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The field of Human Resource Management (HRM) has long recognized the importance of interpersonal influence for employee and organizational effectiveness. HRM research and practice have focused primarily on individuals’ characteristics and behaviors as a means to understand “who” is influential in organizations, with substantially less attention paid to social networks. To reinvigorate a focus on network structures to explain interpersonal influence, the authors present a comprehensive account of how network structures enable and constrain influence within organizations. The authors begin by describing how power and status, two key determinants of individual influence in organizations, operate through different mechanisms, and delineate a range of network positions that yield power, reflect status, and/or capture realized influence. Then, the authors extend initial structural views of influence beyond the positions of individuals to consider how network structures within and between groups – capturing group social capital and/or shared leadership – enable and constrain groups’ ability to influence group members, other groups, and the broader organizational system. The authors also discuss how HRM may leverage these insights to facilitate interpersonal influence in ways that support individual, group, and organizational effectiveness.

Organization efforts in groups generate interaction and procedural structures, or “rules of behavior”. The type and extent of structuring are affected by preexisting preferences among group members for a desired degree of procedural order, as well as by the communication media available in the meeting environment. Analysis of thirty partially‐distributed groups that met over a series of four sessions was conducted by using two methods. Questionnaires were administered to ascertain perceptions of satisfaction and procedural practices. Content analysis was used to determine actual procedural behavioral patterns. It appears that preferences for procedural order does affect structuring behaviors, but do not affect their satisfaction with the group process. Interestingly, and counter to the expectations elicited from a history of media richness theory and studies, results here indicate that interaction media (video conferencing vs. audio conferencing) have no affect on either members’ perceptions of procedural structuring, their satisfaction, or their actual procedural structuring practices. Implications of these results are discussed.

The use of routines in the decision-making process of individuals, groups and organizations is a well accepted yet taken for granted phenomenon. One goal of organizations is to develop group routines that are efficient, but at the same time flexible. However, this presents a paradox because routines that are efficient at one point in time, or for a particular task, may persist, be unquestioned, and become increasingly inefficient for the group and the organization. This chapter develops a formal theory that describes the processes by which the legitimation of particular group structures impacts the development and use of group routines. The theory presented draws from theories of legitimation, expectation states theory, and institutional theory. The theory formally depicts three sources of legitimation: a referential belief structure (set of cultural beliefs) about expertise and leadership, authorization or superordinate support of a leader, and endorsement (support by group) of a leader. Specifically, the theory addresses: (1) how different sources of legitimation make groups more or less hierarchical; and (2) how the different sources of legitimation make group routines more or less flexible.

This study seeks to examine how agency problems and internal capital markets in group‐affiliated firms are mutually influenced by the ownership structure, capital structure, and performance. It also aims to examine the endogeneity in group affiliation.

Using panel data, this study employs two‐stage least squares regression with the instrumental variable technique to examine the relationship among capital structure, ownership structure, and performance of group‐affiliated firms. Simultaneous equation models are constructed to identify the effects of interdependent decisions.

The empirical results indicate a U‐shaped relationship between insider ownership and performance. Moreover, the alignment of ownership and control rights determines the relationship between ownership structure and performance for group‐affiliated firms. The capital structure decisions of group‐affiliated firms are independent of firm performance and insider ownership, supporting the view that capital structure decisions of group‐affiliated firms are determined by the overall characteristics of the business group, rather than those of the individual firms.

Business groups can reduce the agency problems that occur in group affiliation by increasing the insider ownership (after a certain tunneling point), debt financing, and dividend payout.

Previous studies have paid little attention to the effects of the agency problem and the internal capital market on group affiliation. Whether endogeneity is a consequence of the common characteristics of group affiliation or a result of the simultaneity existing among ownership structure, capital structure, and performance is also unknown. This paper fills some of these gaps.

Distributed leadership has been reported in the literature as an effective management approach for educational organizations such as institutions of higher education. This study aims to investigate the role of distributed leadership in the promotion of sustainability in an Israeli college of teacher education.

Based on the Multi-Level Model of Leadership Practice in higher education, taken from Bolden et al. (2008a) and from Woods et al. (2004), the authors investigated how the characteristics of distributed leadership are expressed in three central organization-wide structures in the college (a student group, the green council and a professional development program). They also explored in what ways aspects of distributed leadership promote sustainability-oriented activities on campus. They used a deductive and inductive interpretive approach in this case study.

The authors found three organization-level processes that are based on the principles of distributed leadership and that promote sustainability on campus: distributed leadership enables change in the organization’s internal culture with respect to mainstreaming sustainability; distributed leadership encourages collaboration between the entire campus population and between different departments and distributed leadership on campus enables the development of diverse “bottom-up” and “top-down” structures in the organization.

While the study’s findings indicated several challenges regarding the implementation of distributed leadership in the organization, they ultimately support the idea that distributed leadership may contribute to the long-term, organization-wide implementation of sustainability in higher education institutes. Therefore, the authors recommend that institutions that are willing to promote sustainability adopt distributed leadership as their major management approach.

Basic science, sometimes called “curiosity-driven research” at the National Science Foundation and other places, starts with a question that somehow stays in the mind, nagging for an answer. Such questions really are “puzzles”; they arise in an intellectual field or context, asking someone to fit pieces to an improving but incomplete picture of the social world. What makes a worthwhile puzzle is a missing part in understanding the picture, or a new piece of knowledge that does not seem to fit among other parts. Sometimes creative theorists can imagine a solution to one of the holes in the puzzle. If they are also empirical scientists, they devise ways to get evidence bearing on their ideas, and some of those ideas survive to give more complete and detailed pictures of the world. This chapter is the story of puzzles and provisional solutions to them, developed by dozens of men and women investigating status processes and status structures, using a coherent perspective, for over half a century.¹

Many researchers and executives have viewed fit as a key to organizational survival and high performance (Summer et al., 1990). However, the type of fit and how it can be best achieved may often be in question (Venkataraman, 1989). The current study empirically examines both external and internal fit as predictors of firm performance where: (1) external fit is the alignment of, or congruence between, the organization's strategy and/or structure and the task environment, and (2) internal fit is the multidimensional matching of strategy with structure. The argument presented here is that both internal and external fit can, and do, occur simultaneously. Further, the presence of one type of fit may compensate for deficiencies in the other. Using fit in terms of both matching and moderation, hypotheses are tested to determine the nature of both internal and external fit of strategy and structure. Testing of the hypotheses is conducted using data from the medical group industry. Findings support the influence of individual strategy and structure variables on medical group performance. However, fit found between strategy and structure, be it as matching or moderation, shows little influence on performance. Implications for medical groups and the broader health care industry are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the debt structure of group affiliated firms in Pakistan for the period of 2009-2011. The study seeks to know the level of debt specialization in group affiliated firms. If they do; then how are they different from stand-alone firms?

The study primarily uses Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and Excl90 as measures of debt specialization, which are further used in cluster, threshold and conditional analysis. Corporate groups are characterized to subsidize their affiliates through internal debt market and loan guarantee. Logistic regression model is used to analyze association among the measures of debt specialization and firm-specific characteristics for group affiliated and stand-alone firms.

The results show that about 85 percent firms use more than 50 percent of debt from one debt type. However, group affiliated firms are more inclined toward debt specialization than stand-alone firms. Tangibility and book leverage are negatively and significantly associated to the measures of debt specialization. Moreover, internal debt market and loan guarantee are suggestive reasons of debt specialization in group affiliated firms.

This study highlights the issue of group affiliation and its significance on firm’s debt structure. It has implications for determination of the optimal financing strategy. In the context of emerging economies, group affiliated firms can create market imperfections as a protection shield. In case of emerging markets, it is recommended to strengthen regulatory mechanism to avoid such market imperfections.

Prior studies have explored the phenomenon of debt specialization for rated and unrated firms. However, firm group affiliation is widely studied in the context of capital structure. This is a pioneer study to establish and analyze a link between firm group affiliation and debt specialization.