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The purpose of this paper is to examine the trust repair efforts of top management within an organization specifically focusing on the impact of perceived organizational support and issue‐selling success. Building on the theoretical trust repair literature, the authors bridge the gap between the laboratory dyad trust repair settings and the severe organization‐wide trust repair settings.

The authors focus on one organizational context that experienced competency‐ and integrity‐based trust violations between managers and top management. Surveys and interviews were conducted with 32 managers to capture trust in top management, issue‐selling success rate, and perceived organizational support.

Results demonstrate that perceived organizational support is significantly and positively related to trust in top management. In contrast, issue‐selling success rate is negatively related to trust in top management above and beyond the impact of perceived organizational support.

Trust repair approaches should include demonstrations of organizational support of employees by showing care and concern along with engaging employees in a change process that demonstrates top management commitment to repairing trusting relationships. In addition, top management trust repair efforts should focus on providing managers with the opportunity to engage in multiple issue‐selling episodes.

The paper contributes to an existing research base by extending the approaches to repairing trust in organizational settings to specifically examine the impact of perceived organizational support and issue‐selling.

While inter-organizational collaboration concerns processes of organizing between firms, it is always initiated and enacted by individual people who perceive a need for collaboration. This chapter takes the perspective of these actors and their efforts to seek collaboration as they pursue an agenda for change. Collaboration processes are thus conceptualized as path creation and internal strategizing. The chapter focuses specifically on how actors sell the need for collaboration internally and how they draw on their external network to promote change. It illustrates this process of issue selling and collaboration with six case studies in the area of new product development, new forms of network governance, and network-wide change of business practices. Comparing these more or less successful trajectories highlights the relevance of the relational context in issue selling, the role of intentionality within emerging processes, and interplay between external collaboration and internal strategizing.

The purpose of this study is to explore women project managers as a group in order to generate new understanding about the present project context within which they work and to promote new research‐based ideas for optimizing their potential in business organizations. To this end, the paper explore their demographics and project characteristics, their project challenges and issue selling moves, and their perspectives on the advantages and disadvantages for women in this profession.

Data were collected using quantitative and qualitative questionnaire items of 211 female project managers in North America.

The research results show significant associations among women project managers' career, age, cost of their projects, and their professional certifications. In addition, their challenges and issue‐selling moves produce six factors related to their influence of others. Lastly, the results reveal women's self‐described advantages and disadvantages in the project management profession showing that while women project managers do continue to experience marginalization from gender bias, they are leveraging particular job challenges and issue selling circumstances to their advantage in moving through gender bias.

The results of this study contribute to our knowledge of important real‐world challenges and career development opportunities for women managing contemporary projects. Several implications for future research that build on women's issue selling in project management are discussed. Suggestions for broadening the sample in future research are also included.

This paper highlights several important ways in which business organizations can strengthen and optimize their women project managers, and offset second‐generation gender bias.

This is only the second study to consider the real‐world contextual factors of women's projects, and the first study to explore their perspective specifically in terms of their job challenges, issue selling, and self‐described disadvantages and advantages in managing projects. Business organizations are in a unique historical position to uplift their project management capacity and leadership talent through developing and promoting women project managers.

Subsidiaries use their weight and/or voice to get attention for the initiatives they share with the headquarters. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether subsidiaries with a low weight can effectively use their voice to get the headquarters’ attention.

This paper is a combination of the attention-based view of the firm and the issue-selling literature applied to the context of subsidiaries selling their initiatives to the headquarters of a multinational corporation.

Subsidiaries with a low weight are trapped in a vicious circle in which they are unable to get more influence and gain a central position in the organization through the initiative-taking approach. This problem may mainly be attributed to their limited access to (or even entire lack of) direct and rich communication with the headquarters, which impedes the ability of these subsidiaries to gain knowledge about headquarters and the organization in general. As a result, low-weight subsidiaries are unable to make the correct decisions about which selling moves to use regarding initiatives that are able to capture headquarters’ attention; this inability means that they are less likely to gain approval from headquarters for implementing the proposed initiatives.

Subsidiary voice is not an accessible and effective bottom-up tool available to low-weight subsidiaries for gaining influence, which is contrary to what is claimed by extant mainstream research in international business and strategy. Hence, subsidiaries with low weight are completely marginalized from the sharing of subsidiary initiatives that takes place within multinational corporations.

A recent study found state bond bank participants continually realize considerable interest cost savings. Savings were calculated as differences in interest costs of bond bank loans and the bond offerings participants would have sold as alternatives to loans, (alternative market offerings). The present evaluation determines the sources of the savings. Savings are generated by not only differences in issue characteristics of bond bank issues and alternative market offerings, but also differential impacts of the same market forces and institutional factors on the interest costs of both types of sales. These findings verify that bond bank issues and alternative market offerings sell in different sub-markets, and confirm municipal bond market segmentation.

We study the decision-making process behind business model change, focusing specifically on the tactics managers employ to gain support for such changes. We first argue for the prominent role of middle management in business model change, and second, we revisit the literature on issue selling and championing as they may apply to business model change decision-making. We subsequently analyze the case of a business model change initiative in the Dutch water authority sector, revealing two specific tactics that middle management employed to obtain top management’s agreement to business model change: leveraging external agreements and continuously informing top management. We discuss how these findings extend and in some ways suggest a rethink of the literature on organizational change. Finally, we describe the specificities of business model change that distinguish it from other types of change. In sum, this paper demonstrates the interest of research at the nexus of business models and organizational change.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how subsidiary managers gain attention from top executives at headquarters for their desired issue in order to initiate a bottom-up change. Specifically, it focuses on relationships among a change issue’s characteristics, environmental threats and top executives’ attention.

An empirical test of hypotheses by a hierarchical regression approach has been applied to analyse the data collected through a survey of 81 headquarters-subsidiary dyads in China.

There are three main findings, including first, the headquarters’ attention is positively related to the organizational benefits of an issue; second, there exist inverted U-shaped curves between an issue’s legitimacy or novelty and the headquarters’ attention; and third, the headquarters’ attention to an issue is also moderated by environmental threats.

The present study has noted that the headquarters’ attention to the issue varies not only according to the issue’s distinctive characteristics but also to their perception of environmental threats. It contributes to the advancement of organizational change theory by focusing on the empirical examination of an issue-selling process which is a key component part in a bottom-up change.

In this paper, we explore a new leadership theory termed “Issue Leadership,” where a leader is considered to be a person who looks for critical issues in the ordinary, involves the audience (i.e. those who are directly or indirectly related to a particular issue) in an effective way, and achieves outstanding performances and desired changes through efficient implementation of a proposed issue. Specifically, an issue leader is required to exhibit three distinctive behaviors: issue-creating, audience-involving, and issue-implementing. Antecedents and moderators of issue leadership behavior are identified, and their interrelationships are proposed in a comprehensive issue leadership model. After a detailed explanation of the issue leadership theory, we researched, and tried to answer the question, “How do we apply the theory to global business settings?”

In April and May of 2010 Moody's recalibrated its municipal bond ratings to a global scale, the system they use for other asset classes and the same scale used by Standard and Poor's (S&P). The authors investigate the impact of Moody's recalibration on true interest cost (TIC) of competitively-sold, uninsured, new bond issues with split bond ratings, by looking at a sample of bond issues before recalibration (1997–2010) and after recalibration (2010–2017).

Two different hypotheses are tested for each period to estimate whether TIC remains the same when the S&P rating is higher (H1) than Moody's rating or lower (H2) compared to bond issues for which the S&P and Moody's rating are the same. Further, two additional hypotheses are tested. H3 tests whether the impact of having a higher rating from S&P is the same as having a lower rating from S&P. H4 tests whether the impact of having a split rating is the same in the pre- and post-recalibration period.

Tests suggest that before recalibration a higher S&P rating leads to significantly lower interest costs, but a lower S&P rating does not lead to significantly higher costs. After recalibration, a higher S&P rating leads to significantly lower interest costs; however, a lower S&P rating leads to significantly higher interest costs for the bonds in the sample. The findings also suggest that the rating systems of Moody's and S&P became more similar to each other after recalibration and that the impact on interest cost of a higher S&P rating is reduced after the recalibration.

It appears that a given Moody's rating (which used higher credit standards in the period before recalibration) was more influential than the S&P rating prior to recalibration because investors “ignored” a lower S&P rating during this period. After recalibration, the lower S&P rating was no longer ignored by investors. Therefore, Moody's recalibration seems to have had the intended effect of moving the credit standards of the two rating agencies more into parity. This provides value to investors since they may now assume, unlike the situation in the pre-recalibration period, that similar ratings from the two companies provide similar information about the probability of default and loss that would occur following a default. From the standpoint of regulators, the municipal credit information is easier to understand and is more transparent for investors.

This study aims to explore the formation and consequences of a cross-selling initiative climate, as well as how a service climate, which provides an important boundary condition, affects both its formation and its ultimate impact on service-sales performance. This article identifies two important predictors of a cross-selling initiative climate: frontline employees’ perceptions of supervisors’ bottom-line mentality and their own sense of accountability.

The multilevel data set includes 180 frontline staff and supervisors (team leaders) from 31 teams employed by a spa/beauty salon chain. Hierarchical linear modelling and partial least squares methods serve to analyse the data.

Supervisors’ bottom-line mentality disrupts a cross-selling initiative climate. A sense of accountability exerts a positive impact at both individual and team levels. A service climate at the team level weakens the impact of a sense of accountability on a cross-selling initiative climate. A cross-selling initiative climate has a positive effect on team-level service-sales performance, but this effect is weakened by the service climate.

This study conceptualises an important frontline work unit attribute as a climate. It offers an initial argument that a cross-selling initiative climate is a central factor driving a work unit’s service-sales performance, which can increase firms’ productivity and competitive advantages. With this initial attempt to explore the antecedents and consequences of a cross-selling initiative climate, the study also offers novel insights into the interplay between a service and a cross-selling initiative climate.