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The purpose of this research is to describe organization members' attributions for managerial responses to obviously externally caused crises. The authors draw from attribution theory research and the actor-observer bias to argue that organization members' proximity to managerial crisis response is a key determinant of organization members' affective and behavioral outcomes following a crisis.

The authors develop a conceptual dual-process model of attributions that explains why organization members' judgments of managerial responsibility and associated outcomes differ depending on organization members' proximity to crisis response action.

The authors focus on organization members' attributions for the failure of managerial crisis responses to obviously externally caused crisis events. The authors present propositions regarding the impact of organization members' potential biases on their attributions for managerial crisis response. Then, the authors delineate how action proximity can assuage negative outcomes of managerial crisis response failure by encouraging an attitude of understanding and awareness of situational challenges.

The authors diverge from prior applications of attribution theory to crisis management by focusing on organization members' attributions of managerial crisis response failure, rather than attributions for the initial cause of the crisis itself. The authors also extend prior work that primarily focuses on crisis response strategies by instead elaborating on how organization members' attributions operate in the wake of their management's failure to effectively respond to an obviously externally caused crisis.

Recently, there has been an increase in the number and type of studies in the organizational sciences that examine curvilinear relationships. These studies are important because some relationships have context-specific inflection points that alter their magnitude and/or direction. Although some scholars have utilized basic techniques to make meta-analytic inferences about curvilinear effects with the limited information available about them, there is still a tremendous opportunity to advance our knowledge by utilizing rigorous techniques to meta-analytically examine curvilinear effects. In a recent study, we used a novel meta-analytic approach in an effort to comprehensively examine curvilinear relationships between destructive leadership and followers' workplace outcomes. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an actionable guide for conducting curvilinear meta-analyses by describing the meta-analytic techniques we used in our recent study. Our contributions include a detailed guide for conducting curvilinear meta-analyses, the useful context we provide to facilitate its implementation, and our identification of opportunities for scholars to leverage our technique in future studies to generate nuanced knowledge that can advance their fields.

This paper emphasizes that employee attributional processing is a vital element in understanding employee aggression in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to summarize attributional perspectives and integrate recent theoretical advances into a comprehensive model.

The paper achieved its objectives by reviewing and integrating research and theories on aggression, cognitive processing, and attribution processes to explain how employee aggression unfolds in the workplace. Propositions are suggested.

It was found that early conceptualizations proposing that employee attributions and attribution styles would play important and significant roles in predicting employee aggression were supported by recent research enabling theoretical advancements.

Over the last 15 years, research advances show how attributions influence employee aggression. This paper integrates recent theoretical advances with prior empirical evidence and provides a comprehensive model exhibiting how attributions influence aggression in the workplace.

The typical corporation is based on free capital markets, and in general, on the free market capital system for all its factors of production, distribution, and consumption. Hence, this chapter studies the economic, legal, ethical, and moral goodness and promise of the Free Enterprise Capitalist System (FECS) as it exists and thrives in the open and free economies of the world. We will review several versions of FECS starting from Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) views on private property, Thomas Hobbes’ (1588–1679), The Leviathan (1651), Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, 1776), Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904/1958) to modern defenses of capitalism by David Bollier (Aiming Higher, 1997), Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales (Saving Capitalism from Capitalists, 1998, 2004), C. K. Prahalad (2005) on Inclusive Capitalism, Nitesh Gor (The Dharma of Capitalism, 2012), and John Mackey and Raj Sisodia (Conscious Capitalism, 2014), to name a few. Based on these seminal authors and subsequent theoretical developments, this chapter seeks to defend, save, and uphold the goodness of the FECS along multiple viewpoints such as economics, management, law, ethics, morals, and executive spirituality.

This chapter focuses on critical thinking as a new, powerful, and specialized tool and technique for understanding and analyzing the subtle operations of the free enterprise capitalist market system and its ethics and morality. Everything in the world of consumers and market enterprise systems are determined by our supply–demand system that in turn are determined by our presumed limitless production–distribution and consumption (LDPC) systems. From a critical thinking viewpoint, we study the free enterprise capitalist system (FECS) as a dynamic, interconnected organic system and not as a discrete or compartmentalized body of disaggregate parts. Systems thinking with critical thinking calls for a shift of our mindset from seeing just parts to seeing the whole reality in its structured dynamic unity; both mandate that we see ourselves as active participators or partners of FECS and not as mere cogs in its wheels or as mere factors of its production processes. Critical thinking seeks to identify the “structures” that underlie complex situations in FECS with those that bring about high- versus low-leveraged changes in various versions of capitalism. Specifically, this chapter applies critical thinking to FECS as defined by its founder, Adam Smith, in 1776 to its fundamental and structural assumptions, and as supported or critiqued by serious scholars such as Karl Marx, Maynard Keynes, C. K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond (inclusive capitalism), John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia (conscious capitalism), and others.

Arguably, businesses are facing their most challenging moment in time as we enter the twenty‐first century. Companies that have relied on industrial‐age advantages such as access to distribution channels, mass production, economies of scale, capital investments, switching costs, and even government policy, have all but been rendered obsolete in today’s blisteringly fast‐paced business environment ‐ an environment that is now based on information and knowledge. Today’s business environment is anything but stable and predictable. In fact, it moves in real time. Technological advancements, deregulation, and globalization are generating upheavals in both organizations and products and services. Markets are fragmenting. Barriers to entry are crumbling ‐ even in capital‐intensive industries. New businesses are starting up in venues that did not even exist a few years ago. The Internet and its World Wide Web alone have created ‐ almost overnight ‐ a borderless global economy. Customers can be of any creed, religion, color or race. Matching products, services and employees to customers will become a key and critical ingredient for business and financial survival in the twenty‐first century. The challenge will be to find, acquire and retain the right customers ‐ who could come from anywhere in the world ‐ in order to fuel long‐term business success. This will require keen attention, and a holistic focus, on customers themselves. This will require customer relationship management.

Presents a series of articles on each of the following topics: digital strategy in the next millennium (Digital strategy – a model for the millennium; Searching for the next competitive edge; The technology link; Value web management opportunities; clash of the Titans: communications companies battle for new ground; and a guide through the maze); retailing and distribution in the digital era (The business case for electronic commerce; superdistribution spells major changes; VF Corp. sews up software operation; IBM seeks to harness digital revolution; Egghead’s bold move to a Web‐based strategy; achieving successful Internet banking; and enterprising uses for IT); and the changing shape of the aviation industry (boom times ahead for air cargo; United Airlines flies high through employee ownership; Asian practices to West at Cathay Pacific; and Ryannair strips to the bone).

This paper seeks to explore how corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be effectively built into firm strategy.

By drawing upon classic work in the field, the paper first offers conceptual discussion and then systematically develops a means of incorporating CSR into strategy.

Common approaches to CSR, such as PR campaigns, codes of ethics and triple bottom line reports are far too removed from strategy. To counter common and generally non‐strategic approaches, a framework is offered which demonstrates that CSR can be linked integrally with strategy, and highlights an approach to consider CSR across six dimensions of firm strategy.

Firms do not have to respond reactively towards CSR nor do they have to struggle with understanding the strategic implications of CSR. The paper demonstrates that examining CSR in the context of firm strategy is both possible and increasingly necessary to developing competitive advantage in the current environment.

The value of the paper rests in the treatment of CSR as an issue that is strategic, rather than one that is problematic or potentially a threat. By doing so, firms are offered a means to take a much more proactive approach to CSR than previously discussed.