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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether managers at different levels differ in terms of ability and personality.

Assessment centre results for over a thousand managers on two cognitive and two non‐cognitive tests were subject to analysis of variance.

Non‐manager specialists scored highest on one ability test, but lowest on the other. Senior managers had highest Expressed Inclusion and Control scores but lowest Wanted Inclusion and Control scores. Non‐managers were found to be most diligent and dutiful.

Level is inevitably confounded with age and experience, which may impact onto the individual difference variables making it difficult to accurately attribute causality.

It is important to use psychometric test data to help in selection of all managers. Different levels require different profiles.

An exploration of individual differences in a large sample of managers that may relate to promotion to senior management levels.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of the Five-Factor Model Personality Disorder (FFM PD) count technique to industrial, work, and organizational (IWO) criteria. In this vein, the present research sought to extend previous studies (e.g. De Fruyt et al., 2009) by eliminating common method variance, and by including several objectively assessed IWO criteria, namely, managerial level, intelligence, and creativity.

In total, 1,659 working adults reported their managerial level in their organization, and completed two intelligence tests, a measure of creativity, and a measure of the Big Five personality traits in an assessment centre. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Results showed that the FFM PD counts were significantly associated with each IWO criteria. Results also show that specific linear combinations of Five-Factor Model facets can explain a larger proportion of the variance in these criteria. Finally, normative benchmark values are provided and validated for personnel development contexts in the UK.

Because the FFM PD score-distributions were limited to one assessment setting (medium stakes) only, the use of proposed benchmarks may not be appropriate for other contexts.

Considering the mounting evidence in the area, assessing dark side traits is likely to be desirable for organizations – particularly in selection and development settings.

This study is the first to demonstrate the validity of the FFM PD count technique in relation to objectively measured IWO criteria.

This paper serves two purposes. It is an introduction to the theme of this issue of Society and Business Review which is devoted to “Phenomenological approaches to work, life and responsibility” as well as a presentation of the authors' various contributions. The authors of this paper share the sentiment that management sciences and practices may drive us in a way such that the sense of life has been altered and people, contrary to Kant's definition of moral behavior, are treated as means instead of ends. Moreover, starting from a widely‐spread malaise in modern organizations, they argue how phenomenology can provide us with an approach that can be helpful in assessing our present situation as well as getting a renewed perception concerning work and life.

The authors demonstrate the relevance of Husserl's phenomenology in criticizing management techniques for they direct us to objectives that are abstract, calculable, not one's own, and distant. They single out Husserl's concept of epoche for its high relevance with the theme of this issue and its different papers.

The findings suggest Husserl's concept of epoche (suspension) can be considered as the starting point of a process allowing us to firstly take distance with our usual taken for granted assumptions regarding life and work (bracketing) and then to re‐establish a genuine connection with Husserl's “world of life”. In addition, they establish how epoche can be perceived as a hub linking and introducing the work of other researchers comprising this special issue and their various inspiring authors (Koselleck, Levinas, Henry).

By using a phenomenological perspective, this paper brings an original contribution to critical‐management approaches. It can contribute to a social responsibility renewal in the business arena by providing reflexive practitioners with clues that can trigger new and more human practices. Overall, this paper provides one as a human being an opportunity to analyze the causes of one's malaise and identify better ways to live one's life.

Purpose – Cory Booker will likely step down as mayor of Newark in 2014 or 2018. When he does, the possibility of a strong Latino candidate emerging is quite likely. There are a number of black politicians who would like to succeed Booker as well. This chapter identifies eight potential successors to Booker and assesses their ability to create a multiracial electoral coalition using prior vote performance in citywide elections.Design/methodology/approach – This study regresses district (or precinct) level vote preferences for the aforementioned potential successors in previous elections on the racial and ethnic composition of the district, using voter district demographic data from 2000 and 201011The 2010 data is still incomplete at the time of publication. As such, this data will be used sparingly. compiled by the US Census Bureau and the Minnesota Population Center.Findings − There is a decade’s worth of evidence suggesting racially polarized voting among blacks and Latinos in Newark. The racialized black and Latino candidates examined in this chapter had much stronger support in districts with large coethnic populations. In contrast, the more deracialized candidates often had softer support in districts with high concentrations of coethnic voters, but often performed better in districts with higher concentrations of non-coethnics.Originality/value − While the author cautions against reading too much into the findings, the results do portend a future of racially polarized voting in Newark, especially as the city’s population diversifies and as different factions vie for power.

Historians have long understood that transforming people into property was the defining characteristic of Atlantic World slavery. This chapter examines litigation in British colonial Vice Admiralty Courts in order to show how English legal categories and procedures facilitated this process of dehumanization. In colonies where people were classified as chattel property, litigants transformed local Vice Admiralty Courts into slave courts by analogizing human beings to ships and cargo. Doing so made sound economic sense from their perspective; it gave colonists instant access to an early modern English legal system that was centered on procedures and categories. But for people of African descent, it had decidedly negative consequences. Indeed, when colonists treated slaves as property, they helped to create a world in which Africans were not just like things, they were things. Through the very act of categorization, they rendered factual what had been a mere supposition: that Africans were less than human.

This paper aims to review and synthesize the existing literature related to negotiation complexity and provides an integrative model to systematically identify and examine factors contributing to negotiation complexity and how they affect negotiating parties’ behaviors and economic and subjective outcomes.

The approach was to combine relevant literature from negotiation in general and from negotiation complexity in particular and to develop and support an integrative model of complexity in real-world negotiations.

The literature on negotiation complexity and previous analytical frameworks are reviewed from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Based on the integrative review, an integrative model of negotiation complexity is proposed for identifying important complexity contributory factors. Six contributory factors are distinguished based on the three negotiation components – negotiation task, dynamic variables of negotiators and negotiation context. Their effects on negotiation complexity are examined and discussed with respect to four complexity dimensions (i.e. informational and computational, procedural, social and strategic dimensions). Finally, the effects of negotiation complexity on parties’ behaviors and outcomes are examined based on previous theoretical and empirical research and practical tools for managing negotiation complexity are delineated.

The integrative review and conceptualization of negotiation complexity are helpful for gaining a better understanding of negotiation complexity and its management in various real-world domains.

This chapter enquires into the contribution of two British writers, Herbert Somerton Foxwell and Henry Riverdale Grenfell, who elaborated upon the hints provided by Jevons towards a description of long waves in the oscillations of prices. Writing two decades after Jevons, they witnessed the era of high prices turning into the great depression of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the causes of which they saw in the end of bimetallism. Not only did they take up Jevons’s specific explanation of the long fluctuations, but they also based their discussion upon graphical representation of data and incorporated in their treatment a specific trait (the superposition principle) of the ‘waves’ metaphor emphasized by the Manchester statisticians in the 1850s and 1860s. Their contribution is also interesting for their understanding of crises versus depressions at the time of the emergence of the interpretation of oscillations as a cycle, which they have only partially grasped – as distinct from the approach of later long wave theorists.

This conceptual paper analyses cultural changes in the use of the concept of “play” in managerial ideologies and practices since the 1980s.

The paper uses Koselleck's approach to conceptual history in order to map how play is used in new ways by contemporary organisations. Organisational cultures characterised by “playfulness” and “fun” are used as technologies of self‐governance. It explores a variety of sources which show how this metamorphosis of play into a management tool has occurred.

The appropriation of play by management indicates a significant propensity in the contemporary culture of work. A more complex cultural process is unfolding in the ways in which play and work are recombined and intertwined: work organisations are increasingly places where people work more on themselves than they do on work. Work has become a central therapeutic stage set for engineering and managing souls, well‐being and even “happiness”. In an increasing number of cases, highly managed play settings make corporations resemble frenetic Dionysiac machines in which the Narcissistic modern self seeks an utopia of perpetual fun.

The paper proposes a novel approach to critiques of managerialism. Equally, it offers a new conceptual avenue for the historical analysis of managerial ideas. The result is an original interpretation of the way in which management practices function in their wider cultural contexts.