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Financial accounting to assess stewardship: the case requires students to evaluate Thompson’s stewardship of McDonald’s, in part based on the company’s financial accounting information. Financial reporting performs an important societal role by helping control agency problems that arise from the separation of ownership and management. Since external stakeholders cannot “observe directly the extent and quality of managerial effort on their behalf […] the manager may be tempted to shirk […] blaming any deterioration of firm performance on factors beyond his/her control” (Scott, 2014, p. 23). However, although financial reporting helps hold managers accountable to shareholders, accounting information is not fully informative about managerial effort. For example, while net income provides useful information regarding the CEO’s stewardship, it is also “noisy,” due to recognition lags and other factors (Scott, 2014, p. 364). Efforts undertaken by Thompson in a particular period, such as marketing expenditures, might reduce current earnings, yet boost future profitability. Additionally, Thompson’s predecessor’s past efforts might have positive or negative effects on current earnings. Evaluating stewardship effectively involves considerable judgment, in addition to knowledge of financial accounting. The implication of poor firm performance is that the CEO is ineffective at formulating and implementing strategies and policies to enhance firm value (Dikolli et al., 2014). Specifically, it appears that missing earnings benchmarks matter more for relatively inexperienced CEOs. Don Thompson’s tenure of 33 months at McDonalds is 42 percent lower than median CEO tenure documented in academic research, where the median tenure of chief executives documented in large sample empirical studies is about 57 months (Dikolli et al., 2014). The evidence suggests that the longer a CEO serves, the less likely he is to be dismissed for performance-related reasons. This appears to be the result of the resolution of uncertainty about CEO’s ability and leads to subsequent declines in the level of monitoring by the Board of Directors. Performance evaluation and bias: a significant body of research explores the extent to which female managers are assessed differently than their male counterparts (Powell and Butterfield, 2002). For example, female CEOs face more threats from activist investors than male CEOs. Therefore, even after women achieve the highest managerial rank, they experience more professional challenges than their male counterparts (Gupta et al., 2018). However, the question of whether black CEOs are assessed differently is more challenging to answer empirically as a result of a smaller sample size (only one percent of S&P 500 companies are run by black CEOs). Our case attempts to develop the inference that if female CEOs are subject to bias, analogous forces are likely at work when black CEOs are assessed. Recent evidence further suggests that business students sometimes demonstrate bias in making assessments (Mengel et al., 2018). The authors discuss these findings – as well as strategies for including them in the case discussion – in the “Teaching Strategy” section herein below.

The case was written from the public record surrounding the appointment of Don Thompson and McDonald’s company filings. The record includes articles from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as local and industry publications.

The case examines the role of financial accounting in evaluating CEO performance in the context of the appointment of McDonald’s first African-American chief executive and his subsequent two-and-a-half years on the job. The case deepens students’ understanding of the link between financial reporting and stewardship, while highlighting the subjectivity inherent in assessing managerial performance, particularly over relatively short time periods. As students analyze the case, they must consider the extent to which a firm’s results are attributable to luck vs skill. We use “skill” to refer to CEO effort and other controllable factors, while “luck” refers to exogenous factors, such as macroeconomic conditions. Assessing stewardship is of practical significance. It allows pay to be better aligned with performance and empowers stakeholders to identify when a change of leadership may be warranted. The case may also be used to spur reflection, in an applied context, on the importance of being alert to unconscious bias, even when evaluating seemingly objective financial reporting data. Recent research, discussed herein, suggests that business students sometimes exhibit bias when making assessments.

The case should be included in discussions of corporate governance, executive compensation and the role of accounting information in efficient contracting. It is appropriate in intermediate financial accounting courses for undergraduates, introductory graduate accounting courses, or other courses with an element of financial statement analysis. Standard introductory accounting textbooks offer helpful supplementary reading for students. Horngren et al.’s (2014) book, Introduction to Financial Accounting (12th ed.), Pearson, London, provides an overview of the income statement and its role in assessing performance (see Chapter 2) as well as a useful discussion on evaluating the components and trends of a business (see Chapter 12). More advanced students may benefit from the in-depth discussion of earnings quality, operating income and non-operating income found in Chapter 4 of Intermediate Accounting (9th ed.), McGraw Hill Education, New York by Spiceland et al. (2018).

The purpose of this paper is to examine two important family roles, financial and caregiver, and their impact on four relevant outcome variables: absenteeism, partial absences, employee performance, and life satisfaction; they also explore the intervening impact of core self-evaluations (CSE) among these relationships.

Data are collected using a questionnaire and actual employee performance data. Hypotheses were assessed in a structural model using LISREL.

The results demonstrate the impact of family roles on important outcomes, such as absenteeism and life satisfaction, as well as limited support of the moderating impact of CSE. Further, life satisfaction was significantly impacted by family roles and influenced job performance.

Although the measures were self-reported, actual job performance data were collected from company records; such a design should limit the risk of common method variance (Podsakoff et al., 2003).

Two family roles were shown to impact life satisfaction and these were positively moderated by CSE. Therefore, organization can develop family-friendly programs and policies to support employee’s multiple family roles in an effort to increase employee’s levels of life satisfaction and job performance. Incorporating CSE in the hiring process or providing employees with the skills and abilities to enhance their level of CSE should impact job performance.

The study contributes by assessing family roles using gender-neutral measures that assess level of role engagement. It also incorporates a dispositional variable, CSE, and its relation to family roles and job performance.

Barriers to employment are a significant issue in the United States and abroad. As civil rights legislation continues to be enforced and as employers seek to diversify their workplaces, it is incumbent upon the management field to offer insights that address obstacles to work. Although barriers to employment have been addressed in various fields such as psychology and economics, management scholars have addressed this issue in a piecemeal fashion. As such, our review will offer a comprehensive, integrative model of barriers to employment that addresses both individual and organizational perspectives. We will also address societal-level concerns involving these barriers. An integrative perspective is necessary for research to progress in this area because many individuals with barriers to employment face multiple challenges that prevent them from obtaining and maintaining full employment. While the additive, or possibly multiplicative, effect of employment barriers have been acknowledged in related fields like rehabilitation counseling and vocational psychology, the Human Resource Management (HRM) literature has virtually ignored this issue. We discuss suggestions for the reduction or elimination of barriers to employment. We also provide an integrative model of employment barriers that addresses the mutable (amenable to change) nature of some barriers, while acknowledging the less mutable nature of others.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an updated and theory-driven meta-analysis of work–family conflict (WFC). The authors quantitatively review the relationships between WFC and three pairs of antecedents and several consequences.

A meta-analysis was conducted to investigate the research model. Specifically, the authors adopt a resource-based perspective (i.e. conservation of resources (COR) theory) to investigate the relationships between three pairs of antecedents (demand/control, autonomy/hours spent at both work and family domains and role overload/flexibility) and WFC. While COR theory argues that resource loss perceptions would generate much more influential impact on individuals comparing to that of resource gain, both favourable and unfavourable antecedents, representing resource gain and resource loss, respectively, are incorporated in each pair of antecedents. This inclusion of contrary antecedents allows the authors to investigate the comparison of the relationships between the favourable antecedents – WFC relationships and the unfavourable factors – WFC relationships. In addition, the authors analyse how and to what extent WFC influences employees’ attitudes (i.e. commitment), behaviours (i.e. performance) towards both work and family, and their career consequences.

The meta-analytical findings generally support the hypotheses. Work and family demands are found positively related to WFC, while having a control at either work or family would be negatively related to WFC. Perceiving a high level of autonomy at work is negatively related to WFC, and hours spend at work has a positive relation with WFC. Role overload at both work and family are associated with WFC, while having flexibility from work schedule would be negatively related to WFC. In addition, WFC is negatively related to employee career development outcomes.

First, the authors adopt a resource-based view to organise both favourable and unfavourable antecedents of WFC. Second, this paper aims at extending the investigation on WFC consequences to performance at both work and family, commitment to both work and family, and employee career outcomes, because all of them are critical consequences but not fully explored in previous meta-analyses. Third, this paper has incorporated newly explored correlates of WFC (e.g. employee career development-related outcomes) and quantitatively reviewed their relationships with WFC.

How or whether dimensions of work-to-family enrichment (WFE) mediate the relationship between an individual's core self-evaluations (CSEs) and their psychological well-being (PWB) is yet to be explained. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of three WFE dimensions in mediating between CSEs and PWB in Indian bank employees.

The present study collected data from 222 full-time bank employees working in Indian nationalized banks. The authors tested the study hypotheses using parallel mediation analysis.

The result showed positive associations among CSEs, all WFE dimensions (development, affect and capital-based) and PWB. Parallel mediation analysis suggested that two WFE dimensions (affect and capital-based) mediated the relationship between CSEs and PWB.

The use of a single source of data (Indian nationalized banks) limits the generalizability of the findings.

Senior management at these banks may build a happier and more satisfied workforce by implementing appropriate training and personality development programs. Empowering and rewarding employees for the desired performances may help them appreciate their self-worth, enrich their quality of life (by gaining positive resources from work-family interactions) and ultimately improve their PWB.

The research literature has been relatively silent on the mediating role of individual dimensions of WFE. The present study adds to the existing body of knowledge by exploring the role of individual dimension-based WFE in the relationship between CSEs and PWB.

The frequent turnover of academic instructors (lecturers) to other organizations and countries despite the autonomies their job offer them necessitated; this study aims to examine the relationship between job crafting (JC) and embeddedness of lecturers to their jobs.

A survey research design was adopted. This study is carried out in the south-east region of Nigeria. The population of the study consisted of 8,051 academic staff of six randomly selected public universities in the region and a sample size of 367 was determined using Krejcie and Morgan (1970) formula. The primary and secondary source of data were used in data collection and were analysed using regression analysis at a 5% level of significance.

Result revealed that task crafting has a statistically significant positive relationship with employee job fit (r = 0.949, R² = 0.900, F = 2699.473, p-value < 0.05), that relational crafting has a statistically significant positive influence on employee links (r = 0.982, R² = 0.964, F = 8112.281, p-value < 0.05) and that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between cognitive crafting and sacrifice links (r = 0.962, R² = 0.926, F = 3729.900, p-value < 0.05).

This study’s practical implication is that it will aid in making academics in Nigeria embedded in their jobs by encouraging them to craft their jobs so as to give them more meaning. In the field of research, this study helps to close the literature gap existing in JC and the role it plays in embedding academics in their jobs, hence, opening up a whole new research area with empirical data to back it up. For management, the study will help in knowing how to appropriately harness the potential of JC in making employees more engaged in their jobs.

Many studies have been carried out in the past in areas of JC and employee performance, non to the best knowledge of the researchers has been extended to studying JC as it relates to the embeddedness of academics to their jobs in Nigeria, this study is, therefore, a new addition to academic literature in this area.

Blues music is in the midst of its second revival in popularity in roughly thirty years. The year 1960 can be identified, with some qualification, as a reference point for the first rise in international awareness and appreciation of the blues. This first period of wide‐spread white interest in the blues continued until the early seventies, while the current revival began in the middle 1980s. During both periods a sizeable literature on the blues has appeared. This article provides a thumbnail sketch of the popularity of the blues, followed by a description of scholarly and critical literature devoted to the music. Documentary and instructional materials in audio and video formats are also discussed. Recommendations are made for library collections and a list of selected sources is included at the end of the article.

Purpose: Drawing upon the conservation of resources (COR) theory, the purpose of this chapter is to investigate the influence of supervisor family support (SFS) on job performance of employees through work and family demand, work-family conflict (WFC), work-life balance (WLB), job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and organizational commitment. In doing so, this chapter aims to respond to the limited existing research on WLB in the Australian financial industry, despite its substantial contribution to the economy. Study Design/Methodology/Approach: The study uses an online panel which recruits participants at different levels of financial organizations in Australia. The data comprise 305 employees to test a model with structural equation modeling. Findings: Results demonstrate that SFS relates positively to WLB and inversely to perceived family demand, WFC, and family-work conflict, with no significant link to perceived work demand. Findings show further that WLB associates positively with employee attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction, life satisfaction, organizational commitment). Results also demonstrate positive relations between employee attitudes and job performance. Finally, results show a significant positive relationship between WLB and job performance. Research Limitations/Implications: The survey data were collected from a single source (the financial industry) and from Sydney; therefore, the conclusions may carry less weight than those triangulated from multiple sources and across Australia. The variables were self-reported, which may leave the data subject to some response biases. Consistent with the past research, steps were taken to reduce single-source bias. Practical Implications: The results demonstrate that SFS is important in determining employee job performance in financial industry. It also highlights the role of work and family demand, WFC, WLB, and job attitudes. Originality/Value: The study would guide employers, employees, and managers involved in the financial industry to implement policies which may aim to augment job performance and promote balance between work, home, and life.