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The literature so far has shown that perceptions of managerial interventions matter for motivation and performance. However, how these perceptions are formed and develop over time is less clear. The purpose of this paper is to fill part of this gap.

The paper uses a panel case study to investigate how perceptions of a managerial intervention are formed and developed over time among daycare workers in a Danish municipality.

The paper reveals the dynamic nature of preferences and the centrality of the local manager in perception formation, illustrating that it is not necessarily the implementation style (soft/hard) that is important as much as the managerial involvement in the initiative.

Whereas managers are still well advised to consider the pros and cons of a hard vs a soft implementation approach, this paper also underlines the importance of constant managerial involvement not only to ensure implementation but also to continuously impact the way managerial interventions are perceived.

The paper adds to the existing knowledge about perception formation by using a panel case study, hence illustrating the dynamic character of perception formation.

This paper aims to interpret and compare managerial intentions for and employee perceptions of group-based incentive systems.

The data comprise interviews with managers and employees in four Finnish firms with experience of company-wide incentive systems involving profit-sharing and team-based rewards. Benefitting from social exchange theory, managers’ intentions and employees’ perceptions are examined.

Managers’ and employees’ views resemble each other concerning profit-sharing as reflecting reciprocity rooted in perceived distributive fairness, whereas examination of the team-based rewards revealed impediments in reciprocity. While managerial intentions for team-based rewards refer to social exchange with economic intensity via selection of controllable performance measurements aimed at making individual-level effort count, the employees’ perceptions deem such metrics non-controllable, reflecting perceived distributive and procedural unfairness.

Profit-sharing seems to create fair social obligation and goal congruence between managers and employees, whereas team-based incentives easily suffer from unfairness, reducing their effectiveness.

Distinguishing between managerial intentions and employee perceptions pertaining to incentive systems facilitated in-depth exploration of the social exchange inherent in them, conceptualized in terms of economic intensity, fairness and controllability. With this lens, qualitative analysis revealed differences in interpretations of controllability and fairness between the managerial intentions and employee perceptions. The central contribution to scholarship takes the form of interpretations reflecting upon these key findings.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the perceptions employees have regarding how they are treated in the workplace environment by their current or most recent supervisor, and how this predicted their feelings of power within themselves. The perceptions were measured utilizing the Managerial Leadership Perceptions Questionnaire (MLPQ) created by Parmer (2017). Employee power was measured utilizing the Power Instrument developed by Hinkin and Schriesheim (1989) which stemmed from French and Raven’s (1959) five original bases of power theory to include referent, expert, legitimate, reward, and coercive.

The authors collected a sample of 199 participants gathered from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk digital labor pool. Participants completed a survey which measured their managerial perceptions, bases of power, and demographic characteristics. Statistical analysis was used, including a factor analysis, to explore the relationship between managerial perceptions, bases of power, and demographic characteristics.

This study demonstrated that there were no significant associations between the demographic associations and personal power. There were significant associations between the demographic associations and position power, managerial perceptions and personal power, managerial perceptions and position power, and managerial leadership style and power.

Five bases of power were examined in this study to include referent, expert (i.e. personal power), legitimate, reward, and coercive (i.e. position power). There is a sixth power now, information power, as noted by Northouse (2016) that needs to be additionally examined. Self-confidence and empowerment feelings were not technically measured quantifiably in this study but were expected feelings based on what mindsets power can produce within a person. Researching these additional feelings of self-confidence and empowerment and how this relates to follower power is needed moving forward in this research area. Finally, ethnic differences need to be measured moving forward.

The practical implications of this study show that employees do embody perceptions and attitudes regarding their current or most recent supervisor based on how they are being treated. This, in turn, can affect their own personal feelings of power within themselves and within the overall organization at large. Careers can be affected, both good and bad, organizational cultures can be impacted by both good and bad, workplace assumptions and norms, as well as, workplace relationships can be affected, both good and bad.

The social implications of this study indicated that employees’ perceptions and attitudes regarding their immediate supervisor can create positive or negative feelings toward the supervisor which can, in turn, affect the organization’s culture and workplace environment, both good and bad. Working at an organization is within a social environment that needs to be managed and cultivated appropriately for all parties involved.

The majority of the prior research examines leader–follower relationships. No prior research has utilized this particular perception and attitudinal model, the MLPQ developed by Parmer (2017), and the five bases of power model developed by Hinkin and Schriesheim (1989) together in one study. This study explored employee managerial perceptions and their feelings of power within the follower–leader dyadic relationship, as opposed to the leader–follower dyadic relationship which has been more commonly reported within the literature.

For work organizations and their members, establishing and maintaining mutually satisfying employment relationships is a fundamental concern. The importance that scholars attach to employment relationships is reflected in research streams that explore the optimal design of strategic human resource management systems, the nature of psychological contract fulfillment and violation, and the factors associated with achieving person-environment fit, among others. Generally missing from theory and research pertaining to employment relationships is the perspective of individuals who reside at the employee-employer interface – managerial leaders. We argue that, for managerial leaders, a pervasive concern involves the tangible and intangible resource requirements of specific employees. We then provide the groundwork for study of the leader’s perspective on employment relationships by proposing a model that identifies how employees come to be perceived as low versus high maintenance and how these perceptions, in turn, influence leader cognition, affect, and behavior.

This study aims to examine the influence of managerial perceptions on the strategic responses adopted by four Colombian organizations when facing a political crisis.

To address this research, face‐to‐face interviews were conducted with Colombian managers, consultants, journalists, government officials, and industry experts, and triangulated with documents and archival data.

The findings show that the response adopted by each organization was significantly influenced by their manager's perception of the crisis and, consequently, was prone to producing a particular performance outcome.

The authors’ findings constitute a strong warning call to managers and management teams about the possibility of falling into the “mirror trap”, through which their organizations will adopt strategic responses influenced by their own perceptions of crises.

These findings suggest that managers can affect performance through their individual assessment of a crisis as a threat, an opportunity, or neither one nor the other.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how managers in a multinational corporation (MNC) experience corporate social responsibility (CSR); the concept, the reasons for dealing with it, and its integration in everyday practices. Moreover, the paper aims to discuss how the alignment and misalignment of managerial perceptions are likely to affect corporate social performance.

The analysis is based on a case study that includes interviews with ten managers and survey data from 149 manager respondents.

The paper concludes that managerial perceptions of CSR are characterised by a great deal of heterogeneity. It shows that, even in an organisation with a long CSR tradition and formalised CSR policies, standards and procedures, managers hold different, and not necessarily convergent, views of CSR.

The results indicate that simple categorisations of firms' CSR activities fail to encompass the multitude of perceptions and viewpoints that actually exist in modern organisations. Moreover, the paper questions whether managerial alignment on CSR issues is a precondition for high corporate social performance.

This study aims to advance a behavioural approach towards understanding how managerial perception impacts the enactment of responses to risk management during the implementation of digital technologies in industrial operations and supply chains. The purpose is to investigate the influence of (digital) technology and task uncertainty on the risk perception of managers and how this impacts risk responses adopted by managers.

Following an exploratory theory elaboration approach, the authors collected more than 80 h of interview material from 53 expert interviews. These interviews were conducted with representatives of 46 German companies that have adopted digital technologies for different industrial applications within manufacturing, assembly and logistics processes.

The findings provide nuanced insights on how individual and combined sources of uncertainty (technology and task uncertainty) impact the perception of decision makers and the resulting managerial responses adopted. The authors uncover the important role played by the interaction between digital technology and human being in the context of industrial operations. The exploratory study shows that the joint collaboration between humans and technologies has negative implications for managerial risk responses regardless of positive or negative perception, and therefore, requires significant attention in future studies.

The empirical base for this study is limited to German companies (mainly small and medium size). Moreover, German culture can be characterised by a high uncertainty avoidance and this may also limit the generalizability of the findings.

Managers should critically revise their perception of different types of digital technologies and be aware of the impact of human-machine interaction. Thereby, they should investigate more systematic approaches of risk identification and assessment.

This paper focuses on the managerial risk responses in the context of digitalisation projects with practical insights of 53 expert interviews.

In our framework, we examine the influence of both reactive and proactive cognitive variables on strategic change. Reactive sources that impact strategic change are perceptions and attributions – cognitions that determine the “what” and the “why” of performance. Perceptions are first-order cognitions that assess what is the performance feedback: positive or negative? After performance feedback is perceived, attributions are second-order cognitions that attempt to establish why the performance is positive or negative.

The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate how opportunity for control and firm capability interact to moderate the amount of risk that managers associate with various international entry‐mode strategies. A secondary goal is to investigate how managers perceive the need to retain control over three core functional areas (marketing, production, and R&D) when making entry‐mode decisions.

A field experiment design was implemented in a sample of US business owner/executives. Using an online data collection method, the study asked a sample of small‐business owners and managers to assess the amount of risk they associated with three modes of entering the Japanese market: non‐ownership (export), equal partnership (50/50 joint‐venture), and sole‐ownership. They were also asked how much control they needed to retain over R&D, production, and marketing for the venture to be successful.

Ownership‐provided control interacts with capability to influence managerial risk perceptions. Managers in lower‐capability firms see the least risk in the non‐ownership entry mode while those in higher‐capability firms see the least risk in the equal‐partnership entry mode. Managers believe that for a new venture in a foreign market to be successful, control should be retained over the R&D function, regardless of entry mode.

The findings appear to reconcile some of the conflicting predictions of the transaction cost and resource‐based theoretical perspectives, because it appears that international managers consider both control (internationalization theory) and capability (resource‐based theory) when judging the perceived risk of an entry strategy.

For firms that are incapable of managing in an international context, a low‐control no‐ownership entry mode is perceived as the least risky approach; for firms that have some capability for international management, then a partial‐ownership mode such as a 50/50 joint‐venture is perceived as having lower risk than no‐ownership. In non‐ownership and joint‐venture type entry modes, managers are more apt to outsource the marketing function to an agent/partner, but not R&D. In contrast, managers believe that marketing needs to be maintained in‐house when utilizing a sole‐ownership entry mode.

By illustrating the role of perceived risk in foreign‐market entry‐mode decisions and demonstrating how capabilities interact with ownership‐provided control to moderate these perceptions, the paper's findings suggest that managers' risk perceptions may mediate the effects of firm‐specific factors, and thus contributes significantly to both theory and practice.

It is argued that whilst operational and support processes deliver performance presently, it is the managerial processes that sustain performance over time. The purpose of this research paper is to better understand what these managerial processes are and how they influence organisational performance.

The theoretical background is reviewed covering literature on the subject of business process management, resourced‐based view (RBV), dynamic capabilities and managerial processes. A research framework leads to qualitative case study‐based research design. Data are collected from 37 organisations across Europe, classified according to their performance.

Findings suggest that the five managerial processes and their constituent managerial activities, identified through the empirical research, influence performance of organisations as an interconnected managerial system rather than as individual processes and activities. Also, the execution and maturity of this managerial system is influenced by the perceptions of the managers who organise it.

Within the limitation of the study the discussion leads to eight research propositions that contribute to our understanding of how managerial processes influence organisational performance. These propositions and ensuing discussion provide insights into the content and structure of managerial processes, as well as contributing to the debate on RBV by suggesting that managerial processes and activities could be considered as valuable, rare and inimitable resources. Furthermore, the discussion on how managerial perceptions influence the organisation and execution of the managerial system contributes towards our understanding of how and why dynamic capabilities develop.

The results suggest that in higher performing organisations, managers: demonstrate a wider awareness of the overall managerial system; achieve a balance between short‐term and future‐oriented activities; exploit their managerial activities for multiple purposes; demonstrate greater maturity of managerial activities; and pay greater attention to the organisation of the managerial system.

This paper presents one of the first empirical studies that attempt to understand how business processes, and particularly managerial processes, as an interconnected managerial system serve to sustain performance of organisations.