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During the last several years, a stream of research has evolved that investigates the influence of outcome information on evaluation judgments in an auditor legal liability context. These studies have included judges and jurors and have utilized different cases and scenarios. Our objective in this paper is to review and discuss insights from this stream of research. This research consists of three phases. Phase 1 focuses on the robust manifestation of outcome effects in an audit legal liability context, Phase 2 examines the effectiveness of selected mitigation strategies in moderating outcome effects, and Phase 3 begins the process of developing a preliminary theoretical framework. We also discuss future research that could be done to better understand outcome effects and to test operational responses and proposed remedies.

This paper examines the relationship between human resource practices in 173 hospitals in the United Kingdom and four organizational outcome categories – clinical, financial, employee attitudes and perceptions, and patient attitudes and perceptions. The overarching proposition set forth and examined in this paper is that human resource management (HRM) practices and delivery of care practices have varied effects on each of these outcomes. More specifically, the authors set forth the proposition that specific practices will have positive effects on one outcome category while simultaneously having a negative effect on other performance outcomes, broadly defined.

The paper introduces a broader stakeholder framework for assessing the HR–performance relationship in the healthcare setting. This multi-dimensional framework incorporates the effects of human resource practices on customers (patients), management, and frontline staff and can also be applied to other sectors such as manufacturing. This approach acknowledges the potential for incompatibilities between stakeholder performance objectives. In the healthcare industry specifically, our framework broadens the notion of performance.

Overall, our results provide support for the proposition that different stakeholders will be affected differently by the use of managerial practices. We believe that the findings reported in this paper highlight the importance of examining multiple stakeholder outcomes associated with managerial practices and the need to identify the inherent trade-offs associated with their adoption.

This study examined the effect that venture creation action has on the outcomes of nascent entrepreneurship. A conceptual model was developed which proposes action as a fundamental mechanism in venture creation. Thus, action should rightly be considered as a means which transmits the effects of venture resource endowments on to venture creation outcomes. This conceptual model was empirically supported in a random sample of nascent ventures. Ventures with higher levels of human or social capital were found to be more active in venture creation. In turn, more active venture attempts were more likely to achieve improved venture creation outcomes. Further, human and social capital, on their own, exhibit little direct influence on the venture outcomes achieved. These findings confirm action's central place in the venture creation process.

Major demographic trends are affecting the work schedules of U.S. employees with likely consequences for health and quality-of-life outcomes. These trends include long work hours, at least for some groups of employees, and an increasing proportion of employees in the U.S. and other countries who are working nonstandard work schedules. This chapter contains a review of the empirical literature linking the number of hours worked and the distribution of those hours at the individual and couple level to a variety of outcomes, cross-sectionally and longitudinally. In addition, because the majority of U.S. workers live in dyads (Jacobs & Gerson (2004). The time divide: Work, family and gender inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), major attention is given to the impact of work hours on the employee's spouse as well as on the employee. It is also noted that the relationship between work hours and outcomes might be different among employed single women with children. Data are presented from two new studies conducted by my research team to fill some of the critical knowledge gaps. Finally, I suggest some directions for future research.

Much of the literature in organizational change has taken a single approach to explain employee expectation formation regarding the outcomes of a change event. A conceptual model is developed to integrate two existing streams of research (the information effects approach and the social effects approach) and to develop a comprehensive picture of outcome expectation formation. We propose that information and social effects function simultaneously to shape an employee's outcome expectations. The strength and content consistency of information and social effects jointly determine what people expect regarding change outcomes and how confident they feel about those expectations. Implications are discussed in terms of setting the boundaries for information and social effects as well as future research directions.

Although some researchers have recognized that context can play an important role in explaining the mixed findings of past diversity research, to date a comprehensive framework for specifying these contextual influences has been lacking. In order to address this gap, we propose a framework for future research that incorporates contextual variables at extra-organizational, organizational, and team levels. We consider how these various aspects of diversity influence categorization-based or elaboration-based diversity outcomes. We also present findings of a literature review that identifies aspects of diversity context that have received attention directly or indirectly in research conducted between 1999 and 2007.

Several comprehensive reviews are united in drawing the conclusion that the cumulative research evidence on work team diversity is equivocal. Rather than review the extant state of diversity research, in this paper we redirect attention to the context of workplace diversity as a possible explanation for these mixed findings. We discuss how diversity context may be conceptualized, specify various aspects of this context at multiple levels of analysis, and consider how contextual variables can shape the outcomes of work team diversity. We present findings from a literature review (1999–2006) to identify key trends and patterns of results reported in recent research as well as contextual factors that have received attention to date. This paper also considers how the non-significant, positive, negative, and curvilinear effects of diversity reported in studies can be explained by the contextual factors outlined. Implications for future research are also discussed.

Incentives are effective at enhancing productivity, but research also suggests that performance incentives can have “unintended negative consequences” including increases in hazard/injuries, increases in errors, and reduction in cooperation, prosocial behaviors, and creativity. Relatively overlooked is whether, when, and how incentives can be designed to prevent such negative consequences. The authors review literature in several disciplines (construction, healthcare delivery, economics, psychology, and [some] management) on this issue. This chapter, in toto, sheds a generally positive light and suggests that, beyond productivity, incentives can be used to improve other outcomes such as safety, quality, prosocial behaviors, and creativity, particularly when the incentives are thoughtfully designed. The review concludes with several potential fruitful areas for future research such as investigations of incentive-effect duration.

We study research designs where a binary treatment changes discontinuously at the border between administrative units such as states, counties, or municipalities, creating a treated and a control area. This type of geographically discontinuous treatment assignment can be analyzed in a standard regression discontinuity (RD) framework if the exact geographic location of each unit in the dataset is known. Such data, however, is often unavailable due to privacy considerations or measurement limitations. In the absence of geo-referenced individual-level data, two scenarios can arise depending on what kind of geographic information is available. If researchers have information about each observation’s location within aggregate but small geographic units, a modified RD framework can be applied, where the running variable is treated as discrete instead of continuous. If researchers lack this type of information and instead only have access to the location of units within coarse aggregate geographic units that are too large to be considered in an RD framework, the available coarse geographic information can be used to create a band or buffer around the border, only including in the analysis observations that fall within this band. We characterize each scenario, and also discuss several methodological challenges that are common to all research designs based on geographically discontinuous treatment assignments. We illustrate these issues with an original geographic application that studies the effect of introducing copayments for the use of the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the United States, focusing on the border between Illinois and Wisconsin.