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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the taxonomy of two conceptual models of leadership roles for principals – instructional and transformational leadership (IL and TL) – can be traced empirically in a sample of Norwegian school leaders.

The participants consisted of 149 school leaders attending a national training program for newly appointed principals at the University of Oslo. Leadership preference was measured according to a theoretically grounded self-report scheme representing the most important aspects of both leadership models. Estimations were conducted by means of principal component analyses and confirmatory factor analyses.

The principal component analyses revealed seven meaningful factors: demand-supportive leading, outcome control and loyalty to school owner, management by objective, trust in standard programs for development, trust in professional community, emphasis on collective responsibility, and distributed leadership. Furthermore, by using these seven factors as inputs, the authors attempted to model second-order factors representing IL and TL. The results showed that the structure of IL and TL could not be replicated. Instead, a more complex cross-model structure was revealed.

The results suggest that even though the concepts of IL and TL are valuable analytic tools, they may be too simplistic to represent the reality of school leaders’ thoughts and actions.

The study contributes to the field by challenging the established models of school leadership and by generating insights into Norwegian school leaders’ leadership beliefs and preferences.

This study aims to review and try to understand the importance of complexity management for maritime business to gain competitiveness in global business environment. The purpose of the study is to discuss and evaluate managing change and requirements of understanding the complexity management.

To find peer-reviewed journal publications, a large scientific database used by searching Web of Science and Scopus as the most relevant abstract and citation databases that provide peer-reviewed literature data for many different academic disciplines and selected papers evaluated from the maritime business context.

As a conceptual paper, the contribution of the study is to offer practical/required management applications with the help of six proposes for making better management decisions to confront future challenges to catch organizational competitiveness and success. With adaptation of complexity management, maritime stakeholders able to create an important core competency.

The research has some limitations and further research into this area should be extended. This study is designed as a first step to provide an insight to the field and to understand the main views of the subject. Subsequently, complexity management in maritime business is a slightly deficient area of research, which offers remarkable research opportunities. First, it would be fruitful to collect qualitative data to examine the current issues and changing business environment of the maritime business. Second, it would be helpful develop quantitative models to offer practical solutions from the maritime stakeholders’ point of view according to loading/discharging/transportation requirements. Future studies should deepen the subject with the help of simulation models of operations or agent based applications of stakeholder problems or vessel/ship-owner management implementations to understand changing circumstances of new business environment for the sake of managing complexity.

As the core point of view in strategic management; “achieving and sustaining” competitive advantage in organizations always takes an important place in organizational survival. With the help mentioned proposes stakeholders of the system could understand the ways of dealing with the complexities of new business world which enhances organizational competitiveness.

Maritime business could be defined as a social ecosystem which has it is own dynamics and customs. Socio-eco systems, like all complex systems, show unique non-linear dynamics in space and time which could be tough to define via classical quantitative methods. Organizations co-exist and co-evolve with their environment. It is possible that organizations effect their environment and gain some control over it while at the same time affected from environment and should steer the new trends.

The originality of the study lies in highlighting the importance of change management as a handler of complexity management for maritime business. The contribution of the paper is to indicate expected opportunities and challenges of smart changes for relevant readiness of maritime business for better management decisions, benefiting maritime business stakeholders by simultaneously enhancing effectiveness to confront future demands to achieve organizational competitiveness. With the help of proper complexity management lenses organizations could able to create their source of competitive advantage that represents capacity to align and enable required functions under tough contextual environment.

To describe the implementation of the Performance Information Risk Management System (PIRMS) to indefinite delivery indefinite quantity (IDIQ) general contractors in the US Army Medical Command (MEDCOM) 26 sites, 150 projects/year, and $250m/year maintenance and repair construction program.

To test the hypothesis that facility owner management, control, and decision making is a source of risk, and that the transfer of risk and control to the contractors will minimise the risk.

Include minimising construction management by 33 percent, motivated contractors to regulate their own contracts, minimised unresolved issues by 50 percent, minimised contractor generated change orders by 20 percent, and moving from doing quality control to quality assurance.

The authors see no constraints in the implementation of PIRMS in other organisations. This paper reflects the perceptions of the Arizona State University research team, and publicly available test results, and not the views or policy of the USA Medical Command.

Includes the use of dominant performance/risk information from the contractor's weekly risk reports to create accurate performance and risk information on all ongoing projects, the IDIQ contractors, and on the client's/buyer's personnel. Risk information is being used to streamline a large organisation's organisational structure, minimising decision making and transactions, and transferring risk and control to the party who can minimise the technical risk.

The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between intellectual capital disclosures in initial public offerings (IPOs) and post‐issue stock performance.

The analysis is based on a sample of 259 IPOs listing on the Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX) between July 1, 1999 and June 30, 2005. Post‐issue stock performance is measured using market‐adjusted buy‐and‐hold returns across a 500 trading day observation window after listing. Intellectual capital disclosure is measured using an 81‐item index.

The study's major finding is a negative association between the level of intellectual capital disclosure in IPO prospectuses and post‐issue stock performance. The negative association persists regardless of industry type but is stronger for small IPOs relative to larger counterparts.

The study includes only Singapore IPOs within a specific timeframe concentrating on a single disclosure mechanism. Furthermore, the analysis focuses on an association rather than causal relationship.

The findings imply greater intellectual capital prospectus disclosure may contribute to investor over‐optimism leading to higher IPO mispricing. As information becomes available post‐issue, and over‐optimistic expectations are not immediately met, investors aggressively discount shares leading to greater negative post‐issue stock performance for high IC disclosing IPOs. Pre‐listing owners/management may exploit the speculative environment generating higher wealth transfers from investors. Policymakers may need to introduce (some) uniform intellectual capital disclosure requirements to reduce speculative market conditions.

This paper documents the first study to provide empirical evidence of the association between intellectual capital disclosures and post‐issue stock performance; thus, it offers a new path for future intellectual capital disclosure research and understanding.

Most countries often have public companies with large controlling owners, typically a family. This empirical evidence aims to contrast with the classical view of the largest dispersed firm presented by Berle and Means and challenge the findings by Bhattacharya and Ravikumar, who predict that the shares held by families will decrease if an efficient financial market is put in place. Therefore, family firms represent an important group in the stock market today. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of the family as a controlling owner on firms' performance, valuation and capital structure.

The paper reviews the current literature related to how family (taking into account specific governance characteristics such as family ownership, family control and family management) affects firms' performance and value.

The literature review showed that founder family control and professional (outside) management increase performance, whereas excess control via control enhancing mechanisms (such as dual class shares and pyramidal structures) and descendent management produce both lower valuation and performance. This evidence suggests that families have the incentives and the power to systematically expropriate wealth from minority shareholders.

Previous research shows that family firms on average perform better than non‐family firms. But this is a non‐linear relation due the fact that the relationship between family ownership and performance cannot be identified without distinguishing between control and cash‐flow rights. Thus, the literature review as a whole emphasizes that the incentives for the controlling shareholder to engage in expropriation are a function of the institutional framework in which the firm operates. So, for further research, it is important to investigate how family firms perform in different corporate governance systems. A policy implication is the necessity to improve minority shareholders' protection from the risk of expropriation by large shareholders.

Management buyout (MBO) is a specialized form of acquisition with different motives. Sometimes, there are initiatives taken by the senior management to bailout the firm from sickness. The predominant agency theory focuses only on the governance issues in the MBO firms and this theory can be applied to understand how managerial discretion can play vital roles in mitigating value destruction in the post-MBO firm. A CEO-led MBO is presumed to be greed-driven (Bebchuk, L., Cremers, M., & Peyer, U. (2011). The CEO pay slice. Journal of Financial Economics, 102, 199–221.). But a senior management team-led MBO is said to be a socialistic move. By default, MBOs are debt-driven, unless the buying management team is financially affluent, which may be rare, considering the price for the buyout. Private equity (PE) players play a dominant role in providing and or arranging funds in the form of equity and or debt. There is a notion that the PE investors help promote entrepreneurial and modern management practices. The MBO target firm has to ensure returning the entire money back to the sponsors within the shortest possible time out of the operational cash flow. Therefore, various issues like identifying a target firm, sourcing mix of finance, MBO price determination, value creation and value delivery to all stakeholders are all important for understanding the subject. This chapter attempts to construct a robust model for structuring MBO to ensure value fairness to all parties involved in the transaction.

The paper proffers a tentative conceptualisation of the “small business strategic learning process”, demonstrating the complexity of the small firm learning and management task. The framework, built upon personal construct theory and learning theories, is elaborated through the grounding of relevant areas of the strategic management literature in an understanding of the distinctive managerial and behavioural features of the small business. The framework is then utilised to underpin consideration of the concepts of “organisational learning” and the “learning organisation” within a small firm developmental context. It is suggested that whilst organisational learning may be a key and effective small business management approach to underpin sustainable development, the learning organisation, as currently conceived in the mainstream literature, fails to recognise and address the idiosyncrasies, problems and constraints relating to sustainable small business development. There does appear, however, to be great potential for extending understanding of the learning organisation concept into the small business context. An indicative research agenda is suggested.

Condominium is a dominant form of home ownership in metropolitan areas within Asia. Yet managing and up‐keeping such homes poses a challenge to most condominium owners, with larger condominiums equipped with sophisticated facilities becoming increasingly popular. This paper attempts to develop a model, based on a principal‐agent theoretical perspective, which provides a conceptually vigorous representation of condominium management modes: owner‐management; direct labour and third party agent‐managed modes.

Parallel surveys were conducted in Taipei and Hong Kong to offer empirical evidence of the model.

From the logistic analysis which this paper conducts, it is argued that not only does the choice of management mode reflect the quest for better management service: the mediation effect of agency costs between the lay members of home owner organisations and their leadership, as well as issues between the owners and the professional management agents, is also significant.

Findings in this paper would help to enhance understanding of the practices used in condominium management and the factors that influence the choice of management mode.

In this study, the impact of owner-operator and non-owner operator rice mills on productive efficiency is investigated.

Primary data collected from a survey of 111 rice mills in the Mwea region of Kenya are used. A metafrontier approach is employed to measure overall technical efficiency which is decomposed into managerial and organisational efficiency.

The results reveal no significant difference in overall technical and managerial efficiency between owner and non-owner operated mills. However, a significant difference exists in organisational efficiency of mills: non-owner operated mills were found to be performing significantly better than owner-operated.

The authors provide supporting evidence to the study and discuss some of the significant policy implications stemming from the study.

It is recognised that for owners to take the risk of divesting control to a hired manager rather than manage the firm themselves can have major strategic, financial and often emotional consequences. However, there is little empirical evidence on how production efficiency will develop as a result of hiring a manager with the underlying economic theory providing ambiguous guidance. Standard economic theory assumes that firms behave as profit maximisers, which can be achieved by operating efficiently. However, this may not always be the case and as the literature indicates, this may especially be so for small businesses in low- and middle-income countries.