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Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

In this study, we examine the relationship between political connections of private firms and the initial public offering process. Using registration statement information, we create a unique database of politically connected IPO firms. We find that political connections are substitutes to high-quality underwriters and big four auditors. Politically connected firms manage earnings more highly upward than non-connected firms prior to the public offering. Politically connected firms also exhibit less underpricing than non-connected firms. Finally, politically connected IPO firms have superior post-IPO returns relative to non-connected IPO firms.

We argue for a broadened approach to brokerage by distinguishing between brokerage emphasizing a particular structural pattern in which two otherwise disconnected alters are connected through a third party (“brokerage structure”) and the social behavior of third parties (“brokerage process”). We explore a processual view of brokerage by examining three fundamental strategic orientations toward brokerage: conduit, tertius gaudens, and tertius iungens that occur in many different forms and combinations. This processual view is especially relevant in increasingly complex and dynamic environments where brokerage behavior is highly varied, intense, and purposeful, and has theoretical implications for studying multiplexity, heterogeneity, and brokerage intensity.

Since the rise of rationalism (Bond, 1935) the imagination has often been considered too subjective, and at times regarded with scholarly skepticism (Burke, 2008). Yet, imagination seems to provide basic psychological functions for the human intellect and our understanding particularly of large problems (Hillman, 1975), (Winnicott, 1971). More than the mere ‘fancy’ criticized by Dr Johnson (Havens, 1943), the imagination serves both speculative and interpretive functions, displaying distinct use of cerebral imagery to solve complex environmental and interpersonal challenges. Yorke (2013) argues that humans experience the world dialectically, interpreting everything as cause and effect. Imagination plays a vital role in these universal narratives, shaping our cultural heritage, expression and experience (Zittoun & Gläveanu, 2018). Our oldest tales feature monsters, creatures who are often more interesting and memorable than the heroes who fight them. Halberstam (1995) theorises that monsters are meaning machines. Monsters serve an admonitionary role, and their transgressive nature defines them while displaying a distinct visuality. Like imagination, monsters enable us to analyse and approach difficult topics in innovative ways.

H. P. Lovecraft is one of the most influential horror writers of the twentieth century (King, 1985). Imagination, the visual and the monstrous find a unique balance in his works. Using Lovecraft's copious correspondence, his drawings and his 1927 short story The Call of Cthulhu as a lens, the relationships between imagination, the visual and the monstrous are examined. These postulate an underlying mutual interdependence between the normative and the monstrous and suggest Lovecraft's imaginative use of the visual and monstrous to transgress the bounds of conventional epistemologies and experiences, thereby displacing the anthropocentric focus of conventional narratives.

Susan Brodt (PhD, Stanford University) is E. Marie Shantz associate professor of organizational behavior and associate professor of psychology at Queen's University. Her research examines aspects of effective work relationships and how psychological and organizational processes help or hinder their development. She is currently studying the dynamics of interpersonal trust – trust building, violation, and repair – and how factors external to a work relationship (e.g., personal blogs) can facilitate trust development and repair. Her work has been published in numerous scholarly as well as practitioner-oriented journals. Susan has served on Editorial Review Boards of several scholarly journals and has held leadership positions in both the Academy of Management (Program and Division Chair, Conflict Management Division) and the International Association for Conflict Management (Program Chair, Board of Directors). She is also an experienced executive educator and consultant on such topics as negotiation, executive leadership, interpersonal trust, and managing global teams.

This chapter investigates whether and to what extent tax benefits affect the likelihood of firms undertaking leveraged buyout (LBO) transactions.

With an identified sample of LBO firms and similar non-LBO counterparts, this chapter utilizes staggered changes in state corporate income tax rates as exogenous shocks and adopts a Logistic regression to analyze how these tax changes affect firms' probability of engaging in LBOs.

Firms are more likely to engage in LBOs after increases in corporate income tax rates. Specifically, the increase in the likelihood of firms undertaking LBOs following tax increases is between 6.9% and 12.9%. We also find that this positive relation is more pronounced for firms with higher levels of return on assets (ROA) and marginal tax rates (MTR). Finally, we report that the mean value of tax benefits accounts for between 28.5% and 170% of the premium paid to pre-buyout shareholders.

This chapter provides strong evidence that tax benefits constitute an important source of value creation in LBOs and adds to the debate regarding the role of tax benefits in LBOs.