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A survey of over 1,000 companies conducted in 1990 indicated that two‐thirds will be giving merit‐only increases in 1991, which was a 60 per cent increase over two years ago. However, a current question: Is pay for performance used effectively? This article examines both individual and group incentive plans and explores all key factors utilised in determining the outcome (implementation) of these plans. Furthermore, the structure of an effective pay‐for‐performance plan is outlined in light of the mission, strategy and objectives of the organisation to determine how rigid or entrepreneurial the design can be. It was concluded that pay for performance is fundamental for competitive organisations.

This study aims to analyse the relationship between countries’ regulatory context and voluntary carbon disclosures. To date, little attention has been paid to how specific climate change-related regulation influences companies’ climate change disclosures, especially voluntary carbon reporting.

The New Institutional Sociology perspective has been adopted to examine the pressure of a country’s climate change regulation on voluntary carbon reporting. This research uses Tobit regression to analyse data from 2,183 companies in 12 countries that were invited to respond to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire in 2015.

The results show that countries’ specific climate change-related regulation does influence both the participation of its companies in the CDP and their quality, as measured by the CDP disclosure score.

The sample is restricted to 12 countries’ regulatory environment. Thus, caution should be exercised when generalising the results to other institutional contexts.

The results are of use to regulators and policymakers to better understand how specific climate change-related regulation influences voluntary carbon disclosure. Investors may also benefit from this research, as it shows which institutional contexts present greater regulatory stringency and how companies in more stringent environments take advantage of synergy to disclose high-quality carbon information.

By linking regulatory and voluntary reporting, this study sheds light on how companies use voluntary carbon reporting to adapt to social expectations generated in their institutional context.

This is the first research that considers specific climate change-related regulation in the study of voluntary carbon disclosures.

The purpose of this paper is to understand women’s approaches to acquiring financial and other resources is essential for closing the entrepreneurship gender gap. In nearly 40% of economies, women’s early-stage entrepreneurial activity is half or less than half of that of men’s.

Even when there is extensive literature on female entrepreneurs, the authors review the findings through a Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-1)9 crisis lens, trying to find new perspectives and solutions. With the approach of a systematic review of 4,520 publications on financing topics related to female entrepreneurs, various sources of financing available to female entrepreneurs are considered: bootstrapping, banks, business angels, venture capital and crowdfunding.

Identifying potential gender bias both on the supply and the demand side of financing, this research highlights new directions in encouraging female entrepreneurship and gives guidelines to public organisations on how to foster advanced forms of financing for female entrepreneurs in COVID-19 times.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented challenge for economies and companies. Female entrepreneurs are the ones who have been hit harder, as they overcome pre-existing barriers, such as lack of access to finance, lack of networks and mentors and gendered priorities, among others. Without ensuring gender policies to counter these incremental negative effects, the authors face the risk of widening the gender gap.

Regarding previous systematic reviews of literature, this paper focusses on a specific challenge, how women entrepreneurs finance their activity, with a double vision: supply and demand of money.

The purpose of the study is to explore the board of directors in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) as a distinct source of value creation and to conceptually investigate the going‐private transaction via LBO as a response to deficient governance structures as well as the post‐buyout board restructuring.

The paper provides a review of the literature on LBOs boards, and relies on agency theory and the resource dependence perspective to develop testable propositions. The work suggests that the board as a particular source of efficiency gains in LBOs warrants further empirical research.

The paper gives strong credence to the argument that boards represent a unique source of value creation in LBOs. Previous agency‐theoretic work is complemented by focusing on the monitoring function of the board, but resource dependence theory introduced to suggest the importance of a strategic service and support function. The work is conceptual in nature and thus requires subsequent empirical testing to verify assertions set forth in this study.

The paper shows that incentives of managerial equity participation and the discipline of debt are gradually losing their distinctiveness in today's buyout industry. To compete in an increasingly crowded environment, LBO specialists need to identify new sources of value to generate attractive returns for their investors.

The paper extends the existing LBO literature by introducing resource dependent as a complementary framework. Given that the traditional LBO literature examines the discipline of debt and managerial ownership that explain their efficiencies, the role of LBO boards as a distinct value creation mechanism in buyouts is introduced.

It will be recalled that the last monograph treated the significance of the collective agreement in society. If solely a function in society, (though having a legal basis), were to be attributed to the collective agreement, this would mean that no rights or obligations whatsoever would be created between the parties to it. This is not so in practice. It is of course a fact that no legally enforceable rights and obligations normally accrue, and as already indicated, those are moral ones and are only enforceable in honour, i.e. a gentleman's agreement. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that the collective agreement has no juridical significance. Even agreements which are binding in honour only, as for example the kind of agreement found in Balfour v. Balfour, have a known juridical nature. Furthermore, though the collective agreement is only binding in honour, its incorporation into the individual contract of employment makes its terms legally enforceable even though recourse to the courts is seldom had. As a source of rights and obligations of considerable importance the collective agreement must therefore have some juridical significance and cannot remain entirely in the realms of society.

The challenge facing human resource/compensation professionals in the people‐intensive, high‐technology industry, will be the development of a model and strategy intended to respond to the specific needs of unique professionals engaged in high growth organisations. This article examines the complex purposes of compensation, including the eight factors contributing to the determination of compensation levels, while considering constraints and contingencies. Job‐based evaluation and person‐based systems will be examined together with individual and group incentive plans as they impact upon growth cycles of high‐tech firms. The innovative nature of high‐technology organisations can be directly linked to compensation strategies for management. These high growth firms utilise a most unique compensation approach which is fundamentally different from normative organisations. They: (1) use annual incentives, but emphasise the longer term; (2) emphasise stock rather than long‐term cash plans; (3) use stock options where the manager benefits only if stock prices increase; (4) use a much larger proportion of stock than typical firms provide; and (5) encourage much wider use of stock among a broad employee group. Compensation occupies as significant a niche as articulate strategies and leading edge innovativeness, for high‐technology organisations.

This systematic literature review analyses the determinants and consequences of executive compensation-related shareholder activism and say-on-pay (SOP) votes. The review covers 71 empirical articles published between January 1995 and September 2017. The studies are reviewed within an empirical research framework that separates the reasons for shareholder activism and SOP voting dissent as input factor on the one hand and the consequences of shareholder pressure as output factor on the other. This procedure identifies the five most important groups of factors in the literature: the level and structure of executive compensation, firm characteristics, corporate governance mechanisms, shareholder structure and stakeholders. Of these, executive compensation and firm characteristics are the most frequently examined. Further examination reveals that the key assumptions of neoclassical principal agent theory for both managers and shareholders are not always consistent with recent empirical evidence. First, behavioral aspects (such as the perception of fairness) influence compensation activism and SOP votes. Second, non-financial interests significantly moderate shareholder activism. Insofar, we recommend integrating behavioral and non-financial aspects into the existing research. The implications are analyzed, and new directions for further research are discussed by proposing 19 different research questions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate women small business owners’ informal learning behaviour. There is limited qualitative research that examines women small business owners’ learning process and this study aims to address this gap. The study was driven by the following research questions: “Do women small business owners prefer informal learning to formal training?” and if so, “Why do women small business owners prefer informal learning to formal training?” and “If informal learning is preferred, what role do networking and mentoring play in this learning process?”

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 Western Australian women small business owners who were recruited through purposive sampling methods.

The small business owners had a strong preference for informal learning. Participants used their own work experience and knowledge to start-up their businesses. A low uptake of formal training was found due to time and resource constraints and personal preferences. Participants relied on contacts within their networks to acquire knowledge or they hired others who possessed the requisite knowledge or skill. Only a small portion of participants had mentors or acted as a mentor.

This study has limitations that tend to be commonly found in exploratory studies, such as a small sample size.

The research has implications for recognised training institutions that are engaged in entrepreneurship education. By gaining greater understanding of the nature of learning in small business, they may be able to offer more affordable and flexible informal courses that specifically target women small business owners, incorporate mentorship programs within their business courses by engaging with industry partners, or appoint instructors with industry contacts and experience, to provide mentoring support for these business owners.

This research responds to calls for studies aimed at developing a more nuanced understanding of the learning behaviour of women small business owners.