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The so-called vividness effect, painting a verbal picture to an audience and a key element of charismatic rhetoric, provides opportunities to make corporate communication more persuasive. The article seeks to provide evidence regarding: (1) the presence of the effect in written, international business communication and (2) whether vivid communication by top-level executives affects perception of their communication effectiveness.

The article employs a qualitative, exploratory setting (focus groups) to examine the attitude of participants towards vivid communication of top-executives. The article also employs a computer-aided-content-analysis (CATA) in two of the most important stock indices (Deutsche Aktienindex and Dow Jones) from 2011 to 2015 to locate the presence of the rhetorical style in annual reports. Lastly, the article studies via a quasi-experimental approach whether this type of communication is perceived differently on the dimensions of communication effectiveness by Segars and Kohut (2001) using unique 485 responses from recruited US-citizens.

The article reveals empirically that companies make use of this type of communication across stock indices. The results of the conformational, quasi-experimental study (Study 3) suggests that vividness is perceived differently by an audience. Therefore, positive attributional effects are not univocally related to communication effectiveness but to the dimensions responsibility and customer commitment. The participants also attribute other desirable characteristics towards the speaker, thereby providing evidence for a partial positive effect of vividness on communication effectiveness.

The article employs an established measure of communication effectiveness and combines it with a key communication style from academia and industry. In addition, the article combines several methods to examine the construct (mixed-models).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the information content in letters to shareholders in terms of business content, tone and types of business vocabulary.

The study uses multiple regression models to test the information content concerning business content, tone, and types of business vocabulary in letters to shareholders. Two textual analyses in accounting research dictionaries are used. Loughran and McDonald’s (2011) dictionary is used as a scheme to identify the positive and negative words, and Kothari et al.’s (2009) dictionary is used to identify the business vocabulary.

Letters to shareholders contain incremental information for investors. First, the results show that the market reacts negatively to the content of these letters. The more that business content is disclosed, the lower the abnormal returns. It can be seen that investors catch additional information from letters to shareholders. Second, investors in negative unexpected earnings firms tend to not trust the concentration of positive tone in the letters. Third, some types of business vocabulary in the letters have an influence on investors’ decisions. In addition, larger amounts of business content are seen to be negatively related to firms’ future performance.

Due to the effect of the content of letters to shareholders, the Securities Exchange Commission may wish to consider the results of this study before setting new disclosure regulations. Specifically, some inside information might have a negative effect on market returns.

The study indicates that letters to shareholders are a disclosure venue between companies and investors, where investors react to certain business vocabulary. Some business words are associated with lower future performance. Therefore, the market reacts negatively when these words are reported in the letters.

Scanning both the academic and popular business literature of the last 40 years puzzles the alert reader. The variety of prescriptions of how to be successful (effective, performing, etc.) 1 Organizational performance, organizational success and organizational effectiveness will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.1 in business is hardly comprehensible: “Being close to the customer,” Total Quality Management, corporate social responsibility, shareholder value maximization, efficient consumer response, management reward systems or employee involvement programs are but a few of the slogans introduced as means to increase organizational effectiveness. Management scholars have made little effort to integrate the various performance-enhancing strategies or to assess them in an orderly manner.

This study classifies organizational strategies by the importance each strategy attaches to different constituencies in the firm’s environment. A number of researchers divide an organization’s environment into various constituency groups and argue that these groups constitute – as providers and recipients of resources – the basis for organizational survival and well-being. Some theoretical schools argue for the foremost importance of responsiveness to certain constituencies while stakeholder theory calls for a – situation-contingent – balance in these responsiveness levels. Given that maximum responsiveness levels to different groups may be limited by an organization’s resource endowment or even counterbalanced, the need exists for a concurrent assessment of these competing claims by jointly evaluating the effect of the respective behaviors towards constituencies on performance. Thus, this study investigates the competing merits of implementing alternative business philosophies (e.g. balanced versus focused responsiveness to constituencies). Such a concurrent assessment provides a “critical test” of multiple, opposing theories rather than testing the merits of one theory (Carlsmith, Ellsworth & Aronson, 1976).

In the high tolerance level applied for this study (be among the top 80% of the industry) only a handful of organizations managed to sustain such a balanced strategy over the whole observation period. Continuously monitoring stakeholder demands and crafting suitable responsiveness strategies must therefore be a focus of successful business strategies. While such behavior may not be a sufficient explanation for organizational success, it certainly is a necessary one.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

In this study, I explore the link between workforce downsizing and the predominance of a corporate governance model that espouses a shareholder value maximization principle. Specifically, I examine how top managers’ shareholder value orientation affects the adoption of a downsizing strategy among large, publicly traded corporations in the United States. An analysis of CEOs’ letters to shareholders indicates that firms with CEOs who use language that espouses the shareholder value principle tend to have a higher rate of layoffs, after controlling for various indicators of the firm’s adherence to the shareholder value principle. The finding suggests that corporate governance models, particularly those advocated by powerful organizational elites, have a significant impact on workers by shaping corporate strategies toward the workforce. The key actors in this process were top managers who embraced the new management ideology and implemented corporate strategy to pursue shareholder value maximization.

This paper aims to investigate the informativeness of rhetorical impression management patterns of CEO letters and examines whether these rhetorical features affect financial analysts’ forecasting behaviour.

The authors use textual analysis on a sample of 526 CEO letters of US firms and apply factor analysis on individual linguistic style measures to identify co-occurrence patterns of style features.

The authors identify three holistic style patterns (assertive acclaiming, cautious plausibility-based framing and logic-based rationalizing) and find that assertive rhetorical feature in CEO letters is negatively related with the dispersion of financial analysts’ earnings forecasts and positively associated with earnings forecast accuracy. CEOs’ use of a rationalizing rhetorical pattern tends to decrease the dispersion of financial analysts’ earnings, whereas a cautious plausibility-based rhetorical position is only marginally instrumental in getting more accurate earnings predictions.

Whilst impression management communication is often theorized as manipulative and void of real information content, the findings suggest that impression management serves both self-presentation and information-sharing purposes.

This paper elaborates on the co-occurrence of style characteristics in management communication and is a first attempt to validate the external ramifications of holistic style profiles of corporate narratives by focusing on an economic target audience.

In economic crisis, where tensions create anxiety and test the emotions of the firms' shareholders, communication from top management is very crucial as it provides the reflection of the managers' interpretation of the firms' situation and potential strategies. The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationships between sentiment, as an aspect of emotions extracted from the letters to shareholders, managerial discretion and the firms' subsequent performance and performance trajectory during crisis.

A sentiment analysis was conducted to extract the sentiment from the letters to shareholders, which were collected from firms in two countries with different levels of managerial discretion (US vs. Japan). Hypotheses were developed and tested using a series of regression analysis.

The primary findings indicate that (1) managerial sentiment identified in letters to shareholders can potentially be related to the firm's subsequent performance in the economic crisis, and (2) managerial discretion moderates the relationship between managerial sentiment and subsequent firm performance.

When the managerial discretion is high, firms' shareholders can use the sentiment in top management communications to gauge whether the firms' situation would be improving in the near future.

This study expands the current research on sentiment analysis and firm performance to the context of economic crisis by suggesting that managerial sentiment can be substantially provoked as firms are facing with stressful economic conditions. The study also highlights the moderating role of managerial discretion on the firms' subsequent performance.

Publicly traded firms issue annual reports with significant portions that contain non‐numerical information (i.e., written expressions). AU Section 550 of the professional standards (AICPA 2003) refers to this type of non‐numerical information that accompanies the financial statements as “other information.” AU Section 550.04 clearly indicates that the auditor should read this other information and consider whether such information is materially inconsistent with information, appearing in the financial statements or the manner of its presentation. This paper determines how the users of the letter to shareholders that appears in the annual report numerically interpret the qualitative expressions of magnitude used by top management (e.g., how users would numerically interpret the phrase “a significant increase in earnings”). The numerical interpretations of these qualitative expressions are then used to guide auditors in making the determination of when the use of a qualitative expression may be materially inconsistent with the information that appears in the accompanying financial statements.

This study aims to foster a deeper understanding of socio-ethical shareholder activism by outlining the corporate campaigning strategies of a UK-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) and by assessing their impact on both institutional investors and the practices of two multinational companies. As we move into a world where shareholder ownership is becoming more democratised, shareholder activism is gaining prominence in the USA, Europe and Asia, opening new avenues for participation in corporate governance by stakeholders such as NGOs who have traditionally been uninvolved in corporate decisions.

The article adopts a qualitative methodology and case study research design. It relies on semi-structured interviews, analysis of documents and participant observation.

First, the study sheds light into the ways in which NGOs are connecting themselves to the financial sector. It argues that they can pursue their political goals by framing their arguments in a way that emphasises the short-term financial risks/benefits for investors. Secondly, it demystifies the term “shareholder activism”, transforming it from an action tool belonging only to big and powerful institutions, to a tool which gives other stakeholders such as NGOs and ordinary people a real stake in companies’ affairs. What is more, the study highlights the divergent nature of institutional shareholder activist intervention in the USA and the UK.

Given the generally long-term nature of shareholder campaigns, which can sometimes span over several years, it could be beneficial to adopt a longitudinal research design. Future research can endeavour to focus on a number of different campaigns over a period that exceeds three years.

The research has implications for NGOs adopting a shareholder activist campaigning model and for policy makers aiming to encourage investor stewardship.

The fact that the research field of NGO socio-ethical shareholder activism is relatively new and under-explored by academia, coupled with the growing incidence of the phenomenon in the UK and across the world, as well as its potential benefits for society as a whole, renders further investigation into the topic necessary.

This chapter will describe and analyze the evolution of the structure, content, and other key parameters of business plans in international business plan competitions from the beginnings of such competitions in 1991 through the current time. In particular, the chapter will describe how these competitions have evolved through the current time, the standardization of the structure and content of the plans submitted to these competitions, and the changes that have occurred in their structure and content over time. Then it will explain why these changes have occurred. Specifically, that most of the changes that have occurred in these various areas is a direct or indirect result of pressures on the competitions from the major judges used in them – namely U.S. venture capitalists. Appendices A and B will describe the evaluation criteria used in two of the major competitions – Moot Corp/Venture Labs^® and the Georgia Bowl^® – in more detail, while Appendices C and D will provide information on the Term Sheets and decision-making processes used by such venture capitalists. Appendix E contains four Exhibits that provide additional insights into U.S. venture capitalists’ thought processes. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the additional changes that are likely to happen in the future.