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The purpose of this paper is to assess the feasibility and comparability of daily self‐report and objective measures of work performance in complex office tasks, and factors affecting the correlation between these measures.

Medical bill auditors provided daily information for 12 weeks through interactive voice response (IVR) on their speed, concentration and accuracy at work, compared to their best job performance.

The paper found that 124 of 142 recruited subjects (87 percent) completed > 50 percent of daily IVR reports. Concentration, speed and accuracy were highly inter‐correlated (R=0.75), and right‐skewed (mean speed=7.7, SD=1.5). Mean adjusted daily productivity rate (MAP) was 34 bills/hour (range 4.7 to 111, SD12.6, 61 percent within‐person variation). Subject‐specific speed – MAP correlation varied from R=−0.20 to +0.75 (mean, 0.28). Health status, years on job, age, IVR completion rate, site, month of study, or total hours worked were not associated with these variations.

This paper provides an unprecedented level of detail in the comparison of self‐reported and objective daily measures of work performance, demonstrates the feasibility of data collection and analysis, and identified significant inconsistencies among workers in the correlation between the two types of measures. Results demonstrated that daily self‐reports cannot be used as a direct surrogate for objective performance measures.

During the 2001 International Symposium on Forecasting in Atlanta, Peg Young approached me to inquire whether I would be interested in developing an output measure of the transportation sector for the purpose of macroeconomic forecasting. At that time, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) of the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT) was interested in developing such a project in order for it to join the company of other federal agencies that produce monthly U.S economic indicators. During next two years with a research grant from US DOT at the University of Albany, SUNY, entitled “The Theoretical Development, Selection, and Testing of Economic Indicators for the Transportation Industry,” I developed the transportation services index (TSI) with the assistance of Herman Stekler as the consultant and graduate student Wenxiong Yao as the research assistant of the project. Needless to say, we had to make numerous visits to Washington to consult with DOT staff and for presentations. Identifying monthly indicators for different sectors of the transportation sector was difficult because transportation indicators had virtually disappeared from business cycle research since the early 1950s. The research project was completed in a year and during the summer of 2003. I went to US DOT headquarters in Washington DC with Wenxiong Yao to train its staff to produce the index on a monthly basis. On January 2, 2004, after ringing the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, the U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta announced the roll out of the TSI as a new economic indicator intended to measure the total freight and passenger activity in the U.S. economy. Six weeks later, the first monthly release of the TSI on March 10, 2004, marked the official beginning of the series that has been released and updated every month since then, and all reports are now available at http://www.bts.gov/xml/tsi/src/index.xml. The new indicator did not escape the media attention. On April 5, 2004, issue of Business Week, columnist James Mehring noted, “The index provides another sorely needed measure of the service sector. Services constitute about two-thirds of the economy, yet few government reports cover the…[It] should become a new crystal ball for economists and investors to peer into.” On March 15, 2010, the front page of Wall Street Journal reported the recent upward movement in the freight component of TSI, suggesting that the latest recession might have turned around.

This paper analyzes the links among executive compensation, a firm’s strategic orientation, and firm performance. A number of key questions relative to the relationships among these elements remain unanswered because prior research on this subject has reported mixed results, and, moreover, has been confined almost exclusively to U.S. firms. We develop a framework that draws on arguments from agency theory to identify such links. A research design with both archival and survey data is used to test hypotheses in a sample of 253 Spanish companies. We found that top managers’ compensation systems are linked with a firm’s strategic orientations, but in a different form than that of previous studies. Results show two differentiated groups of firms: (1) prospective firms that adapt their managerial compensation systems to the requirements of strategic context, consequently obtaining positive performance effects; and (2) conservative firms that design managerial compensation systems independent of strategic context, consequently not obtaining additional performance benefits.

Stress is a mentally or emotionally disruptive or upsetting condition occurring in response to adverse external influences and capable of affecting physical and psychological health. Stress is intangible. However, it comes with some symptoms such as weight gain or loss, easiness to anger, sleeplessness, frequency headaches, strained relationships, fatigue, and low productivity (Hanes, 2002).

The chapter aims to analyse the influence of the board of directors on transparency and integrity in hybrid organisations like state-owned enterprises. The effect of several characteristics of directors on the board’s effectiveness was assessed. The empirical analysis was based on 60 Italian listed and non-listed state-owned enterprises. Each enterprise’s website was individually examined and coded to obtain two self-constructed indexes on transparency and integrity, and a regression model was created to test the hypotheses.

The ‘knowledge structure’ of interlocking directors and board compensation were found to be both positively related to the level of commitment among state-owned enterprises to transparency and integrity. Skill and gender diversity on the board had no significant impact. The analysis used data from a one-year period but dealt with hidden and complex phenomena like corruption. Future longitudinal studies and qualitative approaches would provide more comprehensive insights into the relationship between the board of directors, transparency and integrity over time.

Policymakers and all those involved in the appointment of directors to state-owned enterprises should be aware that some features of board members may affect the levels of organisational transparency and integrity. The chapter contributes to the literature on governance of state-owned enterprises, emphasising the board’s role and its effectiveness in sustaining transparency and integrity.

Drawing on three theoretical frameworks, this paper aims to examine the effects of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the interaction between SOEs and prior acquisition experience of Chinese domestic and cross-border acquirers.

Using a sample of 4,116 firms consisting of 3,939 domestic mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and 177 cross-border M&As over the period 2004–2017, this study adopts both accounting- and market-based performance measures, namely, return on assets, return on equity and buy-and-hold abnormal return to analyse the effects of SOEs and the interaction between SOEs and prior acquisition experience on acquirers’ performance.

First, this paper finds SOEs to exert a positive influence on acquirer performance, contrary to agency theory but in line with the resource-based view. However, the positive relationship between SOEs and performance appears more pronounced for domestic M&A compared to cross-border M&As. Second, this study also finds prior acquisition experience and the combined effect of SOE and prior acquisition experience to have a positive and significant bearing on performance.

The limitation of this study is the lack of cross-border M&A data with all the relevant information compared to domestic M&A. Thus, the cross-border M&A sample appears lower compared to the domestic M&A sample.

The results imply that the moderating role of prior acquisition experience on the relationship between SOEs and performance appears to be crucial for cross-border M&A performance compared to domestic M&A.

The findings of this study show SOEs increase performance, contrary to the widely held view based on agency theory that SOEs are inefficient.

The empirical support for agency theory explanations for the great variance in CEO pay has been equivocal. Drawing from the performance appraisal literature, we hypothesize that boards of directors incorporate human judgment into the evaluation and reward of CEO performance in order to balance managerial risk with agency costs. We test Baysinger and Hoskisson’s (1990) proposition that insider‐dominated corporate boards rely on subjective performance evaluation to reward the CEO, and we argue that R&D intensity influences this relationship. Using a sample of Fortune firms, findings support our contention that human judgment is important in evaluating and rewarding CEO performance.

In this paper, we analyze the heterogeneity of acquisition integration processes. Starting with the integration types laid down by Haspeslagh and Jemison (1991), we describe integration processes in terms of their integration level and their integration style. We analyze the postacquisition consequences of integration choice in terms of organizational management analysis, employee turnover, and communication and socialization problems. In a sample of 74 Spanish acquisitions, we demonstrate that management choices about integration level and integration style explain the more relevant consequences of the integration process. They have different consequences in terms of organizational management analysis, employee retention, and communication and socialization.

In this paper, we investigate the effect that employee rank has on attitudes and performance where supervisors establish budgeted standards of performance. This paper advances the extant management accounting literature by considering a variable (employee rank) not considered in prior related studies. Our findings indicate the impact of attitudes on performance is moderated by the rank of the employee within the organization. We find lower ranked employees within the organization performed better when they felt the process for establishing their performance standards was fair. For employees in higher ranking positions, the motivation associated with feedback on their performance was a factor in determining performance, while the degree to which they felt the process for establishing standards was fair was not.