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The theory of managerial discretion and the direct insights it provides in the understanding of the varying impact strategic and operational actions have on organizational change and business fortunes is an area of research potential underexplored in the UK. This study aims to establish whether the measurement of managerial discretion is constant between the two similar societal corporate frameworks of the UK and the USA listed markets.

The extant managerial discretion ranking model, established in the USA, is empirically assessed for its validity and effectiveness across a sample of high- and low-discretion companies from the FTSE 350.

Using accounting measures, a clear and significant difference is established between UK high and low managerial discretion entities. The results prove to be significant in enabling the differential comparative analysis of the institutional characteristics of corporates.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study of this nature has been conducted previously in the UK context. While the original model developed in the USA is now several decades old, the UK results reflect similar industry rankings as found originally in the USA, subject to some differences considered to be a result of the changing nature of global business since the 1990s. This study opens a new seam of novel research, which has the potential to uncover, at a granular level, the differential mores and character of management ethics, styles and practices in such issues as organizational change, corporate culture, governance and social responsibility.

In today's competitive business environment, understanding how leadership traits shape outcomes is critical. Chief executive officer (CEO) narcissism, an intriguing and debated trait, raises questions about its impact on organisational behaviour, particularly regarding entrepreneurial orientation (EO). This study aims to examine how CEO narcissism affects EO, both as aggregate and specific measures, encompassing internal and external growth. It also considers the organisational context by examining how factors such as capital intensity, firm ownership and CEO duality moderate this relationship.

To test the hypotheses, the authors used a sample of firms drawn from China's ChiNext database (2008–2017). After an initial screening, the final sample consists of 251 CEOs from 239 companies. Data on CEO narcissism are collected from the firm's official website and major online sources, whilst additional data are extracted from the WIND daabase. The authors use multiple regression and ordinary least squares (OLS) for data analysis.

The results show that CEO narcissism leads to external asset growth investments but not internal research and development (R&D). There is a positive relationship between CEO narcissism and EO as an aggregate measure and also different managerial discretions play varying roles in the relationship. Specifically, capital intensity weakens this relationship, but state ownership strengthens it.

This study helps to clarify the relationship between CEO narcissism and EO and advances the literature by showing that firms' EO actions may take various forms of innovation and venturing as new entry initiations of EO. The study findings have important implications for firms to capitalise on narcissistic CEOs' entrepreneurial tendencies, balance internal R&D and external asset growth and leverage various managerial discretions.

This paper builds upon managerial discretion literature to study the relationship between foreign ownership and bribery intensity.

Building on World Bank’s data of 9,386 firms from 125 countries over the period 2006–2018, this paper uses Tobit regression, ordered probit and logit models to empirically test the hypotheses.

This paper finds that firms have higher bribery intensity when executives have a higher level of managerial discretion. Smaller firms with slack financial resources tend to bribe more when they face more government intervention, munificent and uncertain industrial environment.

Extant corruption literature has addressed the effects of external institutional settings and internal corporate governance on bribery offering among multinational enterprises (MNEs). How much, and under what condition do top executives matter in bribery activities are yet to be answered. This paper integrates the concept of managerial discretion with corruption and bribery literature and offers a potential answer to the above question. In addition, prior corruption and bribery literature have primarily studied bribery through either micro- or macro-level analysis. This paper adopts multiple-level of analyses and elucidates the foreign ownership and bribery relationship from the organizational and industrial levels.

Consumer product firms renowned for marketing appear to be complementing brand creation, extension and acquisition with minority equity investments in entrepreneurial brand ventures (EBVs) for strategic purposes. Similarly, EBVs are looking for growth and resources that can be accessed via inter-organizational partnerships. This flourishing industry practice and the paucity of empirical research indicates the potential for new studies. The research objective was to examine why and how large incumbents were implementing strategic brand venturing (SBV), and with this understanding to develop a framework useful for descriptive and normative purposes.

This qualitative research study comprised in-depth interviews and multiple data sources across seven case studies drawn from US subsidiaries of global firms within the consumer products industry. Grounded in resource theory, the dimensions of strategic brand equity investments are abductively derived.

The findings delineate 16 process capabilities within four aggregate clusters entailing, the designing of the SBV program, opportunity identification, brand entrepreneur partnerships and venture portfolio management. Prefaced by endogenous and exogenous antecedents, these process capabilities help to contribute strategic and financial value when implemented.

This qualitative research study yielded analytical rather than statistical generalizations. A range of market and economic factors exist in the United States contributing towards a favorable entrepreneurial and brand incubation climate. This may render the SBV concept as contingent and contextual. Furthermore, the view of brand entrepreneurs' regarding the design of the process model were not explicitly sought but inferred from the discourses of the venturing units interviewed.

The article outlines several important implementation imperatives for corporations endeavoring to competitively advantage their brand portfolios via adoption of a minority equity investing strategy in EBVs. Practitioners are cautioned against myopically adopting this process alone as a success heuristic given other factors may impact success such as changes in corporate strategy or upper echelon sponsorship.

Mission preservation for social brand ventures being tethered to a large incumbent may need to be taken into account prior to and during SBV relationships.

The research contributes to the call for greater insights into the investment processes used in venturing relationships as well as coverage of new industry sectors beyond technology industries that often characterize corporate venture capital studies. Several novel findings emerged related to the importance of—the industry ecosystem; symbiosis between the founding brand entrepreneur and brand culture; synchronization of investment strategies with an emerging brand life-cycle model and serendipitous corporate entrepreneurial opportunities.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the utilization of visual impression management techniques within sustainability reporting. Specifically, the study aims to determine whether Italian companies employ impression management tactics in the presentation of graphs within their sustainability reports and, thus, problematize visual data communication in corporate social responsibility (CSR).

The research adopts a multimodal content analysis of the 58 sustainability reports from Italian listed companies that are GRI-compliant. The analysis focused on three types of graphs: pie charts, line graphs and bar graphs. In total, 860 graphs have been examined.

The study found evidence of graphical distortion techniques being employed by companies in their sustainability reports to create a favorable impression. Specifically, graph distortions are found in column graphs and not in line or pie charts. In particular, selectivity, presentation enhancement and measurement distortion techniques seem to be extensively used when adopting column graphs in sustainability communication. Moreover, social sustainability–related topics tend to be more represented of other area of CSR reporting. This suggests that companies, whether consciously or unconsciously, engage in impression management techniques when using graphs in their sustainability reports.

The study findings suggest that more consciousness is needed for companies when engaging in the construction and selection of graphs in their sustainability reports and that decision-makers should develop a clear guide for ethical visual communication.

The paper systematically analyzes visual impression management techniques in communicating sustainability data and, in particular, advances literature on graphical distortion. The value lies in empirical evidence of distortion adoption in GRI-compliant reports as well as problematizing visual data communication as a fundamental challenge for sustainability communication management.

Building on the premise that top managers' characteristics affect firm outcomes, the study aims to examine whether the impostor feelings of top managers are associated with firm performance.

This study uses survey and regression estimation.

The results show that there is no strong association between the impostor phenomenon and firm performance, when considering the overall sample. However, in the case of women who experience strong impostor feelings, performance is negatively affected. There is no evidence that being a CEO or workload are mechanisms that explain this result.

Improving the understanding of whether top manager impostor feelings sabotage or improve firm performance can encourage managers to engage in preventive actions to overcome or explore its effects adequately so that positive firm outcomes are fostered.

Despite the economic importance of how top managers' judgment affects their decisions, little is known about how the cognitive frames of their top managers affect firm outcomes. In particular, there is no clear understanding of how top managers' feelings of inadequacy, intellectual phoniness and deceitfulness (the impostor phenomenon) affect firm profitability.

Alain Bouchard was born in 1949. He bought his first convenience store in 1978, when he was almost 30 years old. By then, he already had nearly 10 years of experience in the sector. He had already been involved in the start-up of more than 200 convenience stores. He understood that if he was to transform his newly acquired store into a chain and build something big, he needed to set up a team of people with complementary skills to help him make acquisitions.

In 2023, there are roughly 15,000 convenience stores operating under the Circle K/Ingo/Couche-Tard banners, employing 130,000 people in more than 30 countries. Annual sales are more than US$60 billion. Alain Bouchard officially retired from his position as President and CEO in 2014 and became Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board. He continues to be a major shareholder. He is still actively involved in strategic orientations and in identifying potential acquisitions. He has become a ‘Chief Culture Officer’ involved in executive leadership mentoring. He has never stopped communicating the importance of innovative, creative and intrapreneurial behaviour at all levels of the enterprise.

This case study presents Alain Bouchard, the man and the entrepreneur. It shows how he learned and mastered the craft of starting, acquiring, managing and developing convenience stores. It looks at how he encouraged the people around him to act as facilitators and intrapreneurs. It describes his values, how he works and learned to live with risk.

This study proposes strategies for vaccine center allocation for coronavirus disease (COVID) vaccine by determining the number of vaccination stations required for the vaccination drive, location of vaccination station, assignment of demand group to vaccination station, allocation of the scarce medical professional teams to station and number of optimal days a vaccination station to be functional in a week.

The authors propose a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model. However, to handle nonlinearity, the authors devise a heuristic and then propose a two-stage mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation to optimize the allocation of vaccination centers or stations to demand groups in the first stage and the allocation of vaccination centers to cold storage links in the second stage. The first stage optimizes the cost and average distance traveled by people to reach the vaccination center, whereas the second stage optimizes the vaccine’s holding and storage and transportation cost by efficiently allocating cold storage links to the centers.

The model is studied for the real-world case of Chandigarh, India. The results obtained validate that the proposed approach can immensely help government agencies and policymaking body for a successful vaccination drive. The model tries to find a tradeoff between loss due to underutilized medical teams and the distance traveled by a demand group to get the vaccination.

To the best of our knowledge, there are hardly any studies on a vaccination program at such a scale due to sudden outbreaks such as Covid-19.

By integrating perspectives from the resource-based view, attention-based view, upper echelon theory and competitive dynamics (CD), the authors seek to understand how chief executive officer (CEO) vigilance influences the way resources are utilized in relation to competitive behavior.

This study's empirical analysis is conducted using a longitudinal design in the US software and IT services industry with a final sample consisting of 44 publicly traded firms and 471 firm-year observations from 1995 to 2009. The authors respectively use the fixed-effects negative binomial model and generalized estimating equation (GEE) model to test the effects of technology resource breadth on competitive intensity and competitive deviance and the interacting effects with CEO attention broadness and uniqueness.

This study's results show that CEO vigilance (attention broadness and uniqueness) interacts with technology resource breadth to jointly influence competitive intensity and deviance. Firms with vigilant CEOs utilize firm resources to compete less intensively but in an unconventional way.

This study reveals that when CEOs have a broader focus and attend to a wide range of information, their ability to quickly utilize firm resources for formulating competitive actions decreases. Consequently, it is crucial for CEOs to acknowledge the limitations of their attentional capacity. They need to understand that the allocation of their attention and information processing capacity has significant implications for the speed and quality of their decision-making processes.

The authors conceptualize and operationalize CEO vigilance, which is a novel construct that has not been studied. The authors show that CEO vigilance plays critical roles in utilizing resources to compete. This study offers significant research implications for attention-based view, upper-echelons theory, CD perspective and resource-based view.

This paper aims to explore how small businesses can strategically leverage hybrid work to strengthen the satisfaction of their employees and managers, their attractiveness, and ultimately their competitiveness.

Single case study: MANAG+ (pseudonym), a small consulting firm specialized in change management. Following the health crisis and the implementation of remote work, the company has maintained a hybrid work organization and developed management practices that allow it to reap many benefits. This case can be used as a successful example for small companies.

This paper highlights strategic stakes and specific difficulties of working in hybrid mode for small businesses. It provides, through a case study, a framework and solutions to overcome these challenges.

The research is based on a single case study. Further research should be conducted to establish the generalization of the results on this little-addressed issue.

The research provides a unique approach that can be practically implemented within small enterprises to develop their hybrid management capabilities (best practices and insights for managerial support schemes in a hybrid working context).

In small companies, the challenges of hybrid work are the strongest in terms of sustainability and competitiveness. But this type of company still receives very little attention from researchers. This paper helps to bridge that current gap.