Search results

Based on the referent cognitions theory (RCT), individuals compare their outcomes to a given reference point. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of centrality bias in subjective performance evaluation on two employees’ work behaviors; willingness to exert work effort and retaliation intention.

A 2  ×  2 × 2 between-subject real-effort task experiment was conducted on 162 Accounting and Management students. Centrality bias and level of task difficulty were each manipulated into two groups. Meanwhile, the level of performance was divided based on the average score of the real-effort task.

The experimental data were examined using MANOVA and PROCESS macro regression. It reveals that centrality bias negatively affects willingness to exert work effort through perceived procedural fairness and positively affects retaliation intention. These findings align with the RCT in explaining the perceived procedural fairness psychological mechanism and the work behavior resulting from an unfair evaluation procedure.

This study is the first of its kind to investigate the effect of centrality bias in subjective performance evaluation on positive and negative employee behaviors concurrently, which refers to the real-effort experimental task. The study demonstrates the significant impact of centrality bias on unwillingness to exert effort and adverse behavior.

This paper aims to analyze challenges of subjective performance evaluation (SPE) and their effects on team performance. It focuses on discretionary bonus allocations in teams and challenges driven by cognitive biases on the superior or the employee side. This is important as efficient teamwork is a relevant source of competitive advantages in firms, and firms often rely on teams to coordinate various, mutually supportive organizational activities.

The author analyzes results that have recently been discussed in the literature and link them to each other to create a more holistic picture about potential performance effects of SPE. Based on the analyses, the author develops avenues for future research and point out open questions.

Exploring employees’ fairness perceptions in team settings in which there is no clear standard for a “fair” team bonus allocation, the author finds that perceived fairness of team bonus allocation may decrease under SPE because employees interpret the “fairness” of the bonus allocation from an egocentric perspective. Such decrease in perceived fairness can eventually even lead to decreased team performance. Likewise, on the superior side, more complex, but highly relevant team can cause cognitive biases of superiors in assessing employee performance, thereby decreasing the potentially positive effects of SPE on team performance.

This paper contributes to the literature by analyzing recently discovered challenges of SPE in teams and linking them to each other to draw more general conclusions about the performance effects of SPE. For practice, my findings imply that firms may want to be cautious when evaluating the potential effects of SPE – as it is made by human beings with their cognitive biases. For research, the paper opens up new research possibilities and points out open questions.

Reliability and political bias of mass media has been a controversial topic in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to propose and implement a methodology for fully automatic evaluation of the political tendency of the written media on the web, which does not rely on subjective human judgments.

The underlying idea is to base the evaluation on fully automatic comparison of the texts of articles on different news websites to the overtly political texts with known political orientation. The authors also apply an alternative approach for evaluation of political tendency based on wisdom of the crowds.

The authors found that the learnt classifier can accurately distinguish between self-declared left and right news sites. Furthermore, news sites’ political tendencies can be identified by automatic classifier learnt from manifestly political texts without recourse to any manually tagged data. The authors also show a high correlation between readers’ perception (as a “wisdom of crowds” evaluation) of the bias and the classifier results for different news sites.

The results are quite promising and can put an end to the never ending dispute on the reliability and bias of the press.

This paper proposes and implements a new approach for fully automatic (independent of human opinion/assessment) identification of political bias of news sites by their texts.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a quantitative integration of the existing empirical body of literature on culture and acquisition performance.

The study is based on a meta-analytical approach that synthesizes 189 effect sizes from 24 independent samples with a total sample size of n=5,496 acquisitions.

This meta-analytical study found a consistently negative and significant relationship between organizational cultural differences and acquisition performance, and a dual effect of national cultural differences (i.e. cultural distance) on acquisition performance. It further identified significant methodological and contextual moderators and discusses the implications for acquisitions in emerging markets.

Due to the nature of meta-analyses, this study is based on existing (i.e. available secondary) data. Future research may collect novel, primary data to further test the conceptual model and respective relationships developed therein.

This study sheds light onto the culture-based performance determinants of acquisitions and the effects of methodological and contextual moderator variables. Given the significant importance of acquisitions across organizational and national cultures, the findings may inform business practitioners when developing sustainable strategies to successfully integrate organizations that are culturally different and/or are located in culturally diverse environments.

A better understanding about the culture-based performance determinants of acquisitions may inform public policy makers about how to regulate and set incentives for acquisitions, which constitute a main vehicle through which firms undertake foreign direct investment, and which can be considered a global sustainable growth strategy for multinational corporations and entire economies.

This paper is original in that it provides a large-scale and in-depth quantitative integration and synthesis of the empirical literature on culture and acquisition performance based on a meta-analytical approach and so has important theoretical value and empirical implications for future emerging market research.

Some researchers argue that consumers’ lack of knowledge is an important factor increasing risk for a new product derived from emerging agricultural technology. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the potential impacts and the differential effects of subjective and objective perceptions on Chinese consumers’ preferences for the application of a novel biotechnology.

Taking transgenic technology as an example and employing data from a survey of 1,000 consumers in Jiangsu Province, the authors develop a mixed-process regression model based on Fishbein’s multiple attributes attitude model.

The results suggest that there are apparent differences between Chinese consumers’ subjective perceptions and objective perceptions concerning transgenic technology and genetically modified (GM) food, and there exists certain selective perceptions of the emerging biotechnology. Having a subjective perception concerning transgenic technology has a positive effect on consumers’ overall attitudes, whereas subjective and objective perceptions concerning GM foods have a negative effect on consumers’ overall attitudes. Self-identification generated from subjective perception occupies a dominant position in determining consumers’ attitudes.

Consumers’ attitudes regarding an agricultural product depend on their perception of the attributes of the technology used to produce such a product. This study attempts to distinguish and empirically test urban consumers’ subjective perceptions (self-assessed or perceived) and objective perceptions (obtained from a test) about transgenic technology and GM foods and the impact of these four types of perception on the consumers’ attitudes regarding the application of transgenic technology. In this paper, the authors construct a mixed-process regression model to address the possible endogeneity of the perception variables.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a model of how cognitive biases and framing effects influence managerial decision‐making about strategic initiatives.

Because the author was interested in understanding real‐world practices about strategic decisions, he chose to conduct a quasi‐experimental field study over a three‐year period with managers in a multinational corporation. He developed a questionnaire and a series of vignettes for the independent measures, and examined database records of decisions for the dependent measures.

After validating the instrument items, the author conducted a confirmatory factor analysis for model fit, and then tested the model's predictive ability and interactions. The model indicated that risk aversion, overconfidence, anchoring, and expected utility affected commitment decisions, and these factors interacted with framing effects.

Decision‐makers often fall victim to biases and make sub‐optimal decisions, especially regarding long‐term strategic initiatives. To illustrate, some managers may continue to invest in initiatives that have little or no hope of succeeding because they have already invested heavily in them, or they may prematurely terminate them. An explanatory model is helpful to management and organizational developers to learn how to make optimal decisions using normative rules.

The study aims to pioneer an innovative approach for the evaluation of government portal websites (GPWs) by introducing an eye-tracking-based method. The research meticulously pinpoints and analyses the distinct usability issues and challenges that users encounter while navigating and interacting with GPWs.

This study devises an eye-tracking-based GPW usability evaluation approach, which focuses on the major functions (i.e. government information disclosure, government services and interactive responses) of GPWs. An Entropy Weighted Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (EW-TOPSIS) method is employed to process eye-tracking indicator results for deriving GPW usability results.

The proposed approach is demonstrated to assess the usability of 12 GPWs in pilot smart cities in China, and it is found that most GPWs have lower-than-average usability. GPWs with low usability require more cognitive load that exhibit increased fixation and saccade. The comparisons among the GPW usability results from (1) the eye-tracking experiment, (2) questionnaire surveys and (3) the ready-made performance evaluation report validate the effectiveness of eye-tracking-based GPW usability evaluation.

The work contributes to shifting the GPW usability evaluation approach from a subjective judgment paradigm to an objective paradigm, as well as provides implications for enhancing GPW usability, including improving search function, reducing website complexity and prioritizing user needs.

Managers need to be numerate as well as literate. Courses aimed at increasing numeracy often gain very mixed receptions from participants; dissatisfaction being a common reaction. Negative attitudes towards the subject matter and poor mathematical ability are two major problems faced by lecturers on such courses. This article discusses recent research that gives new insights on these two problem areas. These insights reinforce the use of some teaching strategies, whilst suggesting changes to others.

Managing risk is a growing concern of operational managers who face legislative change, financial constraint, increasing litigation and more rigorous external scrutiny. Describes an approach to helping managers in a social services department to consider and deal more effectively with the risks encountered in day‐to‐day service delivery by focusing their problems in a way which assists in determining effective learning strategies. Identifies, key issues of concern both from the risk management literature and by interviewing managers themselves, alongside the exploration of practical methods of improving effectiveness. These routes enabled learning priorities to be established, which were incorporated in a carefully devised learning programme to help managers in dealing with the complexities of risk in their day‐to‐day work.