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This chapter investigates whether core competence of managers and their expansive (vs. specialized) managerial style affects firms' innovative ability, capacity, and efficiency. Using exogenous CEO departures as a natural experiment, it establishes a causal link between managerial capability and innovation. Importantly, it reveals that firms with talented managers receive significantly more nonself citations; make significantly lower self-citations and lesser citations to the others, indicating novel and explorative innovation achievements. Also, managers with higher general (specialized) ability are cited more (less) by patents from a wider range of fields. Lastly, career concern is identified as a mechanism linking higher ability and innovation.

This chapter develops and tests a theory on relationships between perceptions of ability and adherence to rules, guidelines, and tradition. Drawing from theory and research on status processes in groups, the theory proposes that adherence to rules can provide an alternative to task ability in demonstrating competence at a group task and that persons who perceive themselves to be low in ability will become especially likely to strictly adhere to rules.

In an experimental study, participants received feedback that they had high or low ability at a group task that involved making judgments about bonuses in a fictitious organization.

Supporting the theory, participants who perceived themselves to be low in ability gave less money to employees technically ineligible for raises, even when the reason for the ineligibility was arguably trivial.

The proposed theory and supportive results have a number of theoretical implications for how status processes shape individual behavior in groups. For example, the theory might help explain collective enforcement against free riding, with people low in ability being motivated to enforce norms against free riding to compensate for their perceived lack of ability to contribute.

It is easy to conjure examples in which persons who are seen as exceptionally competent also seem to be given wide leniency in adhering to rules. The theory and experimental test presented here can help in understanding the extent to which the following of rules may be seen as the domain of the incompetent.

This chapter develops theoretical aspects of an investigation conducted in Mendoza, Argentina, at the national University of Cuyo (UNCuyo), concerning the learning and development of social abilities on challenged students attending special education schools. First, the concepts of social abilities/social competence are analyzed; the next step is to approach the complexity of the overall evaluation, and, more specifically the evaluation of social abilities in educational contexts. An instrument of qualitative evaluation is presented. Finally, we present an analysis of social abilities in the communicative interaction on students with communicational difficulties and recommend guidelines for school activities.

Prior research suggests that managers engage in classification shifting using discontinued operations as an earnings management tool. The authors investigate the role of managerial ability in this type of classification shifting because prior research links high ability managers to reduced levels of earnings management. Using a large sample from 1988 to 2014, the authors find that more-able managers better mitigate the extent of classification shifting using discontinued operations. The authors also find that our results are mainly driven by firms with income-decreasing discontinued operations.

This chapter introduces a new theoretical framework for developing emotion-related abilities according to the emotional intelligence (EI) construct definition of Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso (2006). The awareness, reflection, and management (ARM) model has been devised and demonstrates a triadic cycle of emotional ARM relating to affect, cognition, and behavior. The ARM model constitutes an approach to nurture emotion-related abilities (ability EI) and responds to criticism raised by Zeidner, Matthews, and Roberts (2009). The ARM Theory was corroborated by both learning theory and schools of counselling (SOC). The potential to develop emotion-related abilities in emotional awareness, reflection and reasoning, coping and management is discussed.

In their authoritative literature review, Breen and Jonsson (2005) claim that ‘one of the most significant trends in the study of inequalities in educational attainment in the past decade has been the resurgence of rational-choice models focusing on educational decision making’. The starting point of the present contribution is that these models have largely ignored the explanatory relevance of social interactions. To remedy this shortcoming, this paper introduces a micro-founded formal model of the macro-level structure of educational inequality, which frames educational choices as the result of both subjective ability/benefit evaluations and peer-group pressures. As acknowledged by Durlauf (2002, 2006) and Akerlof (1997), however, while the social psychology and ethnographic literature provides abundant empirical evidence of the explanatory relevance of social interactions, statistical evidence on their causal effect is still flawed by identification and selection bias problems. To assess the relative explanatory contribution of the micro-level and network-based mechanisms hypothesised, the paper opts for agent-based computational simulations. In particular, the technique is used to deduce the macro-level consequences of each mechanism (sequentially introduced) and to test these consequences against French aggregate individual-level survey data. The paper's main result is that ability and subjective perceptions of education benefits, no matter how intensely differentiated across agent groups, are not sufficient on their own to generate the actual stratification of educational choices across educational backgrounds existing in France at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By computational counterfactual manipulations, the paper proves that network-based interdependencies among educational choices are instead necessary, and that they contribute, over and above the differentiation of ability and of benefit perceptions, to the genesis of educational stratification by amplifying the segregation of the educational choices that agents make on the basis of purely private ability/benefit calculations.

Purpose – This study examines how managerial ability relates to employee productivity using a broad and generalized sample of US firms.

Methodology – This study employs a generalized sample of firm-years from all industries between 1980 and 2013.

Findings – By contending that managers differ in their ability to synchronize management processes and human capital in ways that enhance employee productivity, the authors provide evidence showing that more-able managers are associated with higher employee productivity. In addition, the authors find that high-ability managers moderate the negative relation between uncertain environments (high-technology firms) and employee productivity. Furthermore, the authors decompose employee productivity into employee efficiency components and employee cost components. The authors find a significant positive association between managerial ability and the employee efficiency component, but do not see a significant association between managerial ability and the employee cost component.

Value – The results contribute to the understanding of employee productivity by showing the relation between managerial ability and employee productivity.

Listening is often considered the cornerstone of the communication process, with feedback being a crucial skill for effective management. The primary objective of this article was to investigate the relationship between managers’ listening skills and feedback skills from their subordinates’ perspectives. Moreover, it explores the mediating effect of message-sending skills and the ability to deal with interference in this relationship.

This article deployed a quantitative, descriptive research design. The authors developed and distributed a self-administered questionnaire via non-probability convenience sampling, resulting in 304 useable responses.

The results of the main direct effect test (model 1) indicate that listening is positively associated with feedback. Model 2 established that message-sending skills did not directly mediate that relationship. On the other hand, the ability to deal with interference was found to mediate the relationship. Finally, model 4 showed the multi-mediating effect of message-sending skills and the ability to deal with interference in the relationship between listening and feedback.

As far as the researchers are aware, this paper is the first of its kind to show the ability to deal with interference as a mediating factor in a statistical model. Moreover, this study is the first to present a continuous intermediary role played by message-sending skills and the ability to deal with interference in the relationship between listening and feedback.