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Strategy research has long understood that reconfiguration of the scope of the activities a firm engages in over time is critical to its long-run success, while under-emphasizing differences in redeployment strategy that underlie apparently similar scope and changes in scope. In this paper, we build on the idea that a firm’s number of activities (scope) and change in activities (turnover) arise from two fundamental rates of redeployment: the rate at which activities are added and the rate at which activities are subtracted. In net, the turnover rate reflects how actively a firm reconfigures its resource base by redeploying resources via addition and subtraction of activities. We develop a model that links addition and subtraction with the composition of a firm’s activities and then provide an empirical illustration using data from the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office. As an example of one extension, the model can be generalized to incorporate elements of absorptive capacity. The analysis contributes to our understanding of how firms reconfigure their activities and provide managers with a clearer understanding of tools that guide redeployment of existing resources.

This paper aims to examine the short-term structure of the impact of R&D investments on turnover growth, indicating differences between tangible and intangible investments. The main questions are whether R&D and capital investments accompany firms' growth in the subsequent periods and how this relationship depends on other characteristics of the firms, such as size and industry. In addition, the authors study the relationship between R&D investments and the autocorrelation dynamics of firm growth.

The paper uses the European Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard as data source. This data source includes 1,000 European companies with information on employees, turnover, sector affiliation and details on capital expenditure and R&D expenditure.

The authors find that R&D activities have, on average, a positive effect on turnover growth, while capital investments show both, positive and negative, relationships with firm growth. The relationship and its temporal structure strongly depend on firm size and industry affiliation as well as whether investments are considered as one-time or permanent activities.

Usually, the impacts of firm characteristics on firm growth are studied without explicitly considering time. Firm characteristics and firm growth are usually measured and examined at the same point in time. In contrast, the study will focus on the short-term structure of the influence of firm characteristics on turnover growth, especially the impact of R&D investments.

Scholars working in the strategy area have long held that one of the primary ways in which organizations adapt to external changes is through strategic choice. Inasmuch as a new CEO can result in a new strategic direction for the firm, the CEO turnover event itself is an important way by which organizations can signal an alteration in the direction of the firm. In this chapter, we explore how and why CEO turnover has become one of the most powerful indicators of adaptation the firm can make and propose a research agenda to guide future work on CEO turnover.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of three training indicators, namely offer, participation and cost, on three firm outcomes, namely voluntary turnover, firm performance and profit.

The empirical analysis is carried out using firm-level data sourced from a Canadian national data set. In total, data from 5,237 for-profits firms with ten employees or more were analyzed longitudinally over eight years. Results were generated by XTREG fixed effect longitudinal analyses between the three variables of training, voluntary turnover, firm performance and profit.

Training offer, operationalized as the number of different formal training programs offered annually by an employer, significantly decreases voluntary turnover while it significantly increases performance and profit. Training participation, operationalized as the percentage of employees receiving training per year, has a significant positive impact on voluntary turnover. Training cost, operationalized as the annual cost of training per employee, has no impact on the three firm outcomes.

Among the various human resource practices a firm can use to strengthen its human capital, training can have a significant impact of its own. Investing in a diversified training offer brings value to a firm by decreasing employee voluntary turnover while increasing firm performance and profit.

This research contributes to the strategic impact of organizational training, demonstrating the impact of training on key organizational outcomes over time. Further, this paper contributes to the empirical literature by making a distinction between voluntary and involuntary turnover. Last, even though this study does not entirely addresses the problem of possible reverse causality, using longitudinal objective data, this study addresses several limits of past research at the macro-level of analysis.

This paper reviews the evolving literature on top management team effects in mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Existing research has focused on understanding why incumbent top managers depart at higher rates than normal following an acquisition and why high turnover rates have negative postacquisition performance effects. We explore two new areas of inquiry. First, we discuss the role of newly hired executives – executives hired after the acquisition. Our research indicates that executives who join target companies after an acquisition also depart more quickly than executives who join companies not previously involved in an acquisition. Acquisitions appear to create long-term instability in the target firm’s top management team – both incumbent and new-hire executives depart at higher rates than normal well into the future. Integration of the target firm often intensifies instability within the target company’s top management team. This instability affects performance and leads to further integration efforts as the firm attempts to improve performance. These additional integration activities, in turn, lead to even higher subsequent executive turnover. Second, we examine the topic of director turnover and propose a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between acquisitions and director retention. Future research that considers the role of directors as well as executives may lead to deeper insight into the nature of turnover and integration effects in mergers and acquisitions.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of local political uncertainty on the asymmetric cost behavior (i.e. cost stickiness) for listed firms in China.

In this study, the authors manually collect the turnover data of prefecture-city officials as a measure of exogenous fluctuations in political uncertainty and obtain firm-level financial information from the China Stock Market Accounting Research (CSMAR) database. To perform the analysis, the authors augment the traditional cost stickiness model by including the interaction terms of the prefecture-city official turnover, and firm-level and prefecture-city level control variables.

The authors find that political turnover leads to a higher degree of cost stickiness, implying that firms retain slack resources when political uncertainty is high. Moreover, the effect of political turnover on cost stickiness is more pronounced for firms residing in regions with weaker institutional environments, and firms that are privately owned and with smaller size. The authors further provide evidence that policy uncertainty and the threat of losing political connection are two underlying channels. Overall, this study documents that the local political process is an important channel that influences corporate operational decisions.

This study provides the first piece of evidence on the relation between political uncertainty and cost stickiness at the local government level. Moreover, the authors propose and demonstrate two underlying channels through which political uncertainty affects firms' asymmetric cost behavior.

Resource redeployment may occur when a firm exits from one line of business and enters another. We suggest that when multiproduct firms identify opportunities in new high-growth markets, their entry will occur alongside exit from low-growth markets when the firm is resource-constrained. For our sample of over 47,000 high-tech US firms in CorpTech from 1993 to 2004, 5% of the firm-years include simultaneous entry and exit at the product market level, which we term “product turnover.” Firms are more likely to engage in product turnover when there is a larger spread between the highest and lowest growth rates for the product markets in the firm’s portfolio. This effect is strongest for small- and medium-sized firms, which tend to be privately held. Therefore, future research on resource redeployment might find fruitful ground in samples of mid-size firms.

There is a small but growing body of empirical research examining benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR) beyond traditional, accounting‐based financial benefits. To extend this body of research in contexts outside of Europe and the USA, the purpose of the present paper is to empirically examine three potential benefits of demonstrating CSR: reduced employee turnover; increased customer satisfaction; and improved reputation.

The paper collected data on latent constructs through a survey of chief executive officers across a spectrum of industries in Australia. Confirmatory factor analysis assessed psychometric properties of the constructs, while regression analysis was used to examine posited hypotheses.

The findings suggest that firms engaging in CSR can benefit in ways beyond a pure bottom‐line outcome. First, due to exhibited fairness, socially responsive activities appear to be a means to reduce employee turnover. Second, by meeting justice needs of customers, CSR is likely to increase customer satisfaction. Lastly, CSR activities provide visible signals from which stakeholders infer various positive characteristics of firms, thus creating an avenue to increase overall firm reputation.

Firms can choose to do nothing with respect to their social responsibilities to doing much. While proactively engaging in CSR is not without opportunity cost, the results of this paper suggest executives should not dismiss CSR altogether.

Value from this paper is derived in three ways: relying on non‐financial dependent variables, it supplements limited CSR research conducted in this stream; the data and implications drawn come from Australia, thereby adding needed international insight into the benefits of CSR; and the paper supplements financial‐driven theories used in CSR research by focusing on employee justice perceptions, equity, and signaling theories.

The purpose of this paper is to test the competing explanations of stated preferences for firm characteristics, optimism and overconfidence for trading activities in a single framework.

A survey methodology is followed to collect the data among retail investors in Malaysia using simple random sampling.

The findings show simultaneous identification of stated preferences for firm characteristics, optimism and overconfidence as determinants of trading activities. Preferences for firm’s profitability characteristics, management and product-related attributes and risky characteristics are likely to decrease investors’ trading activities. On the other hand, preferences for firm’s liquidity and trading volume characteristics with relative financial-domain optimism, personal investment optimism and better-than-average aspect of overconfidence are likely to increase investors’ trading activities.

This finding implies that investors should be careful not only in assessing firm’s characteristics but also need to understand the effects of optimism and overconfidence in trading decisions.

The study considers various aspects of optimism and overconfidence, and the stated preferences for firm characteristics, unlike one aspect of these behavioral biases and indirect observation of preferences for firm characteristics. Furthermore, the study considers trading frequency, annual portfolio turnover and trading intention, whereas earlier studies considered only one or two of these trading decisions.