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Personally held values play a fundamental role in business. As such, it is critical that students understand the nature of values pertaining to the workplace. Using an innovative classroom exercise, laddering, business students interview individuals to identify values that influence choices. Objectives are to help students understand the role of personal values in decision making, develop the ability to respond effectively to workplace demands, respect diverse perspectives, and achieve a better understanding of their own values. Measures used to assess these learning objectives revealed that many students gained valuable insights. After participating in the exercise, students wrote passages in which they articulated how their values affected their decision-making behavior, described in detail how the exercise improved their improvisational skills, and helped them gain respect for others' viewpoints. Furthermore, a quantitative survey provided evidence that students may have experienced a greater understanding of their own values after participating in the exercise. (Contains 4 tables.)

To mitigate risk, should companies signal a broad range of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives or instead focus on only a few ESG issues? Drawing on signaling theory, we propose that a broad array of ESG initiatives generates not only signal consistency but also accelerating signal costs. Our empirical results support the resultant hypothesis of a curvilinear relationship between ESG scope and equity risk. In addition, this U-shaped curve seems to become steeper when firms face multiple media-reported ESG controversies. Overall, our study qualifies the conventional wisdom that firms can reduce equity risk by attending to a wide variety of stakeholders and highlights the moderating (signal-amplifying) impact of the firm's media environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Most theorizing on the relationship between corporate social/environmental performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) assumes that the current evidence is too fractured or too variable to draw any [...]

The article contains four essays about management research. The article by Chad Nehrt (1998), which focuses on first mover advantage for multinational corporations (MNC), is discussed, as well as challenges relating to environmental regulation in host countries. Chad Nehrt defends his article, responds to the criticism of Alain Verbeke and Alan M. Rugman, and comments on their article about environmental regulation and MNC strategy. Marc Orlitzky and David Jacobs discuss objectivism, which was a focus in the article by Edwin A. Locke and Thomas E. Becker, who respond by introducing issues such as extrospection and value judgments.

This qualitative study investigates whether the views of managers need to be congruent with the corporate sustainability (CS) logics—either integrative or instrumental—of their employing organization. We assessed the CS performance of 25 organizations within the Australian forestry and wood products industry and analyzed the CS orientations of 32 senior managers within these companies to explore whether their individual CS views were consistent with organizational CS logics. The findings indicate that, in general, better performing organizations are led by managers that hold the integrative view, whereas poorer performing organizations are more likely to have managers with an instrumental view of CS. Nonetheless, there were noteworthy exceptions to this conclusion. The findings indicate that, under certain industry conditions, managers who hold an instrumental view may be able to generate ecological and social organizational outcomes that are at least equal to those produced by integrative managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of financial markets for sustainable development. More specifically, the authors ask to what extent financial markets foster and facilitate more sustainable business practices. The authors highlight that their current role is rather modest and conclude that, on the old paths, a paradoxical situation exists. On one hand, financial market participants increasingly integrate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria into their investment decisions, whereas on the other hand, in terms of organizational reality, there seems to be no real shift toward more sustainable business practices. The authors identify two main challenges within the field of sustainable investments that are relevant for entering new avenues that may help overcome this situation. First, a reorientation toward a long-term paradigm for sustainable investments is important. Second, ESG data must become more trustworthy. From a theoretical point of view, the authors finally highlight the potential market consequences when ESG investment criteria are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the implications of industry contingencies and business strategy on its typology. It relates the article by H. Aguinis and A. Glavas which shows that General Electric Co. (GE), Intel Corp., and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) connect CSR to their core competencies. It mentions that external normative alignment might be important in the success of CSR within the organizations.

In this paper we seek to improve the measurement of corporate social performance (CSP) by advancing a new supplemental technique for assessing a firm's reputation for social legitimacy. Specifically, we propose using generalizability theory to measure the extent to which corporate conduct is perceived as acceptable to various stakeholder groups. We argue that this suggested approach to measurement can render CSP more meaningful to scholarship and useful in practice. We also note some limitations of this approach and directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to propose possible solutions to the methodological problem of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), which is framed as deeply embedded in the institutional structure of the social and organizational sciences. The core argument is that, for the deinstitutionalization of statistical significance tests, minor methodological changes within an unreformed epistemology will be as unhelpful as emotive exaggerations of the ill effects of NHST. Instead, several institutional-epistemological reforms affecting cultural-cognitive, normative, and regulative processes and structures in the social sciences are necessary and proposed in this article. In the conclusion, the suggested research reforms, ranging from greater emphasis on inductive and abductive reasoning to statistical modeling and Bayesian epistemology, are classified according to their practical importance and the time horizon expected for their implementation. Individual-level change in researchers' use of NHST is unlikely if it is not facilitated by these broader epistemological changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors review three theoretical approaches to strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR), which can be defined as voluntary CSR actions that enhance a firm’s competitiveness and reputation. The end result of such activities should be an improvement in financial and economic performance. Based on an overview of recent empirical evidence, the authors conclude that economic theories of strategic CSR have the greatest potential for advancing this field of inquiry, although theories of strategic leadership should also be incorporated into this perspective. In the remainder of the article, they provide focused summaries of the articles presented in this special issue and outline an agenda for future research on strategic CSR and environmental sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Personally held values play a fundamental role in business. As such, it is critical that students understand the nature of values pertaining to the workplace. Using an innovative classroom exercise, laddering, business students interview individuals to identify values that influence choices. Objectives are to help students understand the role of personal values in decision making, develop the ability to respond effectively to workplace demands, respect diverse perspectives, and achieve a better understanding of their own values. Measures used to assess these learning objectives revealed that many students gained valuable insights. After participating in the exercise, students wrote passages in which they articulated how their values affected their decision-making behavior, described in detail how the exercise improved their improvisational skills, and helped them gain respect far others' viewpoints. Furthermore, a quantitative survey provided evidence that students may have experienced a greater understanding of their own values after participating in the exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on earlier work on the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and a firm's financial performance, this integrative empirical study supports the theoretical argument that the higher a firm's CSP the lower its financial risk. Specifically, the relationship between CSP and risk appears to be one of reciprocal causality, because prior CSP is negatively related to subsequent financial risk, and prior financial risk is negatively related to subsequent CSP. Additionally, CSP is more strongly correlated with measures of market risk than measures of accounting risk. Of all CSP measures, reputation for social responsibility appears to be the most important one in terms of its risk implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This meta-analysis tests the functional perspective of small-group decision making, which holds that certain critical requisite functions must be satisfied for an effective group decision to be likely. The results suggest that evaluation of negative consequences of alternative solutions, problem analysis, and establishment of solution criteria (in this order) are the strongest predictors of group decision-making effectiveness. In addition, methodological study artifacts (sampling error, measurement error) and task moderators explain variability in previous findings. More specifically, the moderator subgroup analysis shows that evaluation of negative consequences is an even better predictor of group performance when task evaluation demands are high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes certain methods that the organizations need to apply in order to facilitate the coping process among organization disaster survivors using recent empirical researches. Organizational disasters cannot be prevented completely, and so one must prepare for the social-psychological aftermath of organizational disasters. Individuals, organizations, and institutions are typically ill prepared for the onslaught of massive loss of life because they tend to avoid and deny unpleasant occurrences. Firstly, the article discusses about organization theory and sociology. Further the article describes the implementation of two organizational coping "cultures" in abstract terms and adds several contingencies and other exogenous independent variables. Most organizations and governments have come to realize now that resource loss of any kind causes stress. Effective resource replenishment can often be accomplished in the early stages of post-disaster strains. Organizations must be able to adapt quickly to a disaster situation; establish goal attainment mechanisms to meet intra- and extra-organizational survivors' coping needs; integrate coordination patterns during and after disasters, and maintain latency, that is, supply disaster assistance personnel with necessary motivation.

The explosion of TWA Flight 800 was the second-worst aviation disaster in U.S. history. This theoretical article suggests that as long as the cause of the plane crash remains a mystery, bereaved family members and friends will remain in a relatively weak position to make. sense of the tragedy. The meta-construct of "coping effectiveness" is explained in its dimensionality, and then a general model of coping effectiveness is developed. Individual and situational variables are proposed as antecedents of survivors' effectiveness in coping with the loss q significant others. The individual variables are demographic, intrapsychic, arm behavioral-contextual. The situational variables are suddenness, scope, and cause of organizational disaster. Story. telling is the mediator between independent and dependent variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although much professional and managerial hiring involves experienced workers, previous recruitment research has focused almost exclusively on new college graduates. To remedy this imbalance, 251 staffing professionals were surveyed concerning experienced-versus-college hiring practices in their organizations. Results suggest that a majority of positions requiring a college degree are filled with experienced workers. Experienced hires are evaluated more highly than new graduates on most characteristics (understanding business, knowledge of competition, realistic expectations, technical skills, interpersonal skills, writing skills, work ethic, likelihood of success, personal ethics), although new graduates are evaluated more highly on open-mindedness and willingness and ability to learn new things. Higher proportions of experienced hiring are associated with organizational growth, short-term staffing strategies, older workforces, and less dynamic business environments. Perceived success of experienced hiring is associated with greater use of effective recruitment sources, older workforces, and more competitive salary offers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]