Good Laboratory Practice has been a part of non-clinical research for over 40 years. Operations Research, despite having many papers discussing standards being published over the same period of time, has yet to embrace standards that underpin its research. This talk will examine the need to adopt standards. Specifically, a concrete set of recommendations that the community should adopt are suggested and how the proposals could be progressed are discussed.
This Research Workshop looks into the New Theory Development in management. It discusses the critical steps and the contributing factors of new theory development. It further suggests some research topics for management and provides some challenges that will be faced in the future.
Service organizations commonly impose either explicitly or implicitly, requirements on how employees display their positive emotions and suppress negative emotions during service delivery. In response, employees either fake the necessary emotion (termed as “surface acting”), or show their genuine emotion by putting themselves into the shoes of their customers (termed as “deep acting”). These organizational display rules and employees' emotional acting strategies developed in the West may not be able to fully capture the essence of interpersonal relationship in Chinese culture characterized by a high degree of relational harmony, respect for hierarchy, and shame. The results of an empirical study on nursing professionals support that specific Chinese cultural values do play a part in affecting compliance with organizational display rules and employees' emotional acting strategies.
Growing income inequality has been a major concern worldwide. Contemporaneous management remuneration practice which is characterized by huge pay disparity between management and ordinary workers apparently contributes to the phenomenon. Much of the previous research on pay disparity focuses on its consequences and is mostly based on data from western countries. This seminar contributes to the literature by exploring antecedents of pay disparity in an emerging economy like China. Using a sample of Chinese listed companies from 2008–2011, it investigates what mechanisms can restrain pay disparity between CEOs and employees. It finds that while CEO power leads to greater pay disparity, monitoring by compensation committees, regulatory supervision, and public monitoring can restrain pay disparity in some circumstances. Effectiveness of these mechanisms tends to be influenced by organizational context such as ownership structure and by institutional factors such as subnational cultural climate.
In view of the benefits of team-member exchange (TMX) and the limited studies on its antecedents, this seminar examines how propensity to trust, reciprocation wariness, and exchange ideology may impact TMX, and how task interdependence and shared leadership may interact with these personality traits to promote or hinder TMX. This examination provides practitioners with insights on strengthening team members' exchange relationships with appropriate work design. The seminar further explores how TMX may be associated with work-life balance. Such exploration may suggest practitioners an economical way to help employees achieve a better balance between their work life and family life. Results of the pilot study and progress of the study will be shared.
Work-life balance is no longer a new topic. Yet, it remains a challenge to almost all employers and employees. Researchers have long advised employers to devise different organizational measures to help employees achieve work-life balance. Many of these measures, however, incur costs which may be difficult to justify if the amount incurred is substantial, particularly for small- and medium-sized enterprises. In view of these limitations, this seminar looks into the topic of work-life balance from a different perspective. It proposes that an individual's relationships with others inside and outside organizational settings may help one achieve work-life balance. On the basis of social exchange theory, it is proposed that when one develops close relationships with coworkers, the individual receives resources that can improve his/her functioning at work. Likewise, close relationships with others in the family and community can bring one various resources that can improve his/her arrangements in family life. In addition, one may receive resources that are cross-domain, that is, resources related to the work life from the family and community as well as resources related to the family life from work. The availability of these resources from either domain can improve the quality of the other domain, leading to work-life enrichment. Based upon this model, recommendations are developed for organizations to strengthen employees' relationships with different parties inside and outside work settings.
In agency theory, remuneration contracts can be designed to mitigate agency problems inherent in different ownership structures. In practice, compensation is not always designed optimally. Instead, compensation is a tool that managers or controlling shareholders can use to extract private benefits at the expense of other corporate stakeholders. This seminar examines the determinants of CEO pay relative to worker pay in Chinese family firms, with particular interest in the effectiveness of board monitoring in alleviating agency problems related to executive compensation. It is found that family firms with greater family board representation award higher relative CEO compensation. Board independence can dilute family influence on boards in determining relative CEO compensation. Overall, it is suggested that variation in board composition determines its potentials for alleviating agency problems in family firms.
Transaction cost economics is a widely accepted framework to study foreign entry mode selection for enterprises. Asset specificity, coupled with behavioral and environmental uncertainties are the major determinants on firms' mode choices. Nowadays, small and medium-sized enterprises play a vital role in international business of which entrepreneurs are the locus of entry mode strategy formulation. Taking their dynamic managerial capabilities—managerial social capital, managerial cognition and managerial human capital—into consideration can provide us with a wider lens on how entrepreneurial capabilities can minimize hazards arisen from behavioral and environmental uncertainties. In so doing, the locomotive of transaction cost economics—asset specificity—can be safeguarded, weakening the propensity of entrepreneurs to choose hierarchical control over hybrid and market in this rapidly changing marketplace.
This study investigated whether and how an exogenous shock to the public information environment created by the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and other regulatory changes in 2005 related to short sellers' use of private information. Using monthly firm-level data from 20 countries on the price (loan fees) and quantity of shares available for lending in the shorting market, the authors of the study documented that the ability of outward shifts in shorting demand and supply to predict future negative stock returns, or equivalently the profitability of equity shorting, dropped significantly in the post-shock period. It was shown that the underlying mechanism through which the profitability of shorting decreased after the shock was an increase in investors' consensus of opinion. We also found that a greater reduction in return predictability occured (i) in negative earnings announcement months, (ii) when firms had larger accounting accruals, and (iii) for firms domiciled in countries with stronger implementation credibility and more disclosure changes from local GAAP to mandatory IFRS. Taken together, we concluded that mandatory IFRS and other regulatory changes reduced the information advantage of short sellers by crowding out their use of private information.
Like other forms of transgressions, wasteful consumption might also lead to feelings of guilt and shame simultaneously. A fundamental difference between these two emotions was that guilt-laden people focused on the bad behaviors committed but shame-laden people focused on the bad qualities in themselves. It is speculated that this may differentially affect people's self-efficacy perceptions, and thus leading guilt to have a positive impact on consumer likelihood to stop wastage but shame to have a negative impact on such likelihood. It was also predicted that when people construed their wasteful consumption at high (versus low) level, feelings of shame (guilt) tended to predominate and when waste-reducing behavior was instrumental to gaining social approval, the negative impact of shame would be alleviated.
This seminar was based on a paper which was intended as a contribution to the ongoing conceptual development of sustainable human resource management. So far the conceptual foundation for sustainable human resource management was based on the three-bottom line concept of sustainable development. However, such adaptation missed some important considerations that the management of human resources in a sustainable sense had to be taken into account of. Further, scholars had only addressed each of these three related bottom-lines separately instead of considering them as an integrated and interrelated entity. If we were to truly facilitate a sustainable management of human resources one would have to go back to the origin and conceptualise what sustainability in the management of human resource was, in terms of its scope and function.
Much of the knowledge management literature focused on knowledge workers in formal office settings and treated knowledge as an objectified and commodified asset. However, the theoretical lens of 'knowledge-as-situated-practice', which focused on how individuals come to apprehend and define knowledge that was embedded and situated in everyday work practices, had challenged such conventional wisdom. The current study seek to better theorize the 'knowledge-as-situated-practice' perspective by focusing on its contentious nature with regard to its legitimization, sharing, and appropriation within webs of power relations in a non-traditional, peripheral context – bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong. Through semi-structured interviews with scaffolding managers and frontline scaffolders, this seminar explored how bamboo scaffolders navigated their risks through the effective learning and utilization of their highly tacit and situated risk assessment knowledge. The authors were also interested in examining whether and how this kind of tacit and situated knowledge could be legitimized and appropriated vis-à-vis the increasing demands on scientific designs and formal safety measures.
In response to increased disruption in the business environment, a new form of adaptive business community had been developed, which was called Business Ecosystems. In these systems customers, partners, competitors, and suppliers innovated and shared resources, whilst the ecosystem's collaboration pathways adapted to respond to the external environment. They were characterised by their innovation capacity, loose coupling of actors, resource development capacity, flexibility and adaptation. A Business Ecosystem theory was developed from a systematic analysis of the extant literature, followed by a statistical and a systematic analysis of the network literature. It identified three high level constructs: strategy development, governance and sustainability of the ecosystem. The preconditions for these (sub-constructs) were also identified: opportunity, innovation and value creation, profitability and actor satisfaction. In addition, it was proposed that these preconditions were the result of the ecosystem governance structure, trust, sharing of resources, knowledge sharing, operation and structure of the network, standards, goal alignment, alignment of actor objectives, leadership, communication, collaboration, interdependence and alignment of functions. This theory created the basis for empirical testing of the relationships in Business Ecosystems.
Keeping aligned with the explosive growth in the global service industry, studies on emotional labour (EL in short) proliferated in the past decades since Hochschild's (1983) seminal work. Notwithstanding significant research findings of past studies conducted across various service and cultural settings, there were certain missing links this study aimed to find. A conceptual model was developed and an empirical study conducted in two phases respectively on frontline service employees and customers. This research seminar was about the second phase of the study focusing on the impact of EL micro-expressions on customers' service evaluation.
In this seminar, Professor Altman presented the context and the details of how to embark on a successful publishing career in business & management.
In this seminar, Professor Altman discussed a case study of national identity and a particular trade activity in detail: Polish obsession / fascination / hate / guilt / remorse with its Jewish past.
Dr Koh, based on an in-depth case study conducted in the Toshiba Corporation in Japan, which participated in IUGC for reducing greenhouse gases in Yokohama city from April 2010 to March 2015, discussed the factors influencing the coordination of technology systems among companies aiming for mass production and identified the organizational processes among companies that have been commercialized. Dr Koh presented the findings that project leaders who have both technological knowledge and an understanding of the overall process are able to manage the outcomes and coordination of the project; and the adoption of a standard interface can enable companies to establish mass production with improved coordination.
