Corporate Social Responsibility: A Strategic Perspective

David Chandler
Business Expert Press, November 2014

The goal of this project is to detail the core, defining principles of strategic CSR that differentiate it as a concept from the rest of the CSR/sustainability/business ethics field. It is designed to be a provocative piece, but one that solidifies the intellectual framework around an emerging concept–strategic CSR. The foundation for these principles comes from my perspective as a management professor within the business school. As such, it is a pragmatic philosophy, oriented around stakeholder theory, that is designed to persuade …

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful: Acknowledging appearance mitigates the “beauty is beastly” effect

Stefanie K Johnson, Traci Sitzmann, Anh Thuy Nguyen
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 125 Issue 2, November 2014, Pages 184-192

Physically attractive women are discriminated against when applying for masculine sex-typed jobs, a phenomenon known as the beauty is beastly  effect. We conducted three studies to establish an intervention for mitigating the beauty is beastly effect and to determine mediators and moderators of the intervention. As expected, physically attractive women were rated higher in employment suitability when they acknowledged that their sex or physical appearance is incongruent with the typical applicant for a masculine sex-typed

The differential impact of the bank–firm relationship on IPO underpricing: evidence from China

Xiangchao Hao, Jing Shi, Jian Yang
Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Vol. 30, November 2014, Pp. 207-232

This study investigates the impact of the bank–firm relationship on IPO underpricing in China, an emerging economy with a bank-dominated financial system. Utilizing a hand-collected loan data for 902 Chinese IPO firms from 2004 to 2011, we document that the bank–firm relationship reduces the degree of IPO underpricing. Both the lender’s and the borrower’s firm characteristics affect the signal quality of the bank–firm relationship, resulting in differential impacts on IPO underpricing. The relationship between firms and banks with …

Measuring the financial value of marketing strategy with excess stock market return

Vicki Lane
International Journal of Risk and Contingency Management (IJRCM), Volume 3, Issue 4, Pp. 16

This paper proposes excess stock market return as a way to measure the impact of marketing strategy on firm value. First, it provides an overview of event study method. An event study examines the excess return to a firm’s stock price after the release of information that is relevant to the firm’s financial success. Second, it shows how excess return captures a marketing strategy’s impact on firm value. It presents a model that illustrates how a marketing strategy impacts consumers, future cash flows, firm value, investor’s expectations, and excess return. Third, a comparison shows that excess return stacks up well against standard marketing metrics. Excess return yields unbiased estimates, allows direct causal inference, is future oriented, includes all cash flows, accounts for opportunity costs, factors in risk, and takes into account the time value of money.

Learning to Behave Badly: Performance Feedback and Illegal Organizational Action

Vinit Desai
Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 23, Issue 5, Pp. 1327-1355.

Two perspectives predict how organizational performance influences illegal action. First, poor performance creates tension, leading decision makers to repair the gap through any means necessary. However, strong performance also bolsters risky behavior, possibly leading to violations. To integrate these perspectives, I suggest that performance evaluation provides only the motive to commit illegal action and that decision makers also require an opportunity to do so. I extend organizational learning theory by suggesting that managers in organizations performing far from expectations may evaluate information about the potential success of illegal acts, and I examine whether they use this information to time violations.

Who did the audit? Audit quality and disclosures of other audit participants in PCAOB filings

Carol Callaway Dee, Ayalew Lulseged, Tianming Zhang
The Accounting Review,Vol. 90, Issue 5, Pages: 1939-1967.

We empirically test whether audit quality is affected when part of an SEC issuer’s audit is outsourced to auditors other than the principal auditor (“participating auditors”). We find a significantly negative market reaction and a significant decline in earnings response coefficients (ERCs) for experimental issuers disclosed for the first time as having participating auditors involved in their audits. However, we find no market reaction and no decline in ERCs for a matching sample of issuers that are not disclosed as using …
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Explaining the Location of Mission-Driven Businesses: An Examination of B-Corps

Hickman, Leila; Byrd, John; Hickman, Kent
Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Volume 2014, Number 55

In his well-known essay, Milton Friedman (1970) argued that it is the social responsibility of business to maximize profit. While such laissez-faire reasoning theoretically considers the welfare of all the stakeholders in the business enterprise through market pricing mechanisms, there is a growing and pressing concern with market failures. Among these failures are externalities, issues of inter-generational equity and short-termism, the commons problem, and decision making biases. The ramifications of these market imperfections have manifested themselves in climate change, financial crises, and deforestation, among other global challenges. Some businesses have responded by refocusing their mission away from solely profit maximisation to broader, more sustainable goals. In this paper, we explore the factors that contribute to businesses adopting one such innovation, the B-Corporation designation.

Examining project commitment in cross-functional teams: Antecedents and relationship with team performance

Kyle Ehrhardt, Janice S. Miller, Sarah J. Freeman, and Peter W. Hom
Journal of Business and Psychology, Volume 29, Issue 3, pp 443–461

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to test a model positing both antecedents and consequences of project commitment for members of cross-functional teams. Signaling theory and previous research guided study hypotheses.

Design/Methodology/Approach: We collected primary data from 142 team members and 31 team leaders across 24 cross-functional product development teams nested within six manufacturing organizations in the US and Canada.

Findings: Findings suggest that project commitment among team members is an important driver of team performance as rated by the team leader. In addition, several factors contribute toward shaping project commitment among cross-functional team members, including team leaders’ encouragement of self-expectation, as well as team members’ perceptions of an organization’s support for the team project.

Implications: Cross-functional teams are often charged with completing projects critical to the profitability, growth, and even survival of a firm. Especially as we show that members’ project commitment is a meaningful predictor of team performance, managers may draw insight from study results as to what actions may be taken to promote the development of this important psychological state among members of cross-functional teams.

Originality/Value: Use of cross-functional teams for accomplishing a wide variety of firm objectives is becoming commonplace in organizations. Although theorized as an important construct in cross-functional team settings, empirical examinations of the nature and implications of project commitment have been limited. By examining both antecedents and potential team performance consequences of project commitment in multiple organizations, we contribute toward filling this gap.

Apology Strategies for Informal Complaints in Service Recovery and CRM Systems

Deborah L. Kellogg and Lawrence F. Cunningham
International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change, Volume 5 Issue 3

This paper reports the results of a quasi-experiment designed to identify linkages between customer attributes and apology types in service recovery in informal resolution settings. Understanding these relationships is critical for enabling more effective and dynamic social relationships between the service provider and the customer/client with the use of technology, namely Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM). The authors find that simple apologies decrease anger, restore distributive and interactional justice, and increase satisfaction. More importantly, the paper suggests that there are significant nuances in apology types and complex relationships between customer types and effective deployment of the apology in informal resolution settings. Further, the analysis suggests that apologies with explanations are more effective among customers with service experience and that apologies with compensation are most effective for all customers. When apologies are used with successive failures there is some evidence that the apology explanations are not equally effective for all customer types. The paper concludes with a discussion of the linkages between apology, service recovery and CRM systems in informal complaint resolution to improve senior level decision making, employee performance in service recovery, and customer satisfaction in for profit and non-profit organizations.

Do managers use meeting analyst forecasts to signal private information? Evidence from patent citations

Katherine Gunny, Tracey Chunqi Zhang
Journal of Business Finance & Accounting,Vol. 41, Issue 7-8, Pages: 950-973
This study examines whether firms manage earnings to meet analyst forecasts to signal superior future performance. Prior research finds that firms use earnings management to just meet analyst forecasts and that these firms have a positive association with future performance (Bartov et al., 2002). There are two potential explanations for the positive association ” signaling and attaining benefits that allow for better future performance (i.e., the real benefits explanation). Prior studies cannot provide evidence of signaling because they do not control for the real benefits explanation. Our research design enables us to control for the real benefits explanation because we can identify potential signaling firms within the sample of firms that just meet analyst forecasts. We use a unique database from the National Bureau of Economic Research to construct a proxy for the manager’s belief about future firm value due to patents

Service Perceptions in China

Lawrence F. Cunningham, Clifford E. Young and Hongxia Zhang
Journal of International Marketing Strategy,Vol. 1, Issue 2, pp. 39-XX

This study investigates customer-based views of generic services from a Chinese consumer perspective. The data for the study were collected using students in a university setting as surrogates for Chinese consumers and were analyzed using a multidimensional scaling technique. The study indicates that only two dimensions, customization/standardization and person/object are responsible for most of the variance in the classifications. The paper discusses the implications of the findings in both the context of theory and for service businesses operating in the Chinese environment. The study is limited by the use of university students as surrogates for consumer and the limitations of multi-dimensional scaling. Despite these limitations, the study is useful to Chinese managers of service organizations because it provides information on how Chinese consumers view generic services in general and in relation to each other in the Chinese environment. Chinese managers may gain insight into the possible ways that these managers may reposition their service in relation to other services. For Chinese service managers, this information may lead to the formulation of better strategy especially in the area of non-technical services.
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Organizational Susceptibility to Institutional Complexity: Critical Events Driving the Adoption and Implementation of the Ethics & Compliance Officer Position

David Chandler
Organization Science, Volume 25 Issue 6, August 2014, Pages 1722-1743

The institutional environment is complex. This complexity is characterized by forces that ebb and flow in wavelike patterns as societal expectations evolve, with attention coalescing around specific events and then dissipating. Some of these critical events are broad and affect many firms, whereas others are narrow and affect individual firms. In either case, when they occur, these events elevate organizational susceptibility to societal demands but encourage different kinds of behavior in response. This study seeks to model this complexity in an area of growing interest for organization scholars—business ethics. In particular, I examine how firms respond to shifting societal pressures for greater ethical behavior by adopting and implementing the Ethics and Compliance Officer position, from 1990 to 2008. Results demonstrate that although firms decide when to adopt in response to broad fieldwide critical events, it is narrower firm-specific critical events that determine resource commitments in implementation.

The paradox of seduction by irrelevant details: How irrelevant information helps and hinders self-regulated learning

Traci Sitzmann, Stefanie Johnson
Learning and Individual Differences, Volume 34 Aigist 2014, Pages 1-11

Instructors often rely on seductive details, such as jokes, stories, and video clips, to keep trainees entertained. However, this extraneous information may inadvertently detract from the course content, and the between-person nature of past research precludes understanding the dynamic process by which seductive details influence learning. Using a
repeated measures field study, we found that seductive details indirectly improved learning performance by reducing negative affect and indirectly hindered learning performance by …

Grand Teton Candy Company: Connecting the Dots in a Fraud Investigation

Carol Callaway Dee, Cindy Durtschi, and Mary P. Mindak
Issues in Accounting Education, Volume 29, Issue 3, pp. 443-458.

Grand Teton Candy Company (GTCC) is considering an initial public offering (IPO). To go public, GTCC will need an audit by a large accounting firm with a solid reputation and experience in audits of IPOs. As a precursor to the formal audit, Elsie Driggs, one of the owners of GTCC, has hired her brother’s CPA firm to ensure the books are in order. Her brother notices some red flags of fraud, so he forms a team of young accountants from his firm to carefully comb through his sister’s records to ensure she does not have problems when the formal audit takes place. You have been placed on the team and your task is to investigate your boss’ suspicions that there is fraud at Grand Teton Candy Company. You are to prepare a written report for your boss that includes the name of the fraudster(s), what he or she did, and how the perpetrator(s) benefited from the crime.

The unconstrained binary quadratic programming problem: a survey

Gary Kochenberger, Jin-Kao Hao, Fred Glover, Mark Lewis, Zhipeng Lü, Haibo Wang, Yang Wang
Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, July 2014, Volume 28, Issue 1, pp 58-81

In recent years the unconstrained binary quadratic program (UBQP) has grown in importance in the field of combinatorial optimization due to its application potential and its computational challenge. Research on UBQP has generated a wide range of solution techniques for this basic model that encompasses a rich collection of problem types. In this paper we survey the literature on this important model, providing an overview of the applications and solution methods.

Let’s talk: an analysis of the “vote vs. negotiated withdrawal” decision for social activist environmental health shareholder resolutions

John Byrd, Elizabeth S Cooperman
Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, Volume 4 Issue 3, July 2014, Pages 230-248

Social and environmental shareholder activists engage in a form of corporate social governance by submitting proxy resolutions for a specific change in corporate behavior deemed to be harmful to society. Using a unique data-set for environmental health shareholder resolutions filed by shareholder activists at 70 different companies during 2006–2011, we examine the success rate of resolutions and characteristics affecting the “vote vs. negotiated withdrawal” decision. Supporting a self-interest hypothesis, resolutions …

Morals, Markets, and Values-based Businesses

David Chandler
Academy of Management Review, Volume 39 Issue 3, July 2014, Pages 396-406.

Institutional theory tells us that institutions “matter”(Powell, 1996: 297). They matter because they are powerful predictors of action, both enabling and constraining actors within socially constructed ranges of acceptable behavior (Greenwood, Oliver, Sahlin-Andersson, & Suddaby, 2008). In spite of the importance of demonstrating that institutions matter, however, institutional theory can be less helpful in terms of explaining why institutions are so influential. In particular, there is still much work to be done to investigate the values on …

Imitate Others? Not if We Have the Chance: Competitive Differentiation in Medical Malpractice Insurers’ Pricing Decisions under Uncertainty

Vinit M. Desai
British Journal of Management, Volume 25, Issue 3, Pp. 589–606

Several perspectives assert that organizations facing uncertainty tend to imitate other organizations’ actions. While one might therefore expect to see great homogeneity across fields characterized by uncertainty, it is surprising that this homogeneity has not been observed more frequently in practice. Research investigating this puzzle has typically focused on the role played by organizational characteristics or the information organizations possess about their environments. Instead, this study turns attention to the information others possess about the organization. To that end, I disaggregate organizational uncertainty into the uncertainty facing decision makers and the uncertainty faced by others about what those decision makers might ultimately do, providing a more fine grained analysis of uncertainty and its impact on competitive action than typically offered in this literature. I suggest that uncertainty in competitors’ evaluations of the organization provides an opportunity for the organization to differentiate itself rather than imitate others. I also suggest that this effect is stronger than the effects of the uncertainty facing the decision makers themselves. Related hypotheses are tested on a panel of medical malpractice insurance providers. The study’s perspective generates unique predictions regarding imitation and differentiation in this industry and across other contexts featuring both uncertainty and competition.

Let’s talk: an analysis of the “vote vs. negotiated withdrawal” decision for social activist environmental health shareholder resolutions

John Byrd, Elizabeth S Cooperman
Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment,Vol. 4, Issue 3, Pages: 230-248.

Social and environmental shareholder activists engage in a form of corporate social governance by submitting proxy resolutions for a specific change in corporate behavior deemed to be harmful to society. Using a unique data-set for environmental health shareholder resolutions filed by shareholder activists at 70 different companies during 2006-2011, we examine the success rate of resolutions and characteristics affecting the “vote vs. negotiated withdrawal” decision. Supporting a self-interest hypothesis, resolutions …
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The University of Colorado Digital Health Consortium Initiative: A Collaborative Model of Education, Research and Service

Jiban Khuntia, Jahangir Karimi, Mohan Tanniru, Arlen Meyers
Journal of Commercial Biotechnology, Vol. 20 Issue 3, June 2014

This article describes the initiative and actions related to establishing a Digital Health Consortium (DHC) at the University of Colorado Denver. The consortium is a part of  the Center for Information Technology Innovation (CITI) in the Business School. The objective is to augment existing information systems program offerings in health information  technology with the support of industry affiliates and other partners of the university. The CITI-DHC is an industry-academia led initiative with a mission to accelerate digital health transformation through education, research, and service. We illustrate the vision and plan for the consortium, that will be fulfilled with academic and industry stakeholders, and who will be engaged with the platform to support digital health care innovations through collaborations.