The Stretch Goal Paradox

Sim B. Sitkin, C. Chet Miller, and Kelly E. See
Harvard Business Review,  JVol. 95, Issue 1, Pages: 93-99

What executive hasn’t dreamed of transforming an organization by achieving seemingly impossible goals through the sheer force of will? We’re not talking about merely challenging goals. We’re talking about management moon shots—goals that appear unattainable given current practices, skills, and knowledge. In the parlance of the business world, these are often referred to as stretch goals. Our research suggests that though the use of stretch goals is quite common, successful use is not. Before launching stretch goals in sales, production, quality, or any other realm, how can you be confident that your grand aspirations will trigger positive attitudes and actions rather than negative ones? We focus on providing clear guidelines for assessing when stretch goals do and do not make sense, and when to employ them rather than set more achievable objectives.

Managing Financial Institutions: Markets and Sustainable Finance

Elizabeth S. Cooperman
Routledge,Pages: 1 to 477.
WE live in times with the world transforming around us, with rapid advances in technology, climate change risks, and accompanying social risks in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. These are challenging times, and the obligation of financial institutions to operate in a responsible way, including engagement in sustainable development, has never been more important, requiring socially and environmentally accountable financial institution management. As Achim Steiner (2015, p. 1) in the foreword to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Inquiry Report for the Design of a Sustainable Financial System notes:The financial system underpins growth and development. In 2008 we witnessed some of the world’s most sophisticated financial systems spawn the worst global financial crisis seen in decades. As markets in some developed countries collapsed, others in both developed and developing

Exploring Brand Personality Scale Development Using Rasch Modelling

Francisco J. Conejo, Ben Wooliscroft, Andrea Insch
Marketing Bulletin,Vol. 27, Issue 1, Pages: 1-23.
Scales in marketing rarely comply with measurement theory’s unidimensionality, invariance and concatenation requirements. To address this, Rasch Modelling is applied to the Brand Personality (BP) construct, redefined as the set of human mental traits consistently associated to brands across situations and time. Ten Rasch BP scales are developed, positive and negative ones for each Big Five personality dimension. A first step towards actual BP measures, these scales lay the foundations for refinement. Addressing the notion of measurement itself, this paper highlights the importance of considering constructs from an intensity perspective, likely fertile ground for future marketing research.

When are outside directors more effective monitors? Evidence from real activities manipulation

Jeff Zeyun Chen, Marc Cussatt, Katherine A Gunny
Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance,Pages: 0148558X17692691.
A large body of the corporate governance literature examines the disciplinary role of outside directors in overseeing the CEO. Although it is certainly a critical factor in effective monitoring, independence alone is not sufficient. Fulfilling the monitoring role also requires a skilled and knowledgeable board (Acharya, Myers, & Rajan, 2011; Adams & Ferreira 2007; Raheja, 2005). The skills and knowledge needed for monitoring vary with the type of CEO activity being monitored. For certain managerial actions that require sufficient firm-specific knowledge and expertise to exercise discipline, board informedness could be at least as critical as board independence. Given the trade-off between informedness and independence, outside directors are not necessarily better monitors than inside directors due to information disadvantages. 1 In this study, we examine whether and to what extent an independent board constrains

A Technical/Strategic Paradigm for Online Executive Education

Marlene A Smith, Susan M Keaveney
Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education,Vol. 15, Issue 1, Pages: 82-100.

This article discusses the development and delivery of online courses for the executive education audience. The goal is to introduce a new framework, the technical/strategic paradigm, that will help educators to identify the pedagogical needs of disparate executive groups and adjust their online course development plans accordingly. We describe how four key elements of online courses (course structure, content-based learning materials, assignments, and learning assessment) should be fashioned in a way …
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The dynamic effects of subconscious goal pursuit on resource allocation, task performance, and goal abandonment

Traci Sitzmann, Bradford S Bell
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,Vol. 138, Pages: 1-14.

We test two potential boundary conditions for the effects of subconscious goalsthe nature of the goal that is activated (achievement vs. underachievement) and conscious goal striving. Subconscious achievement goals increase the amount of time devoted to skill acquisition, and this increase in resource allocation leads to higher performance when conscious goals are neutral. However, specific conscious goals undermine the performance benefits of subconscious achievement goals. Subconscious underachievement goals …
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Does Diversification Drive Down Risk-adjusted Returns? A Quantile Regression Approach

Jeungbo Shim
Asia-Pacific Journal of Risk and Insurance,Vol. 11, Issue 2,

This study examines diversification-performance relationship in the US property-liability insurance industry over the period of 1996-2010. Unlike prior studies that rely on the conditional mean estimation method, we employ quantile regression, which captures the heterogeneous effects of diversification on conditional return distribution. The results show that diversification does not necessarily drive down risk-adjusted returns and its effects vary along return distribution. We find that there is a diversification discount for firms in the …
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Dependency between Risks and the Insurer’s Economic Capital: A Copula-based GARCH Model

Jeungbo Shim, Seung-Hwan Lee
Asia-Pacific Journal of Risk and Insurance,Vol. 11, Issue 1,

Copulas can be a useful tool to capture heavy-tailed dependence between risks in estimating economic capital. This paper provides a procedure of combining copula with GARCH model to construct a multivariate distribution. The copula-based GARCH model using a skewed student’s t-distribution controls for the issues of skewness, heavy tails, volatility clustering and conditional dependencies contained in the financial time series data. Using the sample of US property liability insurance industry, we perform Monte Carlo …
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The Strategic Use of Historical Narratives: A Theoretical Framework

William M. Foster, Diego M. Coraiola, Roy Suddaby, Jochem Kroezen, David Chandler
Business History,Vol. 59, Issue 8, Pages: 1176-1200.

History has long been recognised as a strategic and organisational resource. However, until recently, the advantage conferred by history was attributed to a firm’s ability to accumulate heterogeneous resources or develop opaque practices. In contrast, we argue that the advantage history confers on organisations is based on understanding when the knowledge of the past is referenced and the reasons why it is strategically communicated. We argue that managers package this knowledge in historical narratives to address …
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Is brand alliance always beneficial to firms?

Ruiliang Yan, Zixia Cao
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services,Vol. 34, Pages: 193-200.

In this research, we develop a fresh analytical model to examine the impact of brand quality on the firms’ performances when two firms selling substitute products form a brand alliance. Our results indicate that when two products have equal brand qualities, brand alliance is always a beneficial strategy for two firms to employ. However, when two products have different brand qualities, brand quality differential shows a positive relationship with the profit of the firm with the low-quality brand but demonstrates a …
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The Heterogeneity of Board-Level Sustainability Committees and Corporate Social Performance

Jenna J Burke, Rani Hoitash, Udi Hoitash
Journal of Business Ethics,Pages: 1-26.

This paper explores an increasingly prevalent element of board-level commitment to sustainability. We propose a theoretical framework under which the existence and associated actions of board-level sustainability committees are motivated by shared value creation, where the interests of a diverse group of stakeholders are satisfied and sufficient profit is achieved. Using hand-collected data, we find that sustainability committees are heterogeneous in focus and vary in their effectiveness. Specifically, we disaggregate the …
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Culpable leaders, trust, emotional exhaustion, and identification during a crisis

Sarah Kovoor-Misra, Shanthi Gopalakrishnan
Leadership & Organization Development Journal,Vol. 37 Issue 8, Pages: 1100-1116
The purpose of this paper is to investigate followers judgments of the culpability of their leaders and the organizations external stakeholders in causing a crisis. The authors study the differences in effects of these judgments on their trust toward their leaders, their emotional exhaustion, and their levels of organizational identification.

Revisiting the causes of organizational discontinuance: A diffusion theory approach offers new insights

Madhavan Parthasarathy, David Forlani
Journal of Business Market Management,Vol. 9, Issue 2, Pages: 650-676.

The purpose of this research was to develop a framework capable of classifying the reasons behind the discontinuance of supplier-distributor relationships. Using a sample of CEO’s who manage intra-national and multi-national firms, a study was run to test a typology of discontinuance built around diffusion theory’s source of influence construct (eg, the origin and valence of the information that initiates a discontinuance decision). The three types are called New Day, Strike 3 and Greener Grass. Results support the proposed typology and …
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The impact of tax rate changes on intercorporate investment

Robert F. Gary, Jared A. Moore, Craig A. Sisneros, and William D. Terando
Advances in Accounting, Volume 34, Pp. 55–63

We examine how tax rates impact investment by corporations in the stock market. We regress changes in intercorporate investment on changes in the various individual and corporate top statutory marginal tax rates (MTRs). We find a significant negative association between changes in individual capital gains MTRs and changes in intercorporate investment, while no such association is evident for changes in either individual ordinary or dividend MTRs. These results support the notion that corporations respond to the after-tax rate of return and/or market efficiency consequences brought about by a change in individual capital gains MTRs. We find a significant positive relation between changes in intercorporate investment and changes in corporate MTRs on ordinary income. These results are consistent with corporations scaling back expansion plans and instead investing free cash flows in equity securities as MTRs increase.

Are there exploitable trends in commodity futures prices?

Yufeng Han, Ting Hu, Jian Yang
Journal of Banking & Finance,Vol. 70, Pages: 214-234.

We provide evidence that a simple moving average timing strategy, when applied to portfolios of commodity futures, can generate superior performance to the buy-and-hold strategy. The outperformance is very robust. It can survive the transaction costs in the futures markets, it is not concentrated in a particular subperiod, and is robust to short-sale constraints, alternative specifications of the moving average lag length, alternative construction of the continuous time-series of futures prices, and impact from data mining. …
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Preface to the 2nd Special Issue on metaheuristics in network optimization

Gary Kochenberger, Fred Glover
Networks,Vol. 68, Issue 1, Pages: 3-3.

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An Exploratory Study of Conflict over Paying Debian Developers

James H Gerlach, Chorng-Guang Wu, Lawrence F Cunningham, Clifford E Young
International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes (IJOSSP),Vol. 7, Issue 3, Pages: 20-38.

This article reports on an exploratory study of the causes and effects of conflict within the open source software project, Debian. Conflict arose when the project leader decided to introduce payment for select volunteers within an all-volunteer project to speed up the release of Debian. The study utilized the theoretical framework of Boltanski and Thvenot for understanding disputes. The results of the survey of Debian developers show that the conditions for conflict were complex and were driven by perception of misuse of …
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Price Jump Risk in the US Housing Market

Robert I Webb, Jian Yang, Jin Zhang
The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics,Vol. 53, Issue 1, Pages: 29-49.

Housing prices, like the prices of other speculative assets, contain a mix of both small and large changes (ie, jumps). We apply a jump-GARCH model to monthly Case-Shiller housing price indexes of twenty cities in the US during the period January 1991 through December 2011. We document the evidence of large housing price jumps in many cities, during both the financial crisis and non-crisis periods. The housing price jump intensity observed during the whole sample is largely explained by city, state and national …
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Information Flow Between Forward and Spot Markets: Evidence From the Chinese Renminbi

Jiadong Tong, Zijun Wang, Jian Yang
Journal of Futures Markets,Vol. 36, Issue 7, Pages: 695-718.

We apply a new model selection approach that allows for the joint determination of structural breaks and cointegration to examine the term structure of Chinese Renminbi (RMB)-US dollar spot and forward exchange rates during the managed-floating period of 2005-2013. We find that the RMB market has exhibited different dynamic relationships between spot and forward exchange rates over time, apparently due to significant policy changes. Offshore forward rates with either shorter or longer maturities can substantially …
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University of Colorado Denver Business School