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Do shareholders gain when managers disperse corporate resources through activities classified as corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Strategy scholars have recently developed a theoretical model that links such activities to shareholder value when a firm suffers a negative event; we test key portions of this theory of the 'insurance-like ' property of CSR activity. We posit that such activity leads to positive attributions from stakeholders, who then temper their negative judgments and sanctions toward firms because of this goodwill. We extend the risk management model by theorizing that some types of CSR activities will be more likely to create goodwill and offer insurance-like protection than other types. We delineate several firm and event specific characteristics that we expect to influence the link between CSR activities and an insurance effect. We then test our model using an event study of 178 negative legal/regulatory actions against firms throughout the 11 years from 1993-2003. We find that participation in institutional CSR activities--those aimed at a firm's secondary stakeholders or society at large--provides an 'insurance-like' benefit, while participation in technical CSRs--those activities targeting a firm 's trading partners--yields no such benefits. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for future theorizing and research into the economic value of CSR engagement.

PurposeA model is proposed in which longitudinal changes in adolescents’ dispositions increase age-related risk for the onset of substance use.MethodPooled surveys from 25 longitudinal studies were examined. Disposition was calculated from eight variables: use intentions; refusal intentions; attitudes; positive consequence beliefs; beliefs about negative consequences; descriptive peer normative beliefs; injunctive peer normative beliefs; and lifestyle incongruence. Substance use onset (past 30-day alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use) was analyzed using participants’ just prior dispositional status and recent changes in their dispositions.ResultsDisposition was highly correlated with each of the measured variables. The pattern of disposition changes as adolescents grow older, revealing that younger adolescents have more positive dispositions; whereas when they grew older, negative dispositions gradually emerged among a subset of adolescents. Analyses also revealed that dispositional status and recent changes in their dispositions were strong predictors of substance use onset.Implications. Better understanding the development of dispositions will aid in designing effective interventions. Subordinate variables are amenable to intervention and are recommended as the primary focus of prevention programming. Because of the developmental trajectory of dispositions, multi-year interventions are highly recommended. Whenever possible, tailored approaches that take adolescents’ pre-intervention dispositions into account should be considered.

Purpose The purpose of this research is to outline and investigate a set of five experience elements from neuroscience research labeled SCARF that could impact the quality of perception, evaluation and engagement of executives, managers and employees in business-to-business (B2B) companies during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed experience elements are perceived status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. The authors demonstrate that all five elements are influential factors in B2B employees’ workplace environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors outline several specific managerial implications and describe how companies can make better decisions related to several important market crisis decisions via a growth mindset built on the five experience elements. The authors also pay attention to implications to several B2B areas of research focus, including salesforce management and buying/supplier relationships. Design/methodology/approach The authors first examine existing B2B research to gauge if the five elements have been examined in B2B business contexts. They then analyze a combination of quantitative and qualitative survey data from 335 employees of different B2B companies to see if the five experience elements surface in discussion on how the pandemic has impacted their work experience and careers. Findings The authors find that several B2B research studies have looked at each of the individual components of the SCARF model, but none of them have yet included all five elements together in research or looked at them in the context of COVID-19. The results of analysis of surveys from employees in 335 B2B companies provide strong evidence that all five elements are influential factors in B2B employees workplace environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Originality/value This study contributes to prior research focusing on how B2B companies can thrive during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The research offers valuable practical insights and detailed examples of how to apply a set of five elements/experiences that industrial and business-to-business organization leaders should adopt in their conscious decision-making evaluation and in their communications with employees, suppliers and customers during and after the pandemic.

Online and distance learning classes have been touted for the last several years as an innovation in higher education that should help improve the entrepreneurial growth mindset of students. However, the reported negative online learning experience of many college students worldwide during the COVID-19 epidemic has shown that many opportunities remain to improve the sustainable development and growth of online visual instruction practices. In this study, we outline and investigate a set of hypotheses related to the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use (from TAM) of online video instruction in higher education courses during the pandemic. We employ grounded theory using autoethnographic case studies as a data source. We found that (a) synchronous broadcast lectures improve participant attitude (H1) and motivation (H2) toward online instruction, (b) prerecorded video instruction increases participant perceived “ease of use” (H3) and perceived behavioral control (H4) of online instruction, but (c) indicators of recorded dates on pre-recorded video instruction decreases participant perceived “usefulness” (H5) and “certainty” (H6) of online instruction. We enrich the insights of popular motivation models for organizations and the higher education industry by outlining a set of emotional elements originating in neuroscience leadership research (SCARF) that might either amplify or diminish the perceived the ease of use and perceived usefulness to technology usage relationships when participations engage in online learning situations.

Adding to the growing stream of research on clickstream analysis, this research investigates the traffic growth from website launch for country-specific Web sites of a multinational organization in Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. Several secondary sources of data are used to examine the potential influence of culture, infrastructure, and environment. We find most of the country-specific Web sites appear to follow S-shaped growth patterns (q is greater than p in 29 of the 36 diffusion models). We also find that the growth patterns MDS coefficients are significantly correlated with a combination of country-level physical infrastructure and institutional environment differences and both country-level and regional-level consumer (not work) cultural differences. In greater detail, it appears that the external p coefficients (aka advertising) in the diffusion models influence is, on average, lower for website growth in countries where there is lower physical infrastructure and institutional environment while the internal q coefficients (aka word of mouth) in the diffusion models influence is lower for website growth in countries where there are lower cultural levels of conservatism, affective autonomy, mastery, egalitarian commitment and/or higher levels of harmony.

This research presents a retail shelf-space decision model that incorporates a nonlinear profit function, vertical and horizontal location effects, and product cross-elasticity. We propose a linear programming formulation of the nonlinear profit function that can solve the shelf-space problem optimally. We describe potential advances in heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms and compare the approaches through simulations and a field experiment. We discuss the impact of the number of item facings, vertical location, and horizontal location (e.g., we find the vertical location effect is approximately double the size of the horizontal location effect on profit performance).

PurposeThis paper outlines ways in which struggling ethnic minority entrepreneurial service ventures and their owners might respond to unforeseen economic and social shocks. Interviews with owners of Bangladeshi Curry Houses in the United Kingdom — whom historically have lower performance rates compared to other ethnic minority businesses in the country — reveal that the entrepreneurs' response strategies undertaken to survive and remain in the business despite the challenges faced from operating in a turbulence environment.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted depth phone interviews with owners of Bangladeshi Curry Houses in London during January and February of 2021. The Gioia methodology was applied to the interview scripts to identify which crisis themes exist.FindingsDespite no advanced educational training, Bangladeshi owners have applied all of the different crisis management techniques present in larger companies: retrenchment, persevering, innovation, and exit. Although the results show that government schemes aimed at helping small businesses have contributed significantly to their survival, concerns regarding the post-health crisis situation remain challenging and threatening for their growth and survivability.Originality/valueThe results indicates that the ethnic minority owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are less likely to plan for the future operations; furthermore, they tend not to have formulated a strategy for dealing with an external shock hence affecting and threatening their performance and competitiveness in the marketplace.

Marketing strategists should create, maintain, and arrest the decay of causally ambiguous resource competences that lead to competitiveness and thus performance. However, competence causal ambiguity, which helps create competitiveness, is also implicated in competitiveness decay. In this study we test a model of specialization-competitiveness-performance using primary and secondary data from 169 public respondents/firms, to examine the effects of negative internal barriers to replication and adaptation. These barriers develop due to resource lock-in arising from the same specialization processes that lead to the positive barriers to imitation that deter competitors. Results suggest that commitment to learning can mitigate resource lock-in problems with internal competence causal ambiguity, competence causal ambiguity among competitors appears more essential to competitiveness in more competitive markets, competitiveness positively relates to both shareholder value and new product performance, and an increased differential focus on marketing versus operations in the organization strengthens the positive bridge between organizational competitiveness and shareholder return.

Firms want sales representatives to use social media technologies to connect with relational partners, including customers, suppliers, and other employees. As a result, firms attempt to recruit business students who are experienced with different forms of social media. The focus of this research is on high self-disclosure, low media-richness social media, such as blogging, that works well for central route persuasion. To better understand sales employee participation in blogging, we consider motivation to use sales- and marketing-related technology. This study extends the research on motivation by (1) distinguishing between three forms of motivation-intrinsic, extrinsic, and apathetic-and (2) exploring the potential moderating effects of (a) voluntariness on intention-to-use to actual use and (b) past performance on use to objective outcome. We collected data at two time periods for voluntary and involuntary respondents, and analyzed the data using PLS regression. We find that apathetic motivation appears independent of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Including apathetic motivation improves the explanatory power of motivation and extends the understanding of the moderating influence of voluntariness and individuals' past performance in the model.

Purpose - This paper aims to evaluate the evolution of buyer-supplier relationships from adversarial toward relational, or service-centered, emphasis for large-scale organizations.Design methodology approach - This paper uses the historical method to review historical changes through synthesized qualitative (i.e. field notes and industry interviews) and quantitative (i.e. company reports, Compustat queries, trade reports, and survey) research.Findings - Technology and information sharing in B2B relationships engender integrated value chains. Within these value chains, service-centered view of B2C relationships have been adopted in B2B relationships, resulting in changes in supplier roles and how they are measured.Research limitations implications - By focusing on large scale buyer-supplier relationships within supply chains (e.g. Wal-Mart, Royal Phillips, ElecSound, China Minmetals, The People's Republic of China), which may affect the generalizability to small-business applications, this paper provides some guidance on which customer levels (in a value chain) an organization should focus. The evolution of buyer-supplier relationships towards more cooperative relationships results in changing roles such as co-managed inventory, where suppliers are authorized to write themselves orders.Practical implications - This paper is a very useful source of information for practitioners and educators about recent trends in large-scale buyer-supplier relationships, including slotting allowances, co-managed inventory practices, and selling teams. It also provides a buyer-seller trust matrix that can be used for teaching or developing relational strategy in organizations and classrooms.Originality value - This paper provides description of changes in sales force roles and measures, including the roles of responsiveness, empowerment, trust (both supplier and supplier representative), and information sharing not previously found in the literature. Survey research establishes the external validity of the qualitative research.