Business Commons^™

Diverse Hedge Funds, Yan Lu, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Hedge fund teams with heterogeneous educational backgrounds, academic specializations, work experiences, genders, and races, outperform homogeneous teams after adjusting for risk and fund characteristics. An event study of manager team transitions, instrumental variable regressions, and an analysis of managers who simultaneously operate solo- and team-managed funds address endogeneity concerns. Diverse teams deliver superior returns by arbitraging more stock anomalies, avoiding behavioral biases, and minimizing downside risks. Moreover, diversity allows hedge funds to circumvent capacity constraints and generate persistent performance. Our results suggest that diversity adds value in asset management. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the …

Maximising Effectiveness Of Talent Pools Through Mindfulness: An Empirical Investigation In A Multinational Corporation, Tarmo Raudsepp

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Traditional human resource management is looking to identify and develop talent for maximising human capital in a competitive environment with limited resources and negative demographic trends. Attracting, deploying, motivating, developing and retaining talented employees is a corporate norm for meeting organisational goals. Proper human resource processes through rigorous mapping of employees according to the performance-potential matrix allow the grading of employees against peer groups to establish talent pools for development and internal succession planning.

Mindfulness originates from 2,500-year-old Buddhist spiritual practices and has a rare combination of spirituality and science. Eastern perspective originates from Asian traditions focusing on the self-regulation …

Work Effort: A Conceptual And Meta-Analytic Review, Chad H. Van Iddekinge, John D. Arnold, Herman Aquinis, Jonas W. B. Lang, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Work effort has been a key concept in management theories and research for more than a century. Maintaining and increasing employee effort also is a persistent concern to managers. The goal of the present conceptual and meta-analytic review was to increase clarity and consensus regarding what effort is and how to measure it. First, we reviewed conceptualizations of effort and provided an integrated definition that views effort as a direct outcome of motivation that captures (a) what employees work on, (b) how hard they work, and (c) how long they persist in that work. Second, we identified four main ways …

The Effect Of Formal Time Allocations On Learning Trajectories And Performance, Kenneth T. Goh, Colin M. Fisher, S. Amy Sommer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

How do formal time allocations in teams affect team learning trajectories and performance? We argue that allocating more time for transition phases induces steeper learning trajectories that engender a positive group atmosphere, which in turn improves team performance by improving coordination quality. We tested our hypotheses in a laboratory experiment in which teams worked on a creative design task over multiple iterations. Using a latent growth modeling approach, we found that teams with shorter action and longer transition phases during prototyping had lower initial performance but steeper learning trajectories, which indirectly led to better final team performance.

Revisiting The Internationalization-Performance Relationship: A Twenty-Year Meta-Analysis Of Emerging Market Multinationals, Sihong Wu, Di Fan, Liang Chen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

With the rapid growth of emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs), increasing interest has been focused on exploring the internationalization-performance (I-P) relationship of EMNEs. Yet findings on the relationship remain contradictory. Although researchers emphasize the home-country-bounded nature of EMNEs, less is known about how home-government features and the EMNEs' political mindset affect their internationalization and performance. This study integrates and extends the literature on the I-P relationship of EMNEs using a meta-analysis covering a dataset of 218 effect sizes from 186 retrieved studies published between 1998 and 2021. Findings show that the I-P relationship is overall positive, yet it varies across …

Trust Building Within And Across Cultures: A Study Of Guinea, Xiushun Sun

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

With the development of African economy and the increasing Chinese MNCs operating in Africa, there is a need to have a better understanding of the trust relationships between Chinese expatriates and African HCNs in the organizational environment. We adopt both qualitative and quantitative approaches to understand the trust relationships between Chinese supervisors, Guinea supervisors and Guinea subordinates in a Chinese MNC’s subsidiary in Guinea, compare the difference within culture and across culture, and examine how the interpersonal trust and the trust in the organization affect employees’ job performance. In study 1, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 Chinese supervisors, 20 …

Investing In Low-Trust Countries: On The Role Of Social Trust In The Global Mutual Fund Industry, Massimo Massa, Chengwei Wang, Hong Zhang, Jian Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We hypothesize that social trust, in mitigating contracting incompleteness, may have an important effect on the activeness and effectiveness of delegated portfolio management. Using a complete sample of worldwide open-end mutual funds, we find that trust is positively associated with the activeness of funds and that trust-related active share delivers superior performance (e.g., approximately 2% per year for cross-border investments). Moreover, "trust in the market" and "trust in managers" play important yet different roles for different types of cross-border delegated portfolio management. Our results suggest that trust acts as a fundamental building block for delegated portfolio management.

Happy Analysts, Ole-Kristian Hope, Congcong Li, An-Ping Lin, Maryjane Rabier

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper is the first to investigate the role of work-life balance in financial analysts' performance and career advancement. Using a large sample of Glassdoor reviews by financial analysts, we find a significant non-linear relation between perceived work-life balance and analyst performance and analyst career advancement. Specifically, when perceived work-life balance is relatively low, an increase in work-life balance is associated with better analyst performance and career advancement; however, when perceived work-life balance is already high, a further increase in work-life balance is associated with worse analyst performance and career advancement.

Pay For Performance: When Does It Fail?, Nirmalya Kumar, Madan Pillutla

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The consensus in social psychology is that monetary incentives for performance have a detrimental impact on individual performance. Yes, under certain specific and limited conditions, rewards can reduce performance. Yet pay for performance schemes are ubiquitous. How can we resolve this divergence between theoretical recommendations and observed practices? Nirmalya Kumar and Madan Pillutla recommend solving the problem by designing smarter incentives that avoid these detrimental effects.

The Dark Side Of Sustainability Orientation For Sme Performance, Teemu Kautonen, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Johannes Gartner, Henri Hakata, Katariina Salmela-Aro, Kirsi Snellmand

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article examines how a firm’s willingness to make trade-offs that favour sustainability over commercial goals attenuates the relationship between firm-level sustainability orientation and subsequent performance. The hypothesis development draws on stakeholder theory and the literature on mission and revenue drifts, while the empirical analysis is based on two waves of original survey data on Finnish manufacturing SMEs. We find that sustainability orientation is positively associated with performance only when the willingness to make sustainability trade-offs is low, whereas the relationship becomes negative when the willingness to make such trade-offs is high. Our findings thus suggest that the popular adage …

Happy Analysts, Ole-Kristian Hope, Congcong Li, An-Ping Lin, Maryjane Rabier

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper is the first to investigate the role of work-life balance in financial analysts’ performance and career advancement. Using a large sample of Glassdoor reviews by financial analysts, we find a significant non-linear relation between work-life balance satisfaction and analyst performance and analyst career advancement. Specifically, when work-life balance satisfaction is relatively low, an increase in work-life balance is associated with better analyst performance and career advancement; however, when perceived work-life balance is already high, a further increase in work-life balance is associated with worse analyst performance and career advancement.

Homophily And Individual Performance, Gokhan Ertug, Martin Gargiulo, Charles Galunic, Tengjian Zou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study the relationship between choice homophily in instrumental relationships and individual performance in knowledge-intensive organizations. Although homophily should make it easier for people to get access to some colleagues, it may also lead to neglecting relationships with other colleagues, reducing the diversity of information people access through their network. Using data on instrumental ties between bonus-eligible employees in the Equity Sales and Trading division of a global investment bank, we show that the relationship between an employee’s choice of similar colleagues and her performance is contingent on the position this employee occupies in the formal and informal hierarchy of …

Allocation Of Decision Rights Between The Parent Company And Its Subsidiaries, Yuanyuan Liu, Ting Luo, Heng Yue

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This article examines the determinants of allocation of decision rights between the parent company and its subsidiaries, and the economic consequence of suboptimal power structure. Based on China’s unique double disclosure for the parent company and the whole group, we construct a decentralization index to measure how decision rights are allocated within the group companies. We find a more decentralized (centralized) power structure for the groups with more uncertain (certain) external environment and with poorer (better) internal information quality. We also show that the groups with suboptimal power structure have weaker future performance.

Cross-Border M&A: Challenges And Opportunities In Global Business Environment [Guest Editors' Introduction], Rosa Caizza, Katsuhiko Shimizu, Toru Yoshikawa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business

Under a rapidly changing and globalizing environment, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have become one of the most important strategic initiatives. In this context, cross-border M&As provide various opportunities and benefits such as expeditious entry into new markets by gaining local knowledge, supplier networks, government relationships, and customers embedded in the target firm.

Gender Effects In Hedge Funds Performance, Karen Yoke Wah Gan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper shows that after controlling for total risks (as funds do not typically hold a completely large diversified portfolio) across different funds, female-managed funds appear to perform better in certain circumstances. For example, female-managed hedge funds perform better during post-crisis times, for investments using the Relative Value Style and also when investments are in the Asia excluding Japan region. However, there are still many conditions in which male-managed funds seem to perform better. Namely, male-managed funds performed significantly positive in the Relative Value, Security Selection, and Multiprocess Styles, notably during the pre-crisis period and also when investments are in …

Board Diversity, Firm Risk, And Corporate Policies, Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, Scott Yonker

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the effects of diversity in the board of directors on corporate policies and risk. Using a multi-dimensional measure, we find that greater board diversity leads to lower volatility and better performance. The lower risk levels are largely due to diverse boards adopting more persistent and less risky financial policies. However, consistent with diversity fostering more efficient (real) risk-taking, firms with greater board diversity also invest persistently more in R&D and have more efficient innovation processes. Instrumental variable tests that exploit exogenous variation in firm access to the supply of diverse nonlocal directors indicate that these relations are causal.

Marketing Mix And Brand Sales In Global Markets: Examining The Contingent Role Of Country-Market Characteristics, S. Cem Bahadir, Sundar G. Bharadwaj, Rajendra K. Srivastava

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Marketing products globally is challenging due to the diverse nature of markets. We use market heterogeneity, unbranded competition, resource and infrastructure availability, and sociopolitical governance as country-market characteristics that distinguish between developed and emerging countries. We investigate their moderating role on the relationship between elements of the marketing mix and brand sales. We provide evidence, from a hierarchical linear model and a panel data set of brands from 14 emerging and developed markets that account for 62% of the global GDP, that country-market characteristics moderate the relationship between the complete set of marketing mix elements and brand sales performance asymmetrically. …

Innovation And Leadership: When Does Cmo Leadership Improve Performance From Innovation?, Adam J. Bock, Andreas B. Eisengenrich, Dmitry Sharapov, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Ensuring that organizational innovation generates value increasingly requires effective marketing management. Prior studies, however, report conflicting effects of chief marketing officer (CMO) leadership on how well the firm exploits innovation. These inconsistencies may be associated with firm-level innovation effort, customer focus, and industry type. We analyze archival data from 587 interviews with global CEOs to explain the effect of CMO leadership on outcomes of organizational innovation. CMO leadership of the firm's primary innovation mode is positively associated with product-market innovation effort but not marginal revenue from innovation. CMO leadership also moderates the relationship between customer focus and innovation revenue. Predictive …

Mindfulness At Work: Antecedents And Consequences Of Employee Awareness And Absent-Mindedness, Jochen Reb, Jayanth Narayanan, Zhi Wei Ho

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The present study examines antecedents and consequences of two aspects of mindfulness in a work setting: employee awareness and employee absent-mindedness. Using two samples, the study found these two aspects of mindfulness to be beneficially associated with employee well-being, as measured by emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and psychological need satisfaction, and with job performance, as measured by task performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, and deviance. These results suggest a potentially important role of mindfulness at the workplace. The study also found that organizational constraints and organizational support predicted employee mindfulness, pointing to the important role that the organizational environment may play …

Efficacy Of R&D Work In Offshore Captive Centers: An Empirical Study Of Task Characteristics, Coordination Mechanisms, And Performance, Deepa Mani, Kannan Srikanth, Anandhi Bharadwaj

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Seizing the latest technological advances in distributed work, an increasing number of firms have set up offshore captive centers (CCs) in emerging economies to carry out sophisticated R&D work. We analyse survey data from 132 R&D CCs established by foreign multinational companies in India to understand how firms execute distributed innovative work. Specifically, we examine the performance outcomes of projects using different technology-enabled coordination strategies to manage their interdependencies across multiple locations. We find that modularization of work across locations is largely ineffective when the underlying tasks are less routinized, less analyzable, and less familiar to the CC. Coordination based …

How Firms Respond To Financial Restatement: Ceo Successors And External Reactions, David Gomulya, Warren Boeker

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Although past studies have paid considerable attention to firms' reputations, few have investigated the actions that firms take following a reputation-damaging event. We identify firms involved in financial earnings restatements and examine whether naming a successor CEO with specific qualities serves to signal the seriousness of a firm's efforts to restore its reputation. Using theories of market signaling, we argue that attributes of successor CEOs significantly influence the reactions of key external constituencies. In particular, firms with more severe restatement tend to name successors who have prior CEO or turnaround experience and a more elite education. The naming of such …

Family Incivility And Job Performance: A Moderated Mediated Model Of Psychological Distress And Core Self-Evaluation, Sandy Lim, Kenneth Tai

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study extends the stress literature by exploring the relationship between family incivility and job performance. We examine whether psychological distress mediates the link between family incivility and job performance. We also investigate how core self-evaluation might moderate this mediated relationship. Data from a 2-wave study indicate that psychological distress mediates the relationship between family incivility and job performance. In addition, core self-evaluation moderates the relationship between family incivility and psychological distress but not the relationship between psychological distress and job performance. The results hold while controlling for general job stress, family-to-work conflict, and work-to-family conflict. The findings suggest that …

Leading Mindfully: Two Studies Of The Influence Of Supervisor Trait Mindfulness On Employee Well-Being And Performance, Jochen Reb, Jayanth Narayanan, Sankalp Chaturvedi

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This research examines the influence of leaders’ mindfulness on employee well-being and performance. We hypothesized that supervisors’ trait mindfulness is positively associated with different facets of employee well-being, such as job satisfaction and need satisfaction, and different dimensions of employee performance, such as in-role performance and organizational citizenship behaviors. We also explored whether one measure of employee well-being, psychological need satisfaction, plays a mediating role in the relation between supervisor mindfulness and employee performance. We tested these predictions in two studies using data from both supervisors and their subordinates. Results were consistent with our hypotheses. Overall, this research contributes to …

Systematic Reflection: Implications For Learning From Failures And Successes, Shmuel Ellis, Bernd Carette, Frederik Anseel, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Drawing on a growing stream of empirical findings that runs across different psychological domains, we demonstrated that systematic reflection stands out as a prominent tool for learning from experience. For decades, failed experiences have been considered the most powerful learning sources. Despite the theoretical and practical relevance, few researchers have investigated whether people can also learn from their successes. We showed that through systematic reflection, people can learn from both their successes and their failures. Studies have further shown that the effectiveness of systematic reflection depends on situational (e.g., reflection focus) and person-based (e.g., conscientiousness) factors. Given today's unrelenting pace …

Hedge Fund Managers Who Eschew Asset Gathering, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Fund managers may eschew financial rewards for the non-pecuniary benefits from investment management. They may be highly focused on leaving a legacy of stellar returns when they retire and prefer to preserve their ability to generate those returns by staying small. Others may prefer to run small firms so as to devote more of their time and energy into investment activities as opposed to managing people. We empirically zero in on such managers by focusing on funds that have delivered superior returns but do not take advantage of their stellar performance track records to grow capital aggressively. We find that …

The Performance Of Listed Hedge Fund Firms, Lin Sun, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

We examine the impact of fund management company listing on hedge fund performance. We find that hedge funds managed by listed firms underperform those managed by unlisted firms by 1.89 per annum after adjusting for risk. Using an event study framework, we show that hedge fund performance deteriorates from 10.32 percent per year in the 36-month pre-listing window to 2.16 percent per year in the 36-month post-listing window. Over the same period, firm assets under management effectively double from US$1.54bn to US$3.04bn. There is no evidence to suggest that funds managed by listed firms are better able to manage operational …

Fate Work: A Conversation, Valentina Desideri, Stefano Harney

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The article focuses on a conversation between dancer Valentina Desideri and professor Stefano Harney during the Spring Seminars of the Performance Art Forum (PAF) in Saint Erme, France. Harney suggests that fate work may be considered as a potential practice on the way work determines one's life. Desideri says that one can shape and construct his future through work under capitalism.

Flagship Funds At Hedge Fund Families, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Motivated by the stellar performance of flagship funds such as the Renaissance Medallion fund, we ask whether hedge fund firms (e.g. Renaissance Technologies) have incentives to protect the performance of their flagship funds (e.g. Medallion). We find that the flagship fund tends to outperform other funds within the fund family. The fees and redemption terms of non-flagship funds at launch is correlated with the past performance of the flagship fund. Finally, flagship fund performance has a positive impact on net flows into the other funds within the same family.

Relation-Specific Creative Performance In Voluntary Collaborations: A Micro-Foundation For Competitive Advantage?, Terence Ping Ching Fan, Duncan Robertson

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A fundamental question in the strategy literature is how sustainable competitive advantage can be generated within one firm and yet difficult to copy by another. We offer one solution to this conundrum by way of relation-specific performance that is developed in creative projects – where the individuals involved have significant latitude on the intended objectives as well as their collaborators on these projects. Because higher-level cognition is involved in navigating such projects from conception to implementation, there is heightened relation-specificity in their performance – as measured by how widely they are adopted by third-party users. This relationspecificity means that any …

Quantitative Hedge Fund Selection (Part 2), Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Do fund incentives, volatility exposure, and liquidity risk affect fund performance? We show that hedge funds with high performance fees and high water mark provisions tend to outperform those with low performance fees and no high water marks. Moreover, funds that short volatility and embrace liquidity risk deliver significantly higher returns relative to funds that long volatility and eschew liquidity risk. Investors with access to secure capital and managed account platforms may be positioned to take advantage of these performance differences.