Business Commons^™

Covid-19, Coronavirus, Wuhan Virus, Or China Virus? Understanding How To “Do No Harm" When Naming An Infectious Disease, Theodore C. Masters-Waage, Nilotpal Jha, Jochen Reb

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

When labeling an infectious disease, officially sanctioned scientific names, e.g., “H1N1 virus,” are recommended over place-specific names, e.g., “Spanish flu.” This is due to concerns from policymakers and the WHO that the latter might lead to unintended stigmatization. However, with little empirical support for such negative consequences, authorities might be focusing on limited resources on an overstated issue. This paper empirically investigates the impact of naming against the current backdrop of the 2019-2020 pandemic.

Contracting And Reporting Conservatism Around A Change In Fiduciary Duties, Daniel Bens, Sterling Huang, Liang Tan, Wan Wongsumwai

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We exploit an influential 1991 Delaware court ruling to examine the impact of changes in managerial fiduciary duties on firms’ accounting and contracting choices. The ruling expanded directors’ fiduciary duties in favor of creditors and away from shareholders for a specific group of firms. Using a hand-collected sample of debt contracts around the ruling date, we find that, following the ruling, debt contracts of affected firms rely less on the use of income escalators (provisions in loan contracts which require changes in net worth to reflect losses in full, but only partially for gains and profits) and other conservative adjustments …

Social Media Influencers And Instagram Storytelling: Case Study Of Singapore Instagram Influencers, Mark Chong, Gottipati Swapna

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

While the use of social media influencers (SMIs) by brands is becoming more widespread, the academic literature about SMI communication is still scarce. This is one of the first studies on SMI brand storytelling, using data mining and natural language processing to understand how SMIs tell brand stories on Instagram, what kinds of stories they tell, and the impact they have on follower engagement. The findings show that the "rise-fall" emotional arc was the most common story arc used by SMIs. In addition, SMIs frequently used the first-person perspective and featured themselves as the protagonists in their stories. Last, SMIs …

Motivation Purity Bias: Expression Of Extrinsic Motivation Undermines Perceived Intrinsic Motivation And Engenders Bias In Selection Decisions, Rellie Derfler-Rozin, Marko Pitesa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Organizational selection decisions often involve an exchange of information between candidates and decision makers as to why candidates are motivated to work in the given position. Drawing on popular management myths as our overarching framework, we theorize that candidates’ expressions of extrinsic motivation lead decision makers to infer that the candidate is less intrinsically motivated, leading to bias against such candidates. We term this effect motivation purity bias, and argue that it emerges despite ample evidence, which we review, showing that penalizing expressed extrinsic motivation is not only unfair to candidates but also counterproductive from the standpoint of maximizing future …

What Has Changed? The Impact Of Covid Pandemic On The Technology And Innovation Management Research Agenda, Gerard George, Karim R. Lakhani, Phanish Puranam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Whereas the pandemic has tested the agility and resilience of organizations, it forces a deeper look at the assumptions underlying theoretical frameworks that guide managerial decisions and organizational practices. In this commentary, we explore the impact of the Covid‐19 pandemic on technology and innovation management research. We identify key assumptions, and then discuss how new areas of investigation emerge based on the changed reality.

Human Capital Leadership Insights: Solving Human Capital Challenges From The Business Perspective, Singapore Management University

Student Publications

In 2016, the Lee Kong Chian School of Business launched the Master of Human Capital Leadership (“MHCL”) program with the strategic objective of growing leaders to champion evidence-based human capital practices. The 2019 MHCL cohort took this a step further with their quest to share insights gained from studies and projects with industry stakeholders. This goal resonates with our mission -- to create and disseminate knowledge.

How To Prepare Young Finance & Accounting Professionals For Digital Revolution, Clarence Goh, Gary Pan, Chi Kwan Yuen

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Automation will alter the work of accountants in the coming years. However, accountants will always have a central role to play in business. In order to continue to thrive, the profession will need to position itself to capitalise on the opportunities that automation will bring. This involves identifying areas of work which computers cannot automate, and to focus on deepening contributions in these areas. This calls for a radical transformation of accounting education in order to equip accounting graduates with relevant work skills that will allow students to navigate a future workplace where computers and technology are the norm.

International Tax Competition And Foreign Direct Investment In The Asia-Pacific Region: A Panel Data Analysis, Chengwei Xu, Alfred M. Wu

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how a country's competitive tax policy influences its inward foreign direct investments (FDI) in the Asia–Pacific region, even when given particular constraints (e.g., population, public governance, skilled labor, and so on) exist. Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses the system GMM estimation approach to test the hypothesis. Data on FDI, corporate income tax, and various confounding factors were drawn from Ernst and Young's worldwide corporate tax guide, the World Bank, and other sources to create a panel of 28 economies over the period 2000–2016. Findings: The present research confirms the negative association between …

Predicting Counterproductive Work Behavior: Do Implicit Motives Have Incremental Validity Beyond Explicit Traits?, J. Malte Runge, Jonas W. B. Lang, Ingo Zettler, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study extends research on the link between personality and Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB) by investigating whether the implicit Affiliation, Achievement, and Power motives contribute to the prediction of CWB beyond basic personality traits. Employees high in Affiliation, Achievement, and Power motives may disengage from CWB because it is not rewarding and thwarts goal attainment. In Study 1 (N = 263), we found that Affiliation predicted self-rated CWB beyond traits. In Study 2 (N = 121), we found that Affiliation and Power predicted supervisor-rated CWB. Our findings thus suggest to also consider implicit motives as personality determinants of CWB.

Implementing Lasting Change: Hr In The Social Service Sector, Fermin Diez, Run Qian Ng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The Human Resources (HR) practices in any organisation can make a big difference in its ability to implement the strategic plan (Thomas, Smith & Diez, 2013). This assertion points towards an additional question: Can a whole sector of the economy increase its overall capability and capacity by improving the overall HR abilities of the organisations in the sector? The Social Service Sector in Singapore has been undergoing just such a sector-wide transformation over the past 6 years, and provides a great opportunity to analyse empirically whether a systemic approach to improve the overall HR practices of the Social Service Agencies …

Trading Regularity And Fund Performance: Evidence In Uncertain Markets, Lin Tong, Zhe Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

High trading regularity funds outperform low trading regularity funds more during periods of low market returns and greater market and economic uncertainty. Their trading also has strong return predictability on stock returns during periods of greater uncertainty. They trade more around news events, and their news related trading predicts stock return stronger during periods of greater uncertainty. They also profit from liquidity provision in highly uncertain market environment. Overall our evidence suggests that high trading regularity funds trade more frequently during periods of high uncertainty when information production and processing skill is more valuable and when the demand for liquidity …

Blockchain-Based Public Auditing And Secure Deduplication With Fair Arbitration, Haoran Yuan, Xiaofeng Chen, Jianfeng Wang, Jiaming Yuan, Hongyang Yan, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data auditing enables data owners to verify the integrity of their sensitive data stored at an untrusted cloud without retrieving them. This feature has been widely adopted by commercial cloud storage. However, the existing approaches still have some drawbacks. On the one hand, the existing schemes have a defect of fair arbitration, i.e., existing auditing schemes lack an effective method to punish the malicious cloud service provider (CSP) and compensate users whose data integrity is destroyed. On the other hand, a CSP may store redundant and repetitive data. These redundant data inevitably increase management overhead and computational cost during the …

Cooperative Approaches To Managing Social Responsibility In A Market With Externalities, Xin Fang, Soo-Haeng Cho

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Problem definition: This paper studies two cooperative approaches of firms in managing social responsibility violations of their supplier: auditing a common supplier jointly (joint auditing) and sharing independent audit results with other firms (audit sharing). We study this problem in a market with externalities and a large number of firms. Academic/practical relevance: With numerous firms procuring their materials and parts worldwide, there are many cases in which overseas suppliers violate safety, labor, or environmental standards. Those violations have externalities in the sense that one firm’s violation affects other firms in the same market. …

Is The Synthetic Stock Price Really Lower Than Actual Price?, Jianfeng Hu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Conventional wisdom suggests synthetic stock prices are lower than actual prices due to short‐sale constraints and voting premiums. This study finds that such underpricing of the synthetic midquote disappears if arbitrageurs face security borrowing costs. The synthetic spread predominantly contains the actual spread. Synthetic stock overpricing is as common as underpricing but the former is more persistent and more profitable. The difference between synthetic and actual quotes is significantly affected by options market makers' hedging costs and investors' demand for leverage.

A Two-Stage Parallel Network Dea Model For Analyzing The Operational Capability Of Container Terminals, Jaehun Park, Byung Kwon Lee, Joyce M. W. Low

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study proposes a systematical approach to evaluate the operational capability of container terminals and discusses the effect of resource usages on operational performances. Two inter-dependent processes (i.e. the loading-discharging (L&D) and the delivery-receiving (D&R) operational processes) with shared/non-shared resources and common/separate productions are examined and characterized as a two-stage parallel network. An evaluation model is developed upon the principles of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the operational capability of the terminals. Using the real-world dataset of 9 container terminals at Port of Busan, comparative performance results are obtained for 5 years spanning across 2014–2018. The proposed model demonstrates …

Reflections Of A Chief Strategy Officer In A Diversified Conglomerate, Nirmalya Kumar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

After a lifetime as an academic, I was hired as Chief Strategy Officer (“CSO”) at Tata, a colossal $100 billion group with more than a hundred companies and 650,000 employees worldwide. At first sight, the job of being strategy head for the Tata Group may seem rather different from my academic role, with implementation responsibility and ability being the key difference. But, it did not require much of an adjustment for two reasons. First, I was not the typical academic. For twenty years, as an external consultant, I had been working with top executives and helping them think through their …

Reputation Matters: Building Internal Trust And Resilience With Effective Communication, Su Lin Yeo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Reputation is a crucial driver of business performance. In today’s crisis-ridden business environment, this corporate quality has never been more prized in organizations. Research has time and again demonstratedthat a favorable reputation offers long-term value for organizations. Reputation impacts everything from financial to relationships represented by public’s confidence in brand equity, human capital, earnings and future growth. Reputation-led companies have been shown to set the standard by leading the pack for other businesses to follow, and in times of a crisis, the reputation capital that they have amassed enable them to better recover from economic storms. However, unlike other business …

Assessment And Student Motivations Through The Lens Of Agency Theory, Prasart Jongjaroenkamol

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Assessment is used to evaluate student learning and to motivate students to learn. Instructors generally have the option of using individual assessment, team assessment, or a combination of both. Using a principal-agent model, this study analytically examines how individual assessment and team assessment affect students' incentives to learn when their abilities vary. Relative to individual assessment, team assessment imposes more uncertainties on students, but it also encourages strong students to cooperate with weak students to help them learn. Depending on the strengths of these two forces, it can be optimal for the instructor to use individual assessment only or a …

Feedback On The International Accounting Standards Board Discussion Paper On Business Combinations—Disclosures, Goodwill And Impairment, Pearl Hock-Neo Tan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No abstract provided.

Salary Negotiation: Myths Busted, Abhijeet K. Vadera, Karyn Thye

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A negotiation expert and a compensation geek came together to answer some of the toughest salary negotiation questions from the Master of Human Capital Leadership (MHCL) 2020 graduate cohort. We hope that our combined experiences in this field would help shed some light on the complex world of salary negotiations.

What's On Job Seekers' Social Media Sites? A Content Analysis And Effects Of Structure On Recruiter Judgments And Predictive Validity, Liwen Zhang, Chad H. Van Iddekinge, John D. Arnold, Philip L. Roth, Filip Lievens, Stephen E. Lanivich, Samantha L. Jordan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Many organizational representatives review social media (SM) information (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) when recruiting and assessing job applicants. Despite this, very little empirical data exist concerning the SM information available to organizations or whether assessments of such information are a valid predictor of work outcomes. This multi-study investigation examines several critical issues in this emerging area. In Study 1, we conducted a content analysis of job seekers’ Facebook sites (n = 266) and found that these sites often provide demographic variables that U.S. employment laws typically prohibit organizations from using when making personnel decisions (e.g., age, ethnicity, religion), as well as …

A Social Network Analysis Of Jobs And Skills, Derrick Ming Yang Lee, Dion Wei Xuan Ang, Grace Mei Ching Pua, Lee Ning Ng, Sharon Purbowo, Eugene Wen Jia Choy, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this study, we analyzed job roles and skills across industries in Singapore. Using social network analysis, we identified job roles with similar required skills, and we also identified relationships between job skills. Our analysis visualizes such relationships in an intuitive way. Insights derived from our analyses are expected to assist job seekers, employers as well as recruitment agencies wanting to understand trending and required job roles and skills in today’s fast changing world.

The Spatial And Temporal Impact Of Agricultural Crop Residual Burning On Local Land Surface Temperature In Three Provinces Across China From 2015 To 2017, Wenting Zhang, Mengmeng Yu, Qingqing He, Tianwei Wang, Lu Lin, Kai Cao, Wei Huang, Peihong Fu, Jiaxin Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

China has suffered from severe crop residue burning (CRB) for a long time. As a type of biomass burning, CRB leads to a huge alteration in climate due to the emission of greenhouse gases and particulates in the atmosphere and damages to surface characteristics on land. At present, a growing body of research focuses on the impact of biomass burning (BB) (e.g., forest fire, grass fire, and CRB) on climate change from the aspect of atmospheric process. Meanwhile, a small number of research studies have started to pay attention on the damage caused by BB (e.g. forest fire) on land …

The Role Of Employee Proactive Behaviors In Influencing Supervisors’ Trust In Employees, Ngai Meng Ho

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In organizations, proactive employees make things happen. They anticipate, initiate, and drive meaningful changes for a better future. Such proactive behaviors can be manifested in different forms. Initiating work improvements and voicing for changes are examples of the different proactive behaviors commonly demonstrated by employees.

Empirical studies have associated proactive behaviors at work with a range of positive workplace outcomes. However, only limited research has examined how proactive behaviors might be related to one particularly important outcome, trust, i.e., whether an employee’s proactive behaviors will influence the supervisor’s trust toward the employee. Accordingly, in this present research, I conducted two …

Kin Ties And The Performance Of New Firms: A Structural Approach, Gokhan Ertug, Reddi Kotha, Peter Hedstrom

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Kin ties are all but ubiquitous in new firms. However, their effects on performance are not straightforward, because they may provide new firms with advantages (enhanced coordination and cooperation) as well as disadvantages (reduced diversity, nepotism concerns, and the possible spillover of personal conflict). As kin ties may have both positive and negative implications for performance, a contingency approach to the performance of new firms is valuable. We develop such an approach by relating different structural configurations of kin ties – whether they are between founders, between founders and employees, and between employees – to the performance of new firms. …

Enhancing Students’ Global Competence Through International Business Study Missions, Mark Chong, Benjamin Gan, Thomas Menkhoff

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article shares how an Asian University enhanced students’ global competence through international business study missions (BSMs). More specifically, it focuses on (i) how the design of these BSMs enabled “deep” learning beyond industry tourism and (ii) how 21st century competencies such as ‘global competence’ can be acquired through participation in short-term, faculty-led study missions.Using the case study approach, it critically analyses the learning goals and objectives, design decisions, implementation details and learning outcomes underlying three business study missions led by three instructors from the same university to the USA (New York), Germany (Berlin and Stuttgart), and South Korea (Seoul).The …

Public Relations Education In Singapore: Educating The Next Generation Of Practitioners On Ethics, Eugene Yong Sheng Woon, Augustine Pang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study examines if PR education adequately prepares students for the workplace, particularly in the practice of ethics in the context of Singapore, which has been described as one of “Asia’s economic tigers” (BBC, 2018). This study, thus, aims to first, elucidate the state of PR education specifically in relation to how PR ethics is taught in Singapore. Second, it examines how ethics education prepares students for the workplace in Singapore. Data comes from examining the syllabi of 14 universities in Singapore, both local and international, and interviews with 20 academics and practitioners. Findings suggest there are varying degrees in …

Value Creating Drivers For Effective Human Capital Management, Ser Keng Ang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

It is common for modern-day corporate leaders and academic writers to make claim that human resources is one of the most important assets in their organization (Guest, 2001). If that were the case, effective management of human capital would be a critical factor in the success of any organization. As an important organizational resource, human capital is expected to generate significant economic benefits from its deployment, development and retention (Flamholtz, 1999). There is widespread evidence that the effective use of human capital can also create durable competitive advantage for an organization (Barney, 1991; Becker & Gerhart, 1996; Lado & Wilson, …

The Influence Of Incumbent- And Successor-Related Factors On Succession Process In Family Firms: Exploring The Role Of Values In Family Business Succession, Shengqin Zhu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Succession has been a major concern for family business. Although past research studies how to make successful family business succession from factors related to both incumbents and successors, most studies assume incumbents as the key driver of the succession process. Based on the literature about factors contributing to family business succession, the current research adopts a more comprehensive approach by combining qualitative and quantitative research methods to examine what factors lead to succession success and how to manage the succession process. Viewing succession as the process of mutual role adjustments of incumbents and successors, the qualitative research examines the interactions …

Data Driven Value-At-Risk Forecasting Using A Svr-Garch-Kde Hybrid, Marius Lux, Wolfgang Karl Hardle, Stefan Lessmann

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Appropriate risk management is crucial to ensure the competitiveness of financial institutions and the stability of the economy. One widely used financial risk measure is value-at-risk (VaR). VaR estimates based on linear and parametric models can lead to biased results or even underestimation of risk due to time varying volatility, skewness and leptokurtosis of financial return series. The paper proposes a nonlinear and nonparametric framework to forecast VaR that is motivated by overcoming the disadvantages of parametric models with a purely data driven approach. Mean and volatility are modeled via support vector regression (SVR) where the volatility model is motivated …