Business Commons^™

Scarcity In The Twenty-First Century: How The Resource Nexus Affects Management, Simon J. D. Schillebeeckx, Mark Workman, Charles Dean

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Since theadvent of the 21st century and especially since the food andfinancial crisis in 2008, concerns about natural resource availability haveresurfaced. While scarcity concerns date back hundreds of years and arefoundational to economics, how scarcity is interpreted or framed has evolved significantlyin the last two centuries. In this chapter, we recount the evolving scarcity discourseand specifically address the most recent iteration that centres on the idea ofa resource nexus. While significant attention to the nexus has been paid bypolicy-makers and scholars interested in especially water, management scholarshave so far remained absent from these debates. Given recent calls to address grand …

The Management Of Natural Resources: An Overview And Research Agenda, Gerard George, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Teng Lit Liak

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Natural resources underpin the foundation of human activity. Individuals and organizations consume vast amounts of natural resources as a matter of routine without much cognizance of their continued availability in the future or the true cost of a depleting natural resource. Over the past decades of industrial activity, organizations, communities, and nations have acted to protect their interests by investing in and securing their supplies of natural resources that support economic growth. An industrial complex, now variously termed as extractive industries, supplies crucial non-renewable natural resources such as oil and coal for energy or iron and aluminum for construction. Our …

Sleep And Work: The Interactive Mechanism [睡眠与工作：相互作用机制], Xiaotian Sheng, Zihan Liu, Xichao Zhang, Heng Guo, Shu Da, Shiyi Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Sleep-related problems are becoming increasingly severer for workers, which draws great attention from researchers. Based on important empirical researches in recent years, we finish a systematic summary of the conceptualization, measurement, antecedents and consequences of sleep in the workplace. In general, researches measure individual’s sleep from two dimensions including sleep duration and sleep quality. Objective records and subjective reports are both used to collect data. Antecedents of sleep problems can be classified as environmental factors, cognitive factor and behavioral factors. Unsatisfactory sleep also has a negative influence on the psychological state and behaviors of workers, which may lead to workplace …

Projecting Lower Competence To Maintain Moral Warmth In The Avoidance Of Prosocial Requests, Peggy J. Liu, Stephanie C. Lin

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

When faced with prosocial requests, consumers face a difficult decision between taking on the request’s burden or appearing unwarm (unkind, uncaring). We propose that the desire to refuse such requests while protecting a morally warm image leads consumers to under-represent their competence. Although consumers care strongly about being viewed as competent, five studies showed that they downplayed their competence to sidestep a prosocial request. This effect occurred across both self-reported and behavioral displays of competence. Further, the downplaying competence effect only occurred when facing an undesirable prosocial request, not a similarly undesirable proself request. The final studies showed that people …

Intercultural Relationships And Creativity:Current Research And Future Directions, Fon Wiruchnipawan, Roy Y. J. Chua

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the global economy, individuals have to engage in cross-cultural interactions when tasked to develop creative new products or services. Research on the effects of cultural diversity on creativity, however, has been equivocal. One stream of research champions that cultural diversity in relationships broadens ideas and resources for creative thinking, whereas skeptics counter that intercultural tensions and conflicts hurt rather than help. This chapter discusses both sides of the argument. We examine the effects of intercultural relationships on creativity from three perspectives: (a) how a culturally diverse social environment (including social networks) influences individuals’ creativity; (b) how individuals can successfully …

Employer Branding: A Brand Equity-Based Literature Review And Research Agenda, Christian P. Theurer, Andranik Tumasjan, Isabell M. Welpe, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Over the past two decades, scholarly interest in employer branding has strongly increased. Simultaneously, however, employer branding research has developed into a fragmented field with heterogeneous interpretations of the employer branding concept and its scope, which has impeded further theoretical and empirical advancement. To strengthen the foundation for future work, this paper takes a brand equity perspective to review the extant literature and create an integrative model of employer branding. Using an analytical approach, the authors identify 187 articles, which they integrate along different employer brand dimensions and branding strategies: (i) conceptual; (ii) employer knowledge dimensions; (iii) employer branding activities …

The Impact Of Knowledge Worker Mobility Through An Acquisition On Breakthrough Knowledge, Haemin Park, Michael D. Howard, David Gomulya

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Acquisitions enable firms to access new knowledge from target firms, along with the scientists who created the knowledge, to enhance their own knowledge creation outcomes. We explore how the retention of target firm scientists and acquired knowledge characteristics affect new knowledge creation outcomes for the acquiring firms. Using a sample of 111,227 patents following 301 high-tech acquisitions in 1990–2000, we find that acquiring firms that avoid the exodus of target firm scientists increase their likelihood of creating highly impactful knowledge. Moreover, the characteristics of acquired knowledge and organizational context of the acquiring firms moderate this relationship. The positive effect of …

Determinants, Consequences, And Functions Of Interpersonal Trust: What Is The Empirical Evidence?, Serena C. Lyu, Donald L. Ferrin

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The objectives of this review are to systematically review and succinctly summarize the empirical evidence concerning determinants, outcomes, and functions of interpersonal trust within organizational settings. Our review aims to provide a distinct contribution in that it (1) focuses only on what has been found empirically (rather than summarizing theoretical perspectives); (2) is focused only on interpersonal trust within organizational settings; and (3) has a clearly defined empirical base (clearly delineated body of past research to be reviewed). We begin by describing our review methodology, starting with the definition of interpersonal trust that guided our review.

Singapore Approach To Develop And Regulate Fintech, Sai Fan Pei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper starts with a brief introduction of the recent organizational support established by The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to promote the fast developing FinTech (financial technology) sector. Basing on its existing “balanced” approach in promoting financial development and ensuring a safe and sound financial sector, and in sync with its objective to harness technology to improve the efficiency of the financial markets, the paper elaborates on the insights of MAS' policy intent in regulating the FinTech sector. The paper then focuses on MAS' proposed “Regulatory Sandbox” – an innovative regulatory framework which helps to strike a good balance …

Crisis Communication And Ethics: The Role Of Public Relations, Yan Jin, Augustine Pang, Joshua Smith

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the veracity of the contingency model of ethical crisis communication by examining the factors of influence in a time of crisis including what constitutes ethics in a time of crisis; the role of public relations (PR) practitioners as the “moral conscience” of an organization and perceptions of the PR’ role within top management. Design/methodology/approach: In-depth interviews were conducted among ten senior PR managers with crisis communication experience in North America. Findings: This research identifies and investigates six ethical variables – the nature of the crisis, the role of top management, the …

A Broad Stroke Or Different Strokes For Different Folks? Examining The Subtleties In Crisis Management Approaches Between State-Owned Enterprises And Privately-Owned Enterprises In China, Augustine Pang, Yang Hu, Eugene Woon

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Several previous studies have been conducted to examine China’s management of internal crises, but few have investigated the approaches to crisis management used by domestic Chinese organizations. It is critical to study these organizations because their approaches exemplify the intricacies of crisis management at the local level. In China, there are two main types of organizations: state-owned enterprises (SOE) and privately owned enterprises (POE). This study aimed to determine how their business orientations led to different styles of crisis management in terms of media relations, government relations, and crisis responses. The findings showed that SOEs sought shelter from the government, …

Building Relationships Through Dialogic Communication: Organizations, Stakeholders, And Computer-Mediated Communication, Augustine Pang, Wonsun Shin, Zijian Lew, Joseph B. Walther

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Online media are integral to daily life, and while many organizations use them to reach broad audiences, others still appear to be uncomfortable with online media because they do not understand how to maximize their potential to interact effectively with stakeholders. Numerous organizations use online media for one-way communication to disseminate information, despite the affordances of the media platforms for two-way, dialogic communication. This article draws on two dominant interpersonal theories of computer-mediated communication—social information processing theory and the hyperpersonal model—to propose dialogic strategies that organizations can use to improve their online communication with their stakeholders. We illustrate the application …

Imaginary Alternatives: The Impact Of Mental Simulation On Powerless Negotiators, Michael Schaerer, Martin Schweinsberg, Roderick I. Swaab

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The present research demonstrates that negotiators can act powerfully without having power.Researchers and practitioners advise people to obtain strong alternatives prior to negotiating toenhance their power. However, alternatives are not always readily available, often forcingnegotiators to negotiate without much, or any, power. Building on research suggesting thatsubjective feelings of power and objective outcomes are disconnected and that mental simulationcan increase individuals’ aspirations, we hypothesized that the mental imagery of a strongalternative could provide similar psychological benefits to having an actual alternative. Ourstudies demonstrate that imagining strong alternatives causes individuals to negotiate moreambitiously and provides them with a distributive advantage: negotiators …

The Illusion Of Transparency In Performance Appraisals: When And Why Accuracy Motivation Explains Unintentional Feedback Inflation, Michael Schaerer, Mary Kern, Gail Berger, Roderick I. Swaab

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The present research shows that managers communicate negative feedback ineffectively because they suffer from transparency illusions that cause them to overestimate how accurately employees perceive their feedback. We propose that these illusions emerge because managers are insufficiently motivated to engage in effortful thinking, which reduces the accuracy with which they communicate negative feedback to employees. Six studies (N = 1883) using actual performance appraisals within an organization and role plays with MBA students, undergraduates, and online participants show that transparency illusions are stronger when feedback is negative (Studies 1–2), that they are not driven by employee bias (Study 3), and …

The Macroeconomic Environment And The Psychology Of Work Evaluation, Nina Sirola, Marko Pitesa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This research tested the idea that the perception of the state of the macroeconomic environment impacts the psychology underlying an essential organizational function: The evaluation of employees’ work and the associated promotion and demotion decisions. We predicted that when the macroeconomic environment is perceived to be more (less) prosperous, people’s generalized sense of the extent to which individuals have control over outcomes increases (decreases), leading them to attribute more (less) responsibility for work outcomes to individuals rather than contextual influences. In Study 1, we tested this theory using data from 124,400 respondents surveyed across 57 countries and 19 years and …

The Impact Of The Cost Of Car Ownership On House Price Gradient In Singapore, Naqun Huang, Jing Li, Amanda Ross

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper examines the extent to which a change in the cost of car ownership affects the house price gradient with respect to distance from the central business district (CBD). Theory suggests that if the cost of car ownership increases, then people will shift towards other modes of transportation, thus reducing house prices farther away from the CBD. However, the cost of car ownership is likely to be endogenous and correlated with various unobserved factors that also contribute to a change in the house price gradient. To obtain causal effects, we exploit a unique feature of Singapore’s car registration process. …

Is Corporate Social Responsibility An Agency Problem?, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This chapter examines whether CSR investments occur mostly in firms with severe agency problems, which suggests that CSR is an agency issue. We demonstrate that this is not the case: CSR investments and performance are higher when dividends are high, leverage is high, cash flows and cash holdings are low, and when there is a high managerial pay-for-performance sensitivity. All these variables combined represent managerial discipline in terms of corporate investing. We also document that better legal protection of shareholder rights is positively related to CSR performance. This implies that when shareholders are more powerful relative to the management, the …

Influence Of Online Consumer Reviews On Brand Choice, Patricia Lui

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Social interaction encourages consumers toshare information in the digital age. Many consumers use online reviews of products and services to supporttheir brand choice. The concept ofreference group explains how peers can influence consumer purchasedecisions. Peers can exert influence onconsumers in the forms of informational, utilitarian and value-expressiveinfluences. This proposed study aims atexamining how these three forms of reference group influence would affectconsumers in using online consumer reviews when making a brand choice decision. It also explores the role of brand trust onthe brand choice. This paper serves thepurpose of providing a conceptual framework for developing further research.

Theoretical Principles Relevant To Assessment Center Design And Implementation, George C. Thornton, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Decades ago, assessment centers (Acs) originated by applying the best available evidence and theory to the assessment of managerial performance dimensions. The objectives of this chapter are to take stock of these existing theoretical principles, present additional theoretical principles that have emerged in recent times, and describe the practical implications of these principles for effective Ac design and implementation. Thus, while all Acs include several essential elements, developing and implementing a specific Ac involves a complicated set of choices. This chapter shows how these choices can be guided by theories relevant to the Ac method as a whole and each …

Mindfulness And The Risk-Resilience Tradeoff In Organizations, Ravi S. Kudesia, Jochen Reb

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Through this chapter, we seek to contribute to ongoing discussion about risk, resilience, and how they can be jointly managed (see Linkov, Trump, & Keisler, 2018), particularly in the context of organizations. We start by reviewing the traditional image of organizations. In this traditional image, processes related to risk and resilience are seen as complementary, as these processes pertain to distinct aspects of the organizational environment. We then complicate this theoretical image by introducing five underappreciated ways that risk and resilience processes may not be complementary in practice—because the aspects of the environment to which these processes pertain cannot always …

We’Re Less Likely To Collaborate In Bad Economic Times, Nina Sirola

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the fall of 1930, the U.S. economy was on a path to recovery following a contraction that occurred the year before. However, worries about the state of the economy, and the banking system in particular, prompted an increasing number of bank customers to attempt to withdraw their funds, an event known as a bank run. Because banks normally keep only a small proportion of deposits in cash, bank runs create a self-fulfilling prophecy such that initial concerns about banks’ possible insolvency ultimately cause insolvency. The bank run of 1930 resulted in the worst economic downturn in the modern history, …

The Indigenization Of Crisis Response Strategies In The Context Of China, Augustine Pang, Yang Hu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Crisis communication, which has been dominated by a practical perspective, has become a nexus where theory meets application. Despite mounting interest in theoretical studies, crisis communication lacks cultural contextualization. Asian communication researchers have advocated for the need to indigenize communication, drawing relevance to cultural influences. In this study, the authors explored indigenous corporate crisis response strategies in the context of China through nine cases. Three Chinese indigenous strategies were identified through qualitative content analysis of corporate crisis responses. These strategies are “barnacle,” “third-party endorsement,” and “setting up new topics.” The differences with Western frameworks were also discussed.

Social Media: Mini-Movements To Encourage Civil Discourse Wanted, Siow-Heng Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

No abstract provided.

Are Disagreements Agreeable? Evidence From Information Aggregation, Dashan Huang, Jiangyuan Li, Liyao Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Most studies on disagreement focus on cross-sectional asset returns and well-recognized disagreement measures generally cannot predict the stock market with a horizon less than 12 months. This paper proposes three aggregate disagreement indexes by aggregating information across 20 disagreement measures. We show that disagreement measures collectively have a common component that has significant power in predicting the stock market both in- and out-of-sample. Consistent with the theory developed by Atmaz and Basak (2017), the indexes asymmetrically forecast the market with greater power in high sentiment periods. Moreover, the indexes negatively predict economic activities, and positively predict market volatility, illiquidity, and …

Innovations In Asia: Selected Case Studies, Institute Of Innovation And Entrepreneurship, Singapore Management University

Research Collection Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

This book is a compilation of seven case studies written by faculty and staff of Singapore Management University (SMU) and has been edited in conjunction with the inaugural Asia Pacific Innovation Forum organised by the International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM) and hosted by SMU in December 2014. These cases have been carefully selected to illustrate the various challenges inherent in creating entrepreneurial and business innovations.

The first five cases are related to start-ups by experienced professionals and students. Jayashree is an excellent case that shows how an individual with very little education was able to design and implement …

Multinationals In Emerging Markets: A Test Case Of The Banking Industry In India, Havovi Joshi

Dissertations and Theses Collection

Multinational firms play a significant role in the world economy, accounting for over 30% of the world stock market value. In the past decade or two, these firms have demonstrated a renewed wave of interest in the Emerging Asian markets. This is not surprising, given the attractive demographics, growing middle class and leapfrogging technology of these markets. But the optimism of these western firms heading eastward often gets quickly subdued by the realisation that these emerging Asian markets are far more complex—or at the very least, different—than western ones. They are more volatile, there is frequently a lack of institutional …

Effect Of A Ubiquitous Moral Cue On Ethical Leadership, Moral Disengagement And Goal Difficulty: Real-World Outcomes Of A Novel Behavioural Intervention By Mobile Application Technology, Boon Heon Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Firms invest significant resources in their ethical infrastructure to influence the ethical decision-making of employees. The advent of mobile technology has extended the frontier of interventions that may discourage unethical behaviour, through the use of ubiquitously-present mobile-based moral cues. I conducted a prospective, randomized field experiment, to study how a ubiquitous moral cue may positively enhance ethical decision-making. Sales professionals working in a pharmaceutical firm in China were assigned randomly by teams to either receive, or not, a mobile application from their firm’s compliance department. Over six months, participants completed three cross-sectional surveys, and were randomly monitored by an independent …

The Equity-Financing Channel, The Catering Channel, And Corporate Investment: International Evidence, Yuanto Kusnadi, John K. C. Wei

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We examine how stock market mispricing affects corporate investment in an internationalsetting. We find that investment is more sensitive to stock prices for equity-dependent firms thanfor non-equity-dependent firms in our international sample. Investment is also more sensitive tostock prices for firms located in countries with more developed capital markets (i.e., lower costsof raising capital), higher share turnover (i.e., shorter shareholder horizons), and higher R&Dintensity (i.e., more opaque assets). More importantly, the positive relation between equitydependence and the sensitivity of investment to stock prices is more pronounced for firmslocated in these same countries. These findings are consistent with the equity-financinghypothesis and …

How Do Accounting Practices Spread? An Examination Of Law Firm Networks And Stock Option Backdating, Teck Meng Junior Tan, Patricia M. Dechow

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We hypothesize that one way that accounting practices spread is through law firm connections. We investigate this prediction by examining companies that avoided reporting compensation expense by engaging in stock option backdating. We hypothesize that executives engaged in backdating because they were desensitized to its inappropriateness when they learned through their legal counsel that other companies were engaging in this practice. We identify backdating companies through backdating-related restatements of earnings. Using network analysis, we document that backdating companies are more highly connected with other backdating companies via shared law firms. Logistic regressions indicate that the odds of a company backdating …

Commentary: Wanted - A New Generation Of Accountants, Poh Sun Seow, Gary Pan, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Facing a new wave of automation, young accountants must redefine their role and their value-add to their company, say three Singapore Management University observers.