We discuss and examine empirically a firm-level equivalent of the ancient problem of ‘tying the King’s hands’, namely how to avoid managerial intervention that is undertaken to reap private benefits but is harmful to overall value creation, that is, ‘managerial opportunism’. The link from managerial intervention to firm-level value-creation is moderated by employee motivation. Thus, interventio...

a r t i c l e i n f o Management literature frequently proposes the use of a set of managerial practices in order to facilitate the management of organizational change processes. This paper analyses differences in perception in the use of such practices, between change strategists and change receptors, and the impact these practices have on the outcomes of organizational change programs and on ...

We simultaneously analyze two mechanisms of the managerial labor market (CEO turnover and remuneration schemes) in two different regulatory regimes, namely before and after the sweeping governance reforms adopted in the UK in the 1990s. We employ sample selection models to examine firms in a pre-Cadbury Code period (1988-1993) and a post-Combined Code period (1998-2004). CEOs’ compensation and ...

We propose a novel approach to evaluating the empirical importance of individual managerial characteristics: We analyze different managerial positions (CEO and CFO) jointly and ask whether a managerial bias (overconfidence) matters for decisions under the control of the manager, but not for decisions outside the manager’s core duties. Using a new data set on CEO and CFO overconfidence, we show ...

We examine relations between board size, managerial incentives and enterprise performance in nonprofit organizations. We posit that a nonprofit’s demand for directors increases in the number of programs it pursues, resulting in a positive association between program diversity and board size. Consequently, we predict that board size is inversely related to managerial pay-performance incentives a...

This paper empirically studies a group of projects in a large bureaucratic government agency that adopted iterative and incremental development (IID). We found that a project that followed IID since inception provided substantially better bug-fixing responsiveness and found bugs earlier in the development lifecycle than existing projects that migrated to IID. IID practices also supported manage...

Management at Mary Kay Cosmetics supported development of an expert system (ES) to assist with the problems inherent with package design. Although the ES performed well and was clearly beneficial, use of the ES discontinued after a short time and the package design process returned to pre-ES practices. Within the context of this case this paper describes from a managerial perspective how and wh...