Leadership & Organizational Behavior

To explore if, when, and how intentionally corporate officers conceal negative organizational outcomes from shareholders, we used computer-assisted content analysis of over 1,000 president's letters contained in annual reports to shareholders. Results suggest that outside directors, large institutional investors, and accountants limit such concealment, but small institutional investors and outside directors who are shareholders prompt it. Low disclosure is associated with subsequent selling of stock by top officers and outside directors.

This goal of this paper is to establish a research agenda that will lead to a stream of research that closes the gap between actual and normative strategic managerial decision making. We start by distinguishing strategic managerial decision making (choices) from other choices. Next, we propose a conceptual model of how managers make strategic decisions that is consistent with the observed gap between actual and normative decision making.

Faced with turbulent national and international environments, entire U.S. industries-most notably steel and automobiles-have revealed a distinct propensity to overlook radically new types of competitors, cling to traditional technologies, and remain mired in similar, yet outdated, strategic postures. In this article, we ascribe the adaptive failures of entire industries not only to the micro-cultures of single organizations, but also to what we term inter-organizational "macro-cultures"-relatively idiosyncratic beliefs that are shared by managers across organizations.

This study examines how advertising budget setting, framed as a prisoner's dilemma, is affected by information on the competitive situation and characteristics of the decision maker. Hypotheses are tested using experiments in which subjects set advertising budgets. Results indicate that subjects were generally competitive, but also based their strategy selections on what they expected their opponents to do, what their opponents did last time, whether the competitive relationship was expected to continue, market shares, and whether the subject's profit objectives were short- or long-term.

The objective of governments is to efficiently provide essential services and infrastructure to their jurisdictions at a competitive tax rate within the constraint of a balanced budget. In recent years, several states have found it difficult to maintain this standard. This article examines the nature of the problem in the overlapping jurisdictions of New York City and New York State. Specifically, it explains the nature of projected budget gaps that have emerged in New York, and describes how the two New Yorks' political leaders have managed their budgets in recent years.

Riding the crest of recent artistic and organizational successes, this self-governing symphony orchestra now confronts the challenge of engendering a culture in which, in the words of the managing director, "everyone in the orchestra is constantly thinking, how can we make this better?"

This note considers a principal–multi-agent model of a firm subject to adverse selection. With just the usual optimal (incentive-constrained) contracts being offered, there exist multiple (Bayes–Nash) equilibria in the agents' subgame. Moreover, from the agents' perspective, there exists an equilibrium that Pareto-dominates the equilibrium desired by the principal. By exploiting the structure of the model, this note develops a new approach for eliminating unwanted equilibria (while retaining the desired equilibrium).

The authors argue that attribution patterns reflect implicit theories acquired from induction and socialization and hence differentially distributed across human cultures. In particular, the authors tested the hypothesis that dispositionalism in attribution for behavior reflects a theory of social behavior more widespread in individualist than collectivist cultures. Study 1 demonstrated that causal perceptions of social events but not physical events differed between American and Chinese students.

According to human capital theory, technological change will influence the retirement decisions of older workers in two ways. First, workers in industries with high rates of technological change will retire later if there is a net positive correlation between technological change and on-the-job training. Second, an unexpected change in the rate of technological change will induce older workers to retire sooner because the required amount of retraining will be an unattractive investment.