The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive background on the recent legislative, regulatory, and prosecutorial scrutiny of mutual funds and underlying issues such as…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive background on the recent legislative, regulatory, and prosecutorial scrutiny of mutual funds and underlying issues such as the level and transparency of fees and costs, distribution and sales practices, and fund governance.
Design/methodology/approach
Provides a detailed chronology of events since January 2003 concerning mutual fund scandals such as trading abuses and questionable sales practices and related issues such as revenue sharing, directed brokerage, soft dollars, market timing, late trading, and selective disclosure. The chronology in this issue of JOIC will be followed an article in the next issue that describes reform initiatives that have taken place in response to the scandals.
Findings
Despite criticism and scrutiny of equity mutual funds following poor performance in 2001 and 2002, meaningful efforts to achieve reform began to lose momentum in mid‐2003. Then concern with mutual fund abuses was reignited in September 2003 when New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced a settlement with Canary Capital that involved market timing, late trading, and selective disclosure. Since then there have been numerous disclosures of fund trading abuses and questionable trading practices, and the resulting uproar has triggered significant efforts to reform the manner in which funds and their service providers conduct business.
Originality/value
This comprehensive chronology provides an essential reference by bringing together all the events and underlying issues related to mutual fund scandals, abuses, regulation, compliance, and reform efforts since January 1, 2003.
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Lori Leach, Bradley Hastings, Gavin Schwarz, Bernadette Watson, Dave Bouckenooghe, Leonardo Seoane and David Hewett
This paper aims to extend the consideration of distributed leadership in health-care settings. Leadership is typically studied from the classical notion of the place of single…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to extend the consideration of distributed leadership in health-care settings. Leadership is typically studied from the classical notion of the place of single leaders and continues to examine distributed leadership within small teams or horizontally. The purpose is to develop a practical understanding of how distributed leadership may occur vertically, between different layers of the health-care leadership hierarchy, examining its influence on health-care outcomes across two hospitals.
Design/methodology/approach
Using semi-structured interviews, data were collected from 107 hospital employees (including executive leadership, clinical management and clinicians) from two hospitals in Australia and the USA. Using thematic content analysis, an iterative process was adopted characterized by alternating between social identity and distributed leadership literature and empirical themes to answer the question of how the practice of distributed leadership influences performance outcomes in hospitals?
Findings
The perceived social identities of leadership groups shaped communication and performance both positively and negatively. In one hospital a moderating structure emerged as a leadership dyad, where leadership was distributed vertically between hospital hierarchal layers, observed to overcome communication limitations. Findings suggest dyad creation is an effective mechanism to overcome hospital hierarchy-based communication issues and ameliorate health-care outcomes.
Originality/value
The study demonstrates how current leadership development practices that focus on leadership relational and social competencies can benefit from a structural approach to include leadership dyads that can foster these same competencies. This approach could help develop future hospital leaders and in doing so, improve hospital outcomes.
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Patrick A. Palmieri and Lori T. Peterson
The Institute of Medicine's seminal report, To err is human: Building a safer health system, established the national patient safety framework and initiated interest in changing…
Abstract
The Institute of Medicine's seminal report, To err is human: Building a safer health system, established the national patient safety framework and initiated interest in changing the traditionally punitive healthcare culture. This paper reviews a multidisciplinary literature and offers an attribution framework to explicate the organizational processes that contribute to an industry-wide culture where clinicians are routinely blamed for adverse patient events. Attribution theory is concerned with the manner in which people explain the behaviors of others or themselves by assigning causality for events. To date, attribution theory, though well established in the management literature, has yet to be translated to healthcare. In this paper, we first describe the historical evolution of attribution theory in relation to human behavior in clinical practice and healthcare management and then discuss the work environments in contemporary healthcare organizations. Next, we demonstrate the applicability of attribution theory to healthcare by providing two adverse event exemplar cases. Then, the Healthcare Attribution Error Model is offered to demonstrate how concepts from attribution theory serve as antecedents to the employee cynicism, learned helplessness, organizational inertia, and the emerging Just Culture perspective. We conclude by suggesting attribution theory offers an important theoretical framework that warrants further conceptual development and empirical research. In the quest to produce exceptional healthcare environments where safety and quality are fundamental employee concerns, healthcare managers and clinical professionals need theoretically supported knowledge and evidence-based insights.
Patrick A. Palmieri, Lori T. Peterson, Bryan J. Pesta, Michel A. Flit and David M. Saettone
Through a number of comprehensive reviews, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has recommended that healthcare organizations develop safety cultures to align delivery system processes…
Abstract
Through a number of comprehensive reviews, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has recommended that healthcare organizations develop safety cultures to align delivery system processes with the workforce requirements to improve patient outcomes. Until health systems can provide safer care environments, patients remain at risk for suboptimal care and adverse outcomes. Health science researchers have begun to explore how safety cultures might act as an essential system feature to improve organizational outcomes. Since safety cultures are established through modification in employee safety perspective and work behavior, human resource (HR) professionals need to contribute to this developing organizational domain. The IOM indicates individual employee behaviors cumulatively provide the primary antecedent for organizational safety and quality outcomes. Yet, many safety culture scholars indicate the concept is neither theoretically defined nor consistently applied and researched as the terms safety culture, safety climate, and safety attitude are interchangeably used to represent the same concept. As such, this paper examines the intersection of organizational culture and healthcare safety by analyzing the theoretical underpinnings of safety culture, exploring the constructs for measurement, and assessing the current state of safety culture research. Safety culture draws from the theoretical perspectives of sociology (represented by normal accident theory), organizational psychology (represented by high reliability theory), and human factors (represented by the aviation framework). By understanding not only the origins but also the empirical safety culture research and the associated intervention initiatives, healthcare professionals can design appropriate HR strategies to address the system characteristics that adversely affect patient outcomes. Increased emphasis on human resource management research is particularly important to the development of safety cultures. This paper contributes to the existing healthcare literature by providing the first comprehensive critical analysis of the theory, research, and practice that comprise contemporary safety culture science.
In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of…
Abstract
In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.
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There are approximately 24 million children living in conflict areas across the globe who are not enrolled in school. The reasons vary greatly; while some have access to a school…
Abstract
There are approximately 24 million children living in conflict areas across the globe who are not enrolled in school. The reasons vary greatly; while some have access to a school, many do not attend. School safety is a primary concern, in the form of bullying and racism, school attacks, and sexual abuse. Other refugee children are required to find employment during normal school hours to help their family. In addition, host governments struggle to find qualified teachers and administrators in many of these conflict-strewn nations. Over the next 10 years, these unschooled refugees will reach adulthood, lacking the tools necessary to build successful lives, either abroad or back in their devastated homelands.
The modern homeschooling movement presents an opportunity to address these challenges. Key technological enablers – fast microprocessors, high-speed internet, cloud computing, etc. – are becoming ubiquitous and cheap. Online, free curriculum, combined with translation software, presents a new paradigm. Even caregivers with limited education themselves can facilitate a learning environment in the home, wherever that home may be. While homeschooling will not work in every situation, it could quickly become an option that positively affects the future of tens of thousands of refugees.
James E. Mattingly, Steven A. Harrast and Lori Olsen
The purpose of this paper is to test whether effective stakeholder management results in transparent financial reporting.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to test whether effective stakeholder management results in transparent financial reporting.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses a linear model informed by stakeholder theorizing and established measures of stakeholder management, earnings quality, and earnings management.
Findings
Organizations exhibiting effective stakeholder management have higher earnings quality and are less likely to engage in discretionary earnings management.
Research implications
Future research should carefully sort out the meaning of different measures of earnings quality, should clarify cross‐national institutional differences to reconcile contradictions in extant research, and should discover the underlying governance orientations that shape decision‐making processes and outcomes.
Practical implications
Governing bodies must take into account how underlying organization cultures shape governance regimes, which may determine the transparency with which organization actors interact with various stakeholder groups.
Originality/value
This study establishes a positive link between effective stakeholder management and transparent financial reporting, suggesting that both may be artifacts of deeper underlying orientations toward accountability, transparency, and managerial discretion.