Search results

Global virtual teams (GVTs) – composed of members in two or more countries who work together primarily using information and communication technologies – are increasingly prevalent in organizations today. There has been a burgeoning of research on this relatively new organizational unit, spanning various academic disciplines. In this chapter, we review and discuss the major developments in this area of research. Based on our review, we identify areas in need of future research, suggest research directions that have the potential to enhance theory development, and provide practical guidelines on managing and working in GVTs.

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.

Though production rates for construction materials are generally available, potential capacity on a global scale is poorly understood. Commencement of infrastructure projects to address climate change, such as dikes and levees, could increase demand making critical resources scarce. Since increasing production capacity of scarce products can be a challenge, understanding current potential capacity is an imperative. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new method to assess capacity and to create one such global estimate for cement.

The proposed global hybrid method creates a global estimate of cement production capacity in four steps: collect capacity and production data from existing reports; select top regional capacity holders; compute regional utilisation; back‐calculate capacity from production.

The method overcomes shortfalls of other methods, but – like all estimating methods – is inherently limited by the amount of data available. It nonetheless provides economists, climate change scientists, government officials, investors, and other researchers a better understanding of current maximum global cement capacity.

Most studies only focus on industry demand and actual production, because these forces drive commodity pricing. Capacity is generally estimated either through surveying goods‐producing industries at the plant level or examining economic data. Methods that employ these types of analysis are useful for regional estimates of production, but are ineffective at the global scale.

The paper sets out the reasons for the opposition of the Guild of British Newspaper Editors to the imposition of privacy legislation. In doing so, it first examines five recent stories arguing that the publication of each in the press can be justified as being in the public interest. It then considers the effect of any new privacy legislation which would in the view of the Guild not only probably fail to prevent stories from being released but also be damaging to the working of an open society.

The purpose of this paper is to expand our understanding on team listening by incorporating an action component. The authors empirically test the effect of this expanded concept, namely team action listening on team success, and investigate how team commitment moderates the relationship between team trust and team action listening.

The authors explored listening in teams in the field and in the lab, both qualitatively and quantitatively, through studying 474 team members representing 100 teams. The authors tested the hypotheses by structural equation modeling augmented with in-depth team interviews.

The findings showed that: teams demonstrate that they listen by taking action, teams that exhibit action listening are more successful, there is a direct relationship between team trust and team action listening and team commitment negatively moderates this relation in larger teams.

Managers should encourage taking action in team discussions. Yet, they should be wary of the detrimental effects of team commitment to team action listening particularly in teams with high trust. Commitment increases the risk of groupthink and decreases the participation to team discussions and listening. In particular, managers may benefit from keeping the team smaller, as in large teams, commitment suppresses the relationship between trust and team action listening.

This study extends research on team listening by adding the action aspect that distinguishes successful teams. It is one of the first to investigate the interrelationships between team trust, commitment, team action listening and success in teams.

To explain SEC Division of Corporation Finance Staff Legal Bulletin No. 14H (SLB 14H), which provides interpretive advice on how the Staff will treat shareholder proposals under the “directly conflicts” and “ordinary business” exclusions under Rule 14a-8.

Explains Rule 14-8 concerning the inclusion of shareholder proposals in a company’s proxy materials, Rule 14a-8(i)(9) on substantive bases for exclusion of shareholder proposals, guidance from SLB 14H on shareholder proposals that do and do not directly conflict with company proposals, Staff guidance prior to SLB 14H, the “ordinary business” exclusion under Rule 14a-8(i)(7), and how SEC staff guidance differs from the majority opinion in Trinity Wall Street v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. on the ordinary business exclusion.

The SEC Staff’s new standard for conflicting proposals is likely to make it more difficult for companies to exclude a shareholder proposal that is different from a management proposal if the two proposals are not “mutually exclusive”. Staff guidance also states that companies may not exclude proposals focusing on a significant policy issue under the ordinary business exclusion if “the proposals would transcend the day-to-day business matters and raise policy issues so significant that it would be appropriate for a shareholder vote”.

Expert guidance from experienced securities and financial services lawyers.

The management of organisational knowledge and the promotion of staff knowledge sharing are largely neglected in higher education institutions. The purpose of this study is to examine how enterprise social networks can enable staff knowledge sharing in communities of practice in that context.

The study is framed as an Action Research project, covering three cycles over a 12-month period. During the Diagnosing phase, a conceptual model was developed for empirical testing. Data were collected through 30 semi-structured interviews and a number of focus groups. This was supplemented by content analysis and reflective journaling.

The findings support the conceptual model and provide insight into the antecedents necessary for the creation of an enterprise social network-enabled knowledge-sharing environment, the motivators for and barriers to participation, and the perceived organisational and individual benefits of increased staff knowledge-sharing activity.

As the study has a higher education focus, all of the findings may not be generalizable to other types of organisation. Further development of the conceptual model and testing in other contextual settings will yield greater generalizability.

A number of findings have practical implications for the management of higher education institutions, such as the evidence of a divide between faculty and other staff. In general, the study findings provide an opportunity for educationalists to better understand the scope and impact of employing social media platforms for knowledge sharing.

This paper adds to the growing body of work on organisational implementations of social media, and should be of interest to practitioners and researchers undertaking similar projects.