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This study aims to investigate the conflicting views in supply chain and strategic management literature regarding cooperative supply chain relationships (CSCR) and firm performance. Supply chain literature suggests a universally positive impact of CSCR on performance, irrespective of a firm’s strategy. In contrast, strategic management literature contends that the effectiveness of CSCR depends on their alignment with the firm’s competitive strategy. The research aims to clarify this disparity, offering insights into the strategic use of CSCR for enhancing firm performance.

This paper theorizes the integration of perspectives for the impact of CSCR on firm performance by examining the relationships considering the alignment of cost leadership and product differentiation strategies with supplier and customer relationships. Plant-level survey data is analyzed using regression techniques to test four hypotheses.

All four main relationships (cost leadership, product differentiation, supplier relationship and customer relationship) on firm performance are statistically significant. However, cost leadership firms are better aligned to their chosen strategy when they have strong relationships with suppliers, whereas similar relationships with customers create misalignment, negatively influencing firm performance. In contrast, product differentiators benefit by investing in relationships with customers rather than with suppliers.

A firm’s performance does not solely depend on its CSCR efforts but on aligning them with the firm’s overall strategy. Therefore, managers need to be cognizant of the firm’s competitive strategy when investing in CSCR. Failing to do so could negatively impact firm performance and, eventually, its ability to compete in the marketplace.

Scholars have advocated for the importance of examining competing perspectives of phenomena, both within and across various bodies of literature, as cross-disciplinary analysis often brings enhanced focus and depth, leading to improved understanding. This research is one of the initial efforts to empirically analyze the varying perspectives on CSCR in supply chain and strategic management literature. This cross-disciplinary approach can yield a more integrated perspective.

Social networking sites (SNS) are changing the methods of social connectivity – and what it means to be public. Existing literature hints at competing perspectives on how the public nature of these sites impacts users. The question of how the perceived publicness of SNSs influences users' self‐disclosure intentions is debated in the literature, and the aim of this paper is to answer this debate.

This paper theorizes competing perspectives on the role of publicness on self‐disclosure. Competing perspectives are tested using data collected via an online survey.

The study finds support for the perceived publicness of a SNS negatively influencing users' self‐disclosure intentions. Additionally, exploratory analysis of self‐disclosure items ubiquitous to most SNSs found that perceived publicness negatively influences users' intention to self‐disclose items related to users' likes and affiliations.

Variables of the study were self‐reported and, as such, are subject to the typical limitations of cross‐sectional, survey‐based research. Future research should seek to examine how perceived publicness and other variables impact self‐disclosure in SNSs over time.

Business models utilizing social networking technologies rely on users' willingness to engage in self‐disclosure. This research provides a theoretical link between the public nature of a social networking environment and users' willingness to self‐disclose. Highlighting perceived publicness as an important aspect of an environment could be one way to address the need to elicit and manage users' self‐disclosure.

The paper utilizes a unique, but established, method of competing hypotheses to understand the role of the public nature of SNSs.

In this chapter, the authors contribute toward building a better understanding of farmers’ responses to behavioral drivers of land-use decision by establishing an alternative analytical procedure, which can overcome various drawbacks suffered by methods currently used in existing studies. Firstly, our procedure makes use of spatially high-resolution data, so that idiosyncratic effects of physical environment drivers, e.g., soil textures, can be explicitly modeled. Secondly, we address the well-known censored data problem, which often hinders a successful analysis of land-use shares. Thirdly, we incorporate spatial error dependence (SED) and heterogeneity in order to obtain efficiency gain and a more accurate formulation of variances for the parameter estimates. Finally, the authors reduce the computational burden and improve estimation accuracy by introducing an alternative generalized method of moments (GMM)–quasi maximum likelihood (QML) hybrid estimation procedure. The authors apply the newly proposed procedure to spatially high-resolution data in England and found that, by taking these features into consideration, the authors are able to formulate conclusions about causal effects of climatic and physical environment, and environmental policy on land-use shares that differ significantly from those made based on methods that are currently used in the literature. Moreover, the authors show that our method enables derivation of a more effective predictor of the land-use shares, which is utterly useful from the policy-making point of view.

Personality research often has focused on how people change in response to the work environment, given that work constitutes a significant portion of the daily life of adults. However, most research has failed to consider the effect of the work context on purpose in life. This omission is surprising given that purpose research involves several characteristics that align well with the occupational psychology and organizational behavior literatures. The current research considers how one feature of the work context, work stress, may (or may not) facilitate the purpose development process. We put forth a Purpose and Work Stress (PAWS) model which explains why understanding whether work stress is perceived as harmful or challenging to employees can provide significant insight into whether that occupation is aligned with the individual’s purpose in life. Furthermore, the model highlights that the ability to monitor and interpret work stress may help an individual identify and cultivate their purpose. Implications of the PAWS model are described, including how it may help us understanding the roles for retirement and job crafting on purpose.

Motion pictures can serve as an educational tool to shed light on ethical issues in the health insurance industry. To the chagrin of the health insurance industry, this light has oftentimes been unfavorable, as illustrated in such motion pictures as: Damaged Care (Winer, 2002), John Q (Cassavetes, 2002), and The Rainmaker (Coppola, 1997). In reaction to this unfavorable portrayal, health maintenance organizations have taken action to cast themselves in a more positive light. The objectives of this article are: to demonstrate how motion pictures that feature the health insurance industry can serve as a vehicle to illustrate management concepts such as planning, decision making, ethics, and conflict resolution; and to underscore the interrelationships and mutual dependencies of the ethical decisions, the decision-makers, and the context of the ethical dilemmas. Suggestions on how environmental response strategies can be used to improve public perceptions of the health insurance industry are also provided. The teaching method proposed in this article can be used in undergraduate level and graduate level principles of management, organizational behavior, and ethics courses.

The authors analyze how conflicting institutional demands become deployed in organizational storytelling in the context of wildlife documentaries. Documentary producers increasingly feel the pressure to entertain the audience, while simultaneously addressing serious environmental issues. Using a mixed-method analysis of BBC wildlife documentaries produced between 2009 and 2017, the authors identify two narrative strategies, alternation and amplification, to balance demands for entertainment and environmental conservation. Alternation switches entertaining and serious content to offset conservation concerns, while amplification uses entertainment to accentuate conservation. Emotions play a significant role in both ways of storytelling. The findings of this chapter contribute to the literatures on institutional microfoundations, storytelling, and emotions.

This study compares the nature of job satisfaction and organization commitment of employees in a United States manufacturing plant to employees in a Mexico maquiladora manufacturing plant. Demographic and job related variables were measured and used in a regression analysis to explain job satisfaction and organization commitment in both plants. Results indicate that significant differences exist. The regression models for the constructs, job satisfaction, and organization commitment in both countries are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate experimentally the effect of altruistic behavior on personality perceptions, advancement potential, and reward recommendations and assess whether personality perceptions serve as a mediating mechanism between altruistic behavior and job ratings (e.g. advancement potential).

A randomized experimental design was used to investigate the mediating effect of personality perceptions on the relationship between altruistic behavior and advancement potential and reward recommendations.

It was found that altruistic employees were perceived as having more favorable personality characteristics and received higher advancement potential ratings and greater reward recommendations than their less altruistic counterparts. In addition, personality perceptions were found to mediate partially the relation between altruistic behavior and job ratings (i.e. advancement potential and reward recommendations).

Research findings on citizenship behavior and personality are often based on the results of non‐experimental designs. This paper utilized a randomized experiment to investigate a mediating effect using a contemporary approach for testing hypothesized mediation.