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The purpose of this study is to investigate how concentrated owners add value to Asian firms. While prior research suggests that relational owners (i.e., business groups, top management team, board, government, banks, families, and corporation) may help firms fill institutional voids, this study proposes that it is transactional owners (i.e., foreign and institutional investors) lacking this ability who contribute most to firm performance. As these owners frequently hail from contexts with well-developed corporate governance traditions, they tend to have experience with the design and implementation of such governance practices.

This study involves a meta-analysis covering 276 studies from 17 Asian countries.

This study shows that transactional owners impose effective governance practices such as separating the chief executive officer (CEO) and Chair roles and assuring board independence. These practices promote decisions benefiting all shareholders, such as preventing diversification and financial over-leveraging.

This study contributes to the comparative corporate governance literature by showing that implementing internal governance practices helps improve firm performance in Asia. It also contributes to the owner identity literature by opening the black box of how transactional and relational owners differentially affect firms’ strategic behavior. Overall, this study yields a more nuanced understanding of what transactional owners contribute to Asian firms.

Extant research posits that mergers and acquisition (M&As) do not create value. Still many firms adopt expansion strategies such as alliances, joint ventures (JVs), and M&As to grow and enhance their performance. Through performing a meta-analysis on 204 papers that assess the relationship between the three most prevalent expansion strategies formed by firms, alliances, JVs, and M&As and their different substantive and symbolic performance effects, this study contributes in two ways. First, it becomes clear that alliances and M&As enhance a firm’s substantive performance, while no positive performance effect is observed for JVs. In turn, all three expansion strategies boost a firm’s symbolic performance in terms of its legitimacy and status. Second, a distinction between their effects on a firm’s substantive performance in terms of their market-based and accounting-based performance shows that alliances and M&As both positively contribute to a firm’s accounting-based performance, while only the former spurs a firm’s market-based returns. This indicates that M&As have more long-term accounting-based performance effects compared to alliances and JVs, which suggests that in the long-term firms do best by expanding through M&As.

This study investigates the relationship between personal values and feedback‐seeking behaviors. Feedbackseeking behaviors, or the way by which individuals in organizations actively seek information about their performance, has recently become an important research topic in the management literature. However, the large majority of this research has been conducted in the United States. This study aims to test the relationships between the personal values of a multinational sample and feedback‐seeking behaviors. An integrated set of hypotheses regarding the influence of values on feedback seeking are outlined and tested empirically using samples from Canada, China, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States. As predicted, results indicate that significant aspects of feedback seeking were related to personal values. The perceived cost of feedback seeking, the clarity of the feedback from others, and the use of feedback‐seeking behaviors were all linked to personal values. The study also uncovered substantial variations in feedback‐seeking behaviors across nations. The implications of these findings for research on feedback‐seeking behaviors and for feedback practices are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the work of Howard Chase within the history of public relations, his role in the birth and development of issue management, and his relevance for contemporary practice.

Research for this paper draws heavily on the speeches and writings of Chase himself, both before and after the formal establishment of issue management, as well as commentary from key writers.

While Chase is widely acknowledged as the founder of issue management in 1976, his writings reveal that he saw this “new science” as only one part of a much broader restructuring of management design in which he positioned public policy and profit as corporate objectives of equal importance. Analysis confirms his work was innovative and of historical significance, but it has been increasingly outdated by evolution of the discipline he created.

Despite Chase's pioneering role, modern writing in the field usually cites little more than his definitions and his process model. This paper revisits his original concepts in their contemporary context, providing a fresh framework against which to properly assess his contribution.

This article aims to draw on the contingency theory to develop a conceptual model of compatibility between corporate environmental responsibility and business strategy that reflects heterogeneity in this relationship. Four dimensions of compatibility are explored: trade-off, ambidexterity, synergy and symbiosis.

The intended contribution is essentially conceptual. A company case study is included to contribute to the development of the four dimensions of compatibility and support the practical relevance of the model. Twelve in-depth interviews with six managers in different functions of the company were conducted. A grounded theory approach was used to identify and express the patterns of compatibility that emerge from the qualitative data and how these patterns are grounded in managers’ meaning-in-use.

The contribution of the compatibility framework is essentially made to the literature on environmental strategy management, evolved from an implicit and, at most, two-dimensional (win–win and win–lose) conceptualisation of the relationship between green and business strategy into an explicit and multi-dimensionally grounded identification of processes and strategic challenges of corporate environmental and social responsibility. The resulting model contributes to a better understanding of corporate greening as a strategic and moral concern to individuals acting on behalf of business organisations and a greater understanding of the linkages between green and business strategies and operations.

By clarifying the construct of corporate environmental sustainability and providing useful directions for theory and practice, this research claims to inform green management decision-making. While the compatibility model is not intended to explain all pathways by which firms may elicit contingencies of relevance to environmental and social responsibility, it is suggested that the model paints a more complete and contextualized picture of environmental management mechanisms in business.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the links between company ownership structure and financial performance in the context of the largest Central European stock market. Using the framework of agency theory, the authors address the question of the expropriation effect by dominant owners and the effect of collusion between shareholders of different types on company performance.

The authors test hypotheses on the relations between ownership concentration and the involvement of different shareholders (state, CEO, industry and financial investors) vs return on assets (ROA). The authors adopt the panel model controlling for endogeneity and sector of operation and analyze the data from the unique sample of 495 Polish non-financial firms listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange in years 2005-2014 with a total of 3,203 observations.

The authors identify a negative correlation between ownership concentration by the majority shareholder and ROA, which corresponds with the expropriation rationale of blockholders. The authors also observe negative effects due to ownership concentration by the second largest shareholder, supporting the notion of collusion. The results show that ownership by industry investors is associated with a higher ROA. Ownership by the CEO, state and financial investors proves to have no statistically significant effect on performance.

The paper further develops the nature of ownership-performance relations in the specific economic context of a post-transition, emerging European stock market, weak external corporate governance mechanisms, insufficient investor protection and significant concentration of share ownership. The results add to the understanding of monitoring vs expropriation effects by large owners and the collusion between different types of shareholders.

Whether corporate governance systems and practices are converging to the Anglo-American shareholder-value-oriented model or continue to diverge from this model and maintain their idiosyncrasies has been controversially debated among scholars in a variety of academic disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to review, critique and integrate the disparate positions in the convergence-divergence debate in corporate governance and to suggest promising directions for future research.

The author constructs a theoretical framework in which convergence and divergence dynamics are conceptualized as simultaneous processes of institutional change and continuity. This framework takes into account the influence of economic market forces, social embeddedness and cultural forces in shaping corporate governance at the national and the firm levels and provides a holistic and integrative perspective on the extant literature in the convergence-divergence debate.

The literature review does not support either the predictions of convergence advocates or the predictions of divergence advocates. Instead, the paper finds that convergence and divergence dynamics can coexist and lead to increasing heterogeneity in corporate governance arrangements of firms within and between corporate governance systems. This finding adds complexity to the debate and opens room for interesting research directions.

The paper offers a comprehensive review of the topic and draws from literature in financial economics, comparative law, economic sociology, international business, political science and strategic management. Most importantly, the paper offers a multi-theoretical framework that allows for an integration of the divergent perspectives presented in the literature.

The purpose of this study is to find out how corporate governance is interconnected with failure risk in case of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The study is based on Estonian whole population of SMEs, in total 67,058 observations, and data are obtained from Estonian Business Register. Failure risk (FR) is portrayed with a well-known Altman et al. (2017) model, while seven variables reflecting corporate governance (CG) based on previous studies have been selected. As the method, logistic regression (LR) is applied with FR in the binary form as a dependent variable and seven CG variables as independent. The effect of firm size and age is studied with two separate LR models.

The results indicate that with the growth in manager’s age and the presence of managerial ownership, failure risk reduces. In turn, the presence of larger boards and managers having directorships in other firms leads to higher failure risk. Gender heterogeneity in the board, board tenure length and ownership concentration by means of having a majority owner are not associated with failure risk. The obtained results vary with firm size and age.

Unlike this study, research published on this topic earlier has used a much narrower definition of failure, mostly focused on large and listed companies, been sample based and information about corporate governance variables has often been obtained through questionnaires. All these limitations are relaxed in this population level study.

This paper aims to analyse the manner in which “objectivist” grounded theory methodology has progressively developed since 1967 and how it has been employed by management researchers.

The paper traces the methodological development of grounded theory with particular emphasis on the variations, contradictions and modifications to the methodology both between and within the Glaserian and Straussian Schools. Totally 32 empirical grounded theory studies published in the management literature since 2002 are analysed in order to gauge the impact of these variations on the manner in which researchers have employed the grounded theory methodology.

It is argued that grounded theory in management research is in danger of losing its integrity. The methodology has become so pliant that management researchers appear to have accepted it as a situation of “anything goes” “Grounded theory” is now loosely used as a generic term to refer to any qualitative approach in which an inductive analysis is grounded in data.

It could be argued that grounded theory cannot continue to be regarded as a moving target, or to be practised as a free‐for‐all methodology in management research, without risking serious danger of becoming irrelevant. Three suggestions are offered for restoring more discipline into grounded theory studies.