Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration

Employees are motivated intrinsically as well as extrinsically. Intrinsic motivation is crucial when tacit knowledge in and between teams must be transferred. Organizational forms enable different kinds of motivation and have different capacities to generate and transfer tacit knowledge. Since knowledge generation and transfer are essential for a firm's sustainable competitive advantage, we ask specifically what kinds of motivation are needed to generate and transfer tacit knowledge, as opposed to explicit knowledge.

Die erste zusammenhängende und gut dokumentierte Darstellung der Entstehung der PU stammt von Georg Henrik von Wright, der – obwohl einer der Erben und Verwalter von W.s schriftlichem Nachlass – seinerzeit (1953) nicht an der ersten Ausgabe des Buchs beteiligt gewesen war (vgl. von Wright 1986, 117–143). Ergänzungen und weitere Details findet man in der Einleitung und den Nachbemerkungen zur Kritisch-genetischen Edition, die ihrerseits fünf Fassungen unterscheidet und abdruckt.

We study the relaxation response of a social system after endogenous and exogenous bursts of activity using the time series of daily views for nearly 5 million videos on YouTube. We find that most activity can be described accurately as a Poisson process. However, we also find hundreds of thousands of examples in which a burst of activity is followed by an ubiquitous power-law relaxation governing the timing of views. We find that these relaxation exponents cluster into three distinct classes and allow for the classification of collective human dynamics. This is consistent with an epidemic model on a social network containing two ingredients: a power-law distribution of waiting times between cause and action and an epidemic cascade of actions becoming the cause of future actions. This model is a conceptual extension of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem to social systems [Ruelle, D (2004) Phys Today 57:48-53] and [Roehner BM, et al., (2004) Int J Mod Phys C 15:809-834], and provides a unique framework for the investigation of timing in complex systems.

Using environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings from seven different data providers for a sample of firms in the S&P 500 Index between 2010 and 2017, we studied the relationship between ESG rating disagreement and stock returns. We found that stock returns are positively related to ESG rating disagreement, suggesting a risk premium for firms with higher ESG rating disagreement. The relationship is primarily driven by disagreement about the environmental dimension. We discuss the practical implications of our findings for firms’ equity cost of capital as well as for investment managers and asset owners who use ESG investment strategies.

Stakeholder engagement has grown into a widely used yet often unclear construct in business and society research. The literature lacks a unified understanding of the essentials of stakeholder engagement, and the fragmented use of the stakeholder engagement construct challenges its development and legitimacy. The purpose of this article is to clarify the construct of stakeholder engagement to unfold the full potential of stakeholder engagement research. We conduct a literature review on 90 articles in leading academic journals focusing on stakeholder engagement in the business and society, management and strategy, and environmental management and environmental policy literatures. We present a descriptive analysis of stakeholder engagement research for a 15-year period, and we identify the moral, strategic, and pragmatic components of stakeholder engagement as well as its aims, activities, and impacts. Moreover, we offer an inclusive stakeholder engagement definition and provide a guide to organizing the research. Finally, we complement the current understanding with a largely overlooked dark side of stakeholder engagement. We conclude with future research avenues for stakeholder engagement research.

Purpose This paper aims to investigate how students perceive the services they are offered at a German university and how satisfied they are with them. Design/methodology/approach An evaluation study using a new tool to measure 15 dimensions of student satisfaction at an institutional level that covers most aspects of student life was used. It was decided to develop a new measurement tool as many existing surveys are poorly designed, lack standardization and give no evidence concerning reliability or validity. Questionnaires were handed out in eight lectures for the pilot study and 18 lectures for the main study. The response rate was 99 percent. A total of 374 students (pilot study) and 544 students (main study) filled in the newly developed questionnaires using Likert scales. Findings The study gave a valuable insight into how students perceive the quality of the services offered at a university and how satisfied they are with these offerings. The results show that students' satisfaction with their university is based on a relatively stable person‐environment relationship. Thus, the satisfaction of students seems to reflect quite well perceived quality differences of offered services and of the wider environment. Students were particularly satisfied with the school placements and the atmosphere among students. Students were mostly dissatisfied with the university buildings and the quality of the lecture theatres. Research limitations/implications As the study involved only two samples of students from one university, the results cannot be generalized to the German student population as a whole. Originality/value The study was the first to successfully apply a measurement tool, which has previously not been used. The study has hopefully opened up an area of research and methodology that could provide considerable further benefits for researchers interested in this topic. It also shows how the concept of student satisfaction could be assessed in future studies.

Do people intuitively favour certain actions over others? In some dual-process research, reaction-time (RT) data have been used to infer that certain choices are intuitive. However, the use of behavioural or biological measures to infer mental function, popularly known as 'reverse inference', is problematic because it does not take into account other sources of variability in the data, such as discriminability of the choice options. Here we use two example data sets obtained from value-based choice experiments to demonstrate that, after controlling for discriminability (that is, strength-of-preference), there is no evidence that one type of choice is systematically faster than the other. Moreover, using specific variations of a prominent value-based choice experiment, we are able to predictably replicate, eliminate or reverse previously reported correlations between RT and selfishness. Thus, our findings shed crucial light on the use of RT in inferring mental processes and strongly caution against using RT differences as evidence favouring dual-process accounts.

Research summary : Prior literature drawing on the behavioral theory of the firm has not considered how resource constraints impact the direction of organizational change in response to performance shortfalls relative to aspirations. We argue that decreasing financial resources resulting from substantial performance shortfalls and the absence or availability of slack resources together affect the emphasis on different types of organizational change in response to performance shortfalls. Using data on the acquisition and divestment behavior of 530 companies in the information and communications technology sector from 1992 to 2014, we find that the frequency of resource‐consuming acquisitions and of resource‐freeing divestments are affected differently by performance below aspirations and that these relationships are moderated by the level of financial slack . Managerial summary : This paper examines whether firms respond to performance shortfalls with acquisitions or divestments. We argue and show that the closer the firm is to the aspired level of performance, the more likely it is to respond with resource‐consuming acquisitions to close the performance gap, whereas the further it is from aspired performance, the more likely the firm is to respond with divestments to free resources. Financial slack weakens these relationships between performance relative to aspirations and acquisitions or divestments such that it increases the likelihood of a response through acquisitions while it reduces the likelihood of a response through divestments . Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

There is a growing body of evidence that many entrepreneurs seem to enter and persist in entrepreneurship despite earning low risk-adjusted returns. This has lead to attempts to provide explanations—using both standard economic theory and behavioral economics— for why certain individuals may be attracted to such an apparently unprofitable activity. Drawing on research in behavioral economics, in the sections that follow, we review three sets of possible interpretations for understanding the empirical facts related to the entry into, and persistence in, entrepreneurship. Differences in risk aversion provide a plausible and intuitive interpretation of entrepreneurial activity. In addition, a growing literature has begun to highlight the potential importance of overconfidence in driving entrepreneurial outcomes. Such a mechanism may appear at face value to work like a lower level of risk aversion, but there are clear conceptual differences—in particular, overconfidence likely arises from behavioral biases and misperceptions of probability distributions. Finally, nonpecuniary taste-based factors may be important in motivating both the decisions to enter into and to persist in entrepreneurship.

Mice are the preferred mammalian species for genetic investigations of the role of proteins. The normal function of the prion protein (PrP) is unknown, although it plays a major role in the prion diseases, including fatal familial insomnia. We investigated its role in sleep and sleep regulation by comparing baseline recordings and the effects of sleep deprivation in PrP knockout mice (129/SV) and wild-type controls (129/SV x C57BL/6), which are the mice used for most gene targeting experiments and whose behavior is not well characterized. Although no difference was evident in the amount of vigilance states, the null mice exhibited a larger degree of sleep fragmentation than the wild-type with almost double the amount of short waking episodes. As in other rodents, cortical temperature closely reflected the time course of waking. The increase of slow-wave activity (SWA; mean EEG power density in the 0.25-4.0 Hz range) at waking to nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep transitions was faster and reached a lower level in the null mice than in the wild-type. The contribution of the lower frequencies (0.25-5.0 Hz) to the spectrum was smaller than in other rodents in all three vigilance states, and the distinction between NREM sleep and REM sleep was most marked in the theta band. After the sleep deprivation, SWA was increased, but the changes in EEG power density and SWA were more prominent and lasted longer in the PrP-null mice. Our results suggest that PrP plays a role in promoting sleep continuity.

This study examined factors affecting perceived risks and acceptance of gene technology. Based on the reviewed literature, a causal model was proposed. The plausibility of the postulated model was tested using structural equation modeling procedures. Participants were randomly selected students from a Swiss university ( N = 837). Results indicated that trust in companies and scientists performing gene manipulations have a strong effect on the benefits and risks perceived. When trust was controlled for the inverse relationship between perceived risk and perceived benefit vanished. Furthermore, world views, perceived benefit, and perceived risk each are found to contribute independently to the prediction of acceptance of gene technology. World views and trust appear to play an important role in perceptions of gene technology.

In their personal lives, many economists recognize that they are surrounded by individuals who are less than fully rational. In their professional lives, however, economists often use models that examine the interactions of fully rational agents. To reduce the cognitive dissonance of this situation, many economists believe that interactions in markets will correct or offset individually anomalous behaviors—although the reasons for this belief are often not clearly spelled out. This paper presents evidence indicating that “strategic complementarity” and “strategic substitutability” are important determinants of aggregate outcomes. Under strategic complementarity, a small amount of individual irrationality may lead to large deviations from the aggregate predictions of rational models; under strategic substitutability, a minority of rational agents may suffice to generate aggregate outcomes consistent with the predictions of rational models. Thus, the presence of strategic substitutability or complementarity seems to be a key condition in determining when a population that is heterogeneous with regard to rationality reaches either a “rational” or an “irrational” outcome.

Neuroeconomics combines methods and theories from neuroscience psychology, economics, and computer science in an effort to produce detailed computational and neurobiological accounts of the decision-making process that can serve as a common foundation for understanding human behavior across the natural and social sciences. Because neuroeconomics is a young discipline, a sufficiently sound structural model of how the brain makes choices is not yet available. However, the contours of such a computational model are beginning to arise; and, given the rapid progress, there is reason to be hopeful that the field will eventually put together a satisfactory structural model. This paper has two goals: First, we provide an overview of what has been learned about how the brain makes choices in two types of situations: simple choices among small numbers of familiar stimuli (like choosing between an apple or an orange), and more complex choices involving tradeoffs between immediate and future consequences (like eating a healthy apple or a less-healthy chocolate cake). Second, we show that, even at this early stage, insights with important implications for economics have already been gained.

The goal of the present research was to investigate whether high or low power leads to more interpersonal sensitivity and what potentially mediates and moderates this effect. In Study 1, 76 participants in either a high- or low-power position interacted; in Study 2, 134 participants were implicitly primed with either high- or low-power or neutral words; and in Study 3, 96 participants were asked to remember a situation in which they felt high or low power (plus a control condition). In Study 4, 157 participants were told to identify with either an egoistic, empathic, or neutral leadership style. In all studies, interpersonal sensitivity, defined as correctly assessing other people, was then measured using different instruments in each study. Consistently, high power resulted in more interpersonal sensitivity than low power. Feeling respected and proud was partially responsible for this effect. Empathic power as a personality trait was related to more interpersonal sensitivity, and high-power individuals who adopted an empathic instead of an egoistic leadership style were more interpersonally sensitive.

Summary Although followers' needs are a central aspect of transformational leadership theory, little is known about their role as mediating mechanisms for this leadership style. The present research thus seeks to integrate and extend theorizing on transformational leadership and self‐determination. In particular, we propose that the satisfaction of followers' basic needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and employee outcomes (job satisfaction, self‐efficacy, and commitment to the leader). We tested this model in two studies involving employees from a broad spectrum of organizations in Germany ( N = 410) and in Switzerland ( N = 442). Results revealed largely consistent patterns across both studies. The need for competence fulfillment solely mediated the link between transformational leadership and occupational self‐efficacy; the need for relatedness fulfillment solely mediated the link between transformational leadership and commitment to the leader. The mediating pattern for the link between transformational leadership and job satisfaction varied slightly across studies. In Study 1, only the need for autonomy fulfillment was a significant mediator, whereas in Study 2, all three needs mediated this relationship. Taken together, our study integrates theorizing on transformational leadership and self‐determination by corroborating that need fulfillment indeed is a central mechanism behind transformational leadership. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of an open outside‐in innovation management strategy on companies' innovativeness and innovation performance. Specifically, it focuses on the adoption of the open innovation paradigm in practice and the extent of collaboration with different stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach The proposed hypotheses are tested empirically using survey data collected from stock‐listed companies in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The data include the complete responses from 141 R&D managers for the period from 2004 to 2008. Findings The openness of the outside‐in process in R&D management is of crucial importance for achieving high direct and indirect innovation output effects. In particular, openness towards customers, suppliers and universities has a significant positive impact on the different innovation performance measures. Regarding openness towards cross‐sector companies, the analysis reveals a significant negative effect on innovation performance. Research limitations/implications The utilization of cross‐sectional data and its dependency on the perceptions and experiences of the respondents has its limitations. Thus, future research should be based on a more longitudinal design that emphasizes quantitative measurement techniques. Originality/value To date, the adoption of open innovation in practice has not been examined in depth. This study provides empirical insights into the open innovation approaches in German‐speaking countries and, by drawing important conclusions for managers involved in the R&D processes, fills a gap in the innovation management literature.

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior-several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

The aim of the present research was to integrate and extend theorizing on transformational leadership, self‐determination, and work engagement. Specifically, we tested experimentally our hypotheses that the satisfaction of followers' basic psychological needs (i.e., for competence, relatedness, and autonomy) and work engagement mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and performance. A total of 190 participants worked on a brainstorming task under either a transformational or a non‐transformational leadership condition. Followers' performance was operationalized through quantity, quality, and persistence. Results revealed that satisfaction of the needs for competence and relatedness mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and work engagement, which, in turn, was positively related to quality, quantity, and persistence. Taken together, these findings are largely in line with our theoretical model and support B ass' ( L eadership and performance beyond expectations . N ew Y ork, NY : F ree P ress, 1985) and B urns' ( L eadership . N ew Y ork: H arper & R ow, 1978) theories on needs satisfaction being a central mechanism behind transformational leadership. Practitioner points The results of this study suggest that organizations can benefit from implementing measures to increase employees' work engagement, because this can enhance employees' performance. Furthermore, the study provides an indication of how to design such measures. It suggests that initiatives focusing on followers' basic psychological needs satisfaction (especially of the needs for competence and relatedness) are particularly effective. Finally, our findings indicate that transformational leadership is one concrete way to foster employees' needs satisfaction and, consequently, work engagement and performance. Hence, integrating the frameworks of transformational leadership and followers' psychological needs can provide valuable insights for leadership development.

How and to what extent practitioners use the scientific results of management studies is of great concern to management scholars and has given rise to a considerable body of literature. In this paper, we provide a systematic overview of the different streams of this literature, highlighting its strengths and shortcomings. We distinguish between two types of literature. On the one hand, there is the programmatic literature, comprising of studies that take the perceived lack of practical relevance as their main point of departure and suggest particular ways of dealing with the issue of relevance in management research. On the other hand, there is the largely neglected descriptive literature, which examines the interplay between management research and management practice. Despite the interesting insights both bodies of literature provide, progress in this area of research is seriously hampered by the fragmentation of the research and the lack of scientific rigor that characterizes many of the studies it comprises. We argue that, in order to advance research on the practical relevance of management studies, it is necessary to move away from the partly ideological and often uncritical and unscientific debate on immediate solutions that the programmatic literature puts forward and toward a more rigorous and systematic research program to investigate how the results of scientific research are utilized in management practice.

Abstract Climate journalism gathers, evaluates, selects, and presents information about climate change, its characteristics, causes, and impacts, as well as ways to mitigate it, and distributes them via technical media to general and specialist audiences. It is an important source of information about climate change for many people. Currently, however, the media ecosystem surrounding climate journalism is changing, with economic conditions becoming more strenuous, more communicators joining the debate, and social media changing the affordances of communication. This advanced review synthesizes scholarship on both the status quo and the changes taking place in climate journalism in the Global North and the Global South. While it demonstrates that the scholarship has distinct gaps and biases, it does distill several robust findings. First, it shows that the organizational embedding of climate journalism is changing, with specialist reporters becoming scarce and working under more strenuous conditions and with the emergence of online‐born news media and niche sites specializing in climate journalism. It also suggests that few specialist climate journalists exist in the Global South. Second, it demonstrates that the range of roles available to climate journalists has diversified, with a shift from “gatekeeping” to “curating” roles. Third, it indicates that climate journalists’ relationships with their sources have changed. Elite sources have been, and still are, important, but their composition has shifted from scientists to a broader range of stakeholders. Correspondingly, there seems to be a strong and rising influence of stakeholder PR on climate journalism. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication