European Management Review最新文献

The European Management Review is pleased to host this Dialogue on an important theme, gaining increasing attention in the academic debate on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in the policy initiatives of European institutions. The theme is the role of “purposes” in driving the conduct of enterprises. This Dialogue develops and articulates the argument that a debate on purposes not considering the role of law is destined to remain weak in consequences and imprecise in conceptualization.

The Dialogue comprises three pieces centered, in different ways, on that role. The pieces are developments of some of the presentations offered by the authors at a EURAM 2023 Symposium, of which EMR invited submission, for potential transformation in short articles to compose a Dialogue.

The contribution by Colin Mayer offers a set of broad interdisciplinary reflections on corporate purposes, in the context of contemporary challenges, in relation to economic theory and practice, to the evolving corporate law, and to performance and policy implications.

Livia Ventura mobilizes her juridical background for offering a much needed map for orienting in the complicated territory of emerging legal provisions; especially with reference to Europe, but including many comparative law observations with respect to the United Kingdom and the United States.

The analysis by Blanche Segrestin and Kevin Levillain reflects and draw general lessons and implications from an important European experience: the French reform instituting the form of société à mission, that the author themselves contributed in promoting. Those implications include how those developments in the law can suggest broadening and renewing the conceptualization of the role of management.

Thanking the authors for having considered EMR as a possible outlet, we hope the Dialogue can contribute useful inputs for strengthening the discussion on purposes in management, as well as for illuminating public policy regulation, in Europe and elsewhere.

Anna Grandori

Editor-in-Chief, European Management Review

We are encountering growing crises that derive from a misconception of the nature of business. A revised understanding of profit should lie at the heart of the purpose of the corporation, namely, that it derives from producing solutions not problems for others. Firms should not profit from producing problems for others. There is a limit to the extent to which either competitive markets or regulation can ensure that. Instead, it must be intrinsic to the purpose of the business and, in the absence of this, both markets and regulation fail. Furthermore, public policy in the form of corporate taxation and public expenditure can be used to promote problem-solving common purposes around shared prosperity. This has significant implications for business practice as well as policy.

In this study, we examine how decision makers assess and respond to more than two performance feedback regarding goals across different hierarchical levels. Building on Cyert and March's seminal work and later research on pattern perception, we argue that pattern simplicity and pattern predictability of multiple (functional) feedback help decision makers to better guide problemistic search and generate more plausible solutions to fix a serious corporate performance shortfall. In a longitudinal sample of 97 global incumbent pharmaceutical firms, we find that a simpler and more predictable set of functional performance signals strengthens the relationship between poor performance on a corporate goal (i.e., ROA) and the number of functional solutions (i.e., number of new product development projects) that a firm initiates. We discuss the implications of our findings to the performance feedback and managerial search literature.

The debate on corporate governance of business companies and the discussions on the concept of corporate purpose intensified. Looking at the role of law in ensuring that businesses profit from creating benefits and not from creating detriments, it is worth distinguishing between interventions designed to incentivise the former (e.g., mandatory rules on sustainability disclosure or new dual-purpose companies) and disincentivise the latter (tort or recent supply chain due diligence laws). Nevertheless, the existence of a grey area for activities that do not materialise in tort, or the violation of other mandatory rules cannot be denied and is probably where the reconceptualisation of fiduciary duties can mediate. New legal trends in these areas are mapped with a special focus on the European context and some comparative law considerations with respect to the United Kingdom and the United States. Finally, a suggestion for the future of European harmonisation on dual-purpose companies will be offered.

Scholars have greatly improved our understanding of legitimacy and legitimation processes in recent years. Focusing mainly on organizations and institutional fields, mainstream organizational legitimacy theories assume that organizations are permanent. In so doing, projects—viewed as temporary organizations—like those involving natural resources and infrastructure development projects have been overlooked. In this article, our initial argument posits that a significant temporal distinction underpins the contrast in legitimacy between stable and established organizations and projects. We then develop and discuss two spectra that differentiate the legitimacy of a project from the legitimacy of the organization endorsing the project. Building on these spectra, we then theorize four interplay processes between the legitimacy of projects and the legitimacy of organizations: project reinforcement/degradation and organizational reinforcement/degradation. Our findings pave the way for new and unexplored research avenues on the legitimacy of projects.

The learning strategies offered by science for discovering the world by generating and testing hypotheses have been used abundantly to build decision-making heuristics. In contrast, decision-making heuristics for (re)designing the world are rarer. This paper develops a heuristic combining the exploratory power of chimeras with a design logic. Chimeras have long been used to foster imagination and build initially unknown futures. And recent advances in design theory show that in decision-making situations, chimeras can be generated as nonfalsifiable existential statements about desirable alternatives and events. Moreover, design theory offers learning operations that handle nonfalsifiable statements to generate new real objects. This paper uses these operations to build a rational heuristic that may or may not transform initial chimeras into reality. Its main effect is to ensure that stimulated learning leads to decision alternatives (whether pre-existing or novel) that surpass the initial optimal one. This paves the way for a class of design-based heuristics extending the main functions of Bayesian learning to a non-Bayesian world.

This article contributes to talent management (TM) research by offering a comprehensive view of TM in the micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSME) context. It captures and categorizes TM practices according to differences in formality and inclusivity, employee participation in TM, and market orientation. On the basis of 31 in-depth interviews with the top managers of 27 aerospace companies in Luxembourg, we propose a typology of TM in MSMEs. We identify differences in how companies define and manage talent and propose three main types of TM, namely, “planned,” “proactive,” and “reactive.” “Planned” TM sustains organizational growth through the focus on systematically assessing needs and anticipating the future. In contrast, “proactive” TM tests different TM methods to adapt to perceived needs and build the business further. Finally, “reactive” TM focuses on filling the current skill gap to maintain the existing market.

This study examines the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI), knowledge sharing (KS) and perceived team performance. Data from 209 respondents were analysed using hierarchical multiple regression analysis. In this study, we identified interaction patterns between the management dimensions of EI, KS and perceived team performance. A direct effect of KS on perceived team performance was found, yet EI is not a necessary precondition to the relationship. We further found that it is essential to differentiate between knowledge obtaining and knowledge providing and thus acknowledge the two-dimensionality of KS. We offer suggestions to scholars and practitioners concerned with the planning and management of KS in organisations.