British Journal of Management最新文献

Product take-back programmes based on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) are critical in advancing the Circular Economy; however, their effectiveness depends on the underlying governance models. While Collective Producer Responsibility (CPR) dominates in regions like the European Union (EU), it is often criticised for failing to help incentivise sustainable product design. In contrast, Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR) is proposed by some studies as more effective in incentivising sustainable product design, but its efficacy lacks empirical evidence and support. Our research fills this gap by empirically investigating how IPR-based product take-back affects firm-level environmental and financial performance. Drawing on the Practice-Based View, we hypothesise the effects of IPR-based product take-back on Circular Product Design (CPD) and firm performance. Based on survey data from 227 Chinese manufacturers and 9 post-survey interviews, we find that IPR-based product take-back does not directly impact environmental or financial performance. However, it positively impacts CPD, through which it exerts an indirect positive effect on both environmental and financial performance. These results contrast sharply with the EU's CPR-dominant model, in which producers have little incentive to alter product designs. Our findings underscore the significance of EPR governance models in shaping the effectiveness of product take-back programmes and have important theoretical and practical implications.

Employees in supply chain (SC) functions are increasingly assigned sustainability-related responsibilities and expected to engage in green behaviours. While prior research distinguishes voluntary from required green behaviours, the SC context suggests that employees perceive varying degrees of voluntariness and obligation. This study investigates why some SC employees engage more proactively than others, particularly in required green behaviours, and how they influence peers. Using semi-structured interviews with managers in SC and sustainability roles across five companies, we adopt a multi-level case study approach to examine proactive employee green behaviours (EGBs). We identify three levels of engagement—proactive, active compliance and passive—and interpret them through self-determination and proactivity theories. Findings indicate that employees with broader role breadth and a combination of internalized and externalized felt responsibility are more likely to engage proactively and influence colleagues. We develop a multi-level theoretical framework depicting how EGBs are co-shaped by individual-level factors (e.g. role breadth, felt responsibility) and external influences from peers and supervisors (external felt responsibility). By adopting a role- and responsibility-based perspective, we provide practical guidance for job design and establish a foundation for future research on the dynamic, multi-level interplay between individual and organizational factors in shaping EGBs.

This study examines how sell-side analysts’ silence following corporate site visits in China conveys private information. Using detailed site-visit data, we find that analysts who refrain from issuing reports within 15 days after a visit are associated with subsequent negative earnings surprises, even after controlling for regulatory censorship concerns and alternative explanations. The association is stronger when site-visit discussions have a more negative tone, place greater emphasis on forward-looking information and contain more numerical detail, and it is particularly strong for analysts facing higher buy-side pressure. Analyst silence is also associated with negative market reactions and increased institutional selling after visits, particularly for stocks subject to greater buy-side pressure. This pattern is consistent with analyst silence stemming from pressure from institutional clients and possible disapproval from management. These results extend the literature on managerial and insider silence to the context of sell-side analysts, offering new insights into how private information may be selectively transmitted between analysts and their institutional clients, and have important implications for regulators concerned with market information efficiency.

This study documents that unionization imposes a heterogeneous impact on working capital policies. We argue and demonstrate that the impact of unionization on working capital depends on financial performance. Specifically, the rent extraction effect incentivizes profitable firms to reduce working capital to gain bargaining advantages, whereas the operating risk effect motivates less profitable firms to increase working capital to hedge against risk. To establish causality, we employ instrumental variables based on the proportions of female and part-time workers, as well as a regression discontinuity design (RDD) based on union election outcomes. A difference-in-differences (DID) analysis exploiting the staggered adoption of right-to-work laws further confirms that unions influence firm behavior through their bargaining power. Additional mechanism analyzes validate the existence of both the rent extraction and operating risk effects. Moreover, we find that the impact of unionization on working capital is independent of firms’ cash policies, suggesting that cash and working capital are not perfect substitutes. Finally, we provide evidence that shareholders perceive unions’ influence on working capital as value-enhancing. Overall, the findings illuminate a bright side of union power and offer new insights into how labor relations shape corporate liquidity management.

Conflicts in families with multiple children have remained a common yet unresolved issue in family firms. In this study, we provide a novel perspective by drawing on family system theory on how the adoption of structural separation strategy can help address the issue of conflicts in family firms. We theorize that founders with multiple children pursue a higher degree of diversification—structural separation of family business—to mitigate conflicts amongst children. We further theorize that the effect of the number of founders’ children on diversification is weaker with greater gender diversity of children, higher age gaps of children and with a profound influence of harmony culture. Our empirical analysis of Chinese listed family firms (2003–2023) provides strong support for these theoretical predictions, with the notable exception of harmony culture's influence, which contradicts our hypothesized prediction. Our study extends the implications of family system theory by applying its assumption of structural separation strategy to family firms’ literature, advancing research on how conflicts in family firms can be mitigated through diversification and exploring family conflicts as a novel predictor of diversification in family firms.

Although the renewed interest in retro-games has drawn attention to the importance of nostalgia in enhancing their market appeal, the antecedents of nostalgia arousal and its implications for gamers’ behaviour remain underexplored. To address this gap, we follow a discovery-oriented approach that synthesizes literature and field-based insights to conceptualize the psychological characteristics associated with retro-game-evoked nostalgia and the role of nostalgia in affective and behavioural responses. We empirically tested our conceptualizations using a survey study. The findings showed retro-game-evoked nostalgia to be affected by the need for competence, the inclination to escape reality, social stability and the states of boredom and self-discontinuity. In addition, fun derived from playing and nostalgia contributed significantly to players’ satisfaction with the gaming experience, particularly when games were perceived as authentic. Finally, our results show that satisfaction with gaming influences retro-game purchases and fosters opportunities for engaging users widely. These findings provide insights into consumer characteristics shaping the retro-gaming market. Drawing on the differences between retro-gaming and other consumption contexts, we shed light on the behavioural implications of retro-game-evoked nostalgia and the situational conditions facilitating positive behavioural responses. These findings offer practical guidance on how to effectively target a market segment likely to continue growing.

Although the emergence of big data analytics (BDA) has stimulated enormous investments from contemporary businesses, empirical evidence tends to remain limited about how firms should leverage their BDA initiatives. There is also a need to understand how BDA integrates with organizational capabilities to drive performance gains. We draw on the strategic alignment framework grounded in dynamic capabilities theory to examine combinations of BDA dimensions with other organizational resources, such as internal competencies and external integration with supply chain actors to drive operational and market competitiveness in realizing performance. Our hypotheses find support in a combination of primary and secondary data gathered from 207 dyads of business and IT executives. Our results suggest that simply implementing BDA tools and techniques do not automatically translate into financial gains. Instead, it must align with the firm's strategic integration capabilities to leverage operational and market capabilities. Our research delineates the mechanisms by which the business value of BDA capability is realized and provides useful guidance to managers and consultants in implementing BDA.

In organizations that delegate decisions, headquarters may sometimes overrule decisions that subunit managers make based on decision rights that have been granted to them. Such interventions are common and are often argued to be detrimental to the motivation of subunit managers. However, little is known about their consequences for strategy implementation. We introduce the construct of an intervention frequency climate to examine the broader, organization-level functioning of headquarters interventions in the context of strategy implementation. The construct captures the organization-wide headquarters’ intervention behaviour instead of the dyadic perspective that has dominated previous research on headquarters intervention. We highlight intervention frequency as a relevant dimension and argue that a climate of high intervention frequency may be perceived positively by subunits. In contrast to earlier research, which has emphasized the adverse effects of interventions, we argue that a high intervention frequency climate is thus positively associated with subunit strategy implementation. Using a multi-level study over two periods of time, we find robust support for our hypotheses that a high intervention frequency climate is associated with subunit strategy implementation.

Prior academic research on hedge funds focuses predominantly on fund strategies in relation to market timing, stock picking and performance persistence, among others. However, the hedge fund industry lacks a universal classification scheme for strategies, leading to potentially biased fund classifications and inaccurate expectations of hedge fund performance. This paper uses machine learning techniques to address this issue. First, it examines whether the reported fund strategies are consistent with their performance. Second, it examines the potential impact of hedge fund classification on managerial decision-making. Our results suggest that for most reported strategies there is no alignment with fund performance. Classification matters in terms of abnormal returns and risk exposures, although the market factor remains consistently the most important exposure for most clusters and strategies. An important policy implication of our study is that the classification of hedge funds affects asset and portfolio allocation decisions, and the construction of the benchmarks against which performance is judged.

Within leadership research, mindfulness is increasingly viewed as being critical for leadership effectiveness. Central to leadership is the ability to support, motivate, and engage followers – that is, the capacity to have influence. Mindfulness has been proposed as a valuable enabler of effective leadership influence. In this study, we synthesize a growing body of research on mindfulness in leadership contexts by reviewing how and under what conditions mindful leaders influence their followers. We meta-analysed two associations: leaders’ mindfulness and leadership behaviours directed towards followers; and leaders’ mindfulness and follower outcomes (i.e., well-being, performance and leader–follower relations). Based on a pool of 109 studies with 396 effect sizes and 19,887 participants, we found that leaders with higher mindfulness engage in more follower-centred leadership behaviours, such as more transformational and authentic leadership (r = 0.39 [0.22, 0.54]), and as a result have better relations with followers (r = 0.33 [0.25, 0.40]), and have followers with better well-being (r = 0.33 [0.25, 0.41]) and performance (r = 0.35 [0.29, 0.41]). Longitudinal and emerging intervention evidence corroborates this pattern of findings. Key contributions of this review are critically evaluating the quality of existing studies and outlining a research agenda to advance this field.