British Journal of Management最新文献

Existing studies on bond covenants have focused primarily on firm-level factors and have largely overlooked the influence of the external environment, including the media. Furthermore, previous research on media coverage has failed to consider its impact on the bond market. This study attempts to fill these gaps by examining the impact of media coverage on bond covenants for a sample of Chinese corporate bonds from 2007 to 2017. Our findings reveal a negative relationship between media coverage and the number of bond covenants. Further analysis demonstrates that this negative impact is more pronounced for non-state-owned firms, in highly competitive industries, and in regions with a weak legal environment. Additionally, media coverage with a non-negative tone leads to a reduction in the number of bond covenants. Notably, government-controlled media exerts a more significant influence than market-oriented media on bond covenants. Furthermore, both media coverage and bond covenants contribute to lower debt costs and are found to be interchangeable in their effects. Our analysis is robust to corrections for the endogeneity of the relationship between media coverage and bond covenants.

This paper addresses the burgeoning interest in management studies concerning methodologies that generate societal or organizational impact. While much research has focused on tackling major societal and environmental challenges, less is known about how management research can benefit research participants. A promising approach involves developing novel methodologies that prioritize theoretical contributions through self-reflections by both researchers and participants. Drawing, as a participatory methodology, holds considerable potential since it can express feelings and embodied experiences that may be hard to put into words. This study advocates for a participatory visual methodology using drawing, inspired by Gestalt art therapy, as a means to create a caring relationship with the participant and promote self-reflection. The study offers three contributions that broaden the methodological scope of management studies: explaining the interplay between drawing, reflecting and theorizing; demonstrating how visual analysis can integrate the individual and their environment by drawing on Gestalt therapy's concept of contact boundary; and explaining how drawing can promote accountability in research with participants. To illustrate the contributions, the paper draws on two research projects that highlight the significance of self-reflection in relation to embodied experiences and explain why it is important for both researchers and participants.

This study explores how entrepreneurs’ extent of experience of business failure affects the level of negative emotional response (NER) they experience, moderating the level of personal growth that occurs after business failure. Contrary to common assumption, the study finds no significant relationship between the extent of failure experience and the level of NER. The results show that many entrepreneurs demonstrate personal growth following business failure, however, the extent of failure experience and the level of NER. This interaction moderates the level of personal growth for the entrepreneur and suggests that high levels of failure experience interfere with the level of personal growth obtained. The study contributes to theory by providing insights into the processes and consequences of entrepreneurial failure. In particular, the study brings together key threads of debate on personal growth and failure to develop and test conceptual arguments, and further explores the way entrepreneurship scholars think about emotion, business failure and its impact on the individual and society.

Previous research has stressed the importance of the relationship between foreign divestment and subsequent firm performance. Yet, controversy remains, as some authors suggest that foreign divestment has a positive effect on firm performance, and others propose that foreign divestment has negative performance effects. To help reconcile this controversy, we first explicate existing arguments and argue that in the context of retail (de-)internationalisation, foreign divestment will have a predominantly negative effect on retailers’ financial performance. We then draw on organisational learning theory to argue that this negative performance effect of foreign divestment is contingent on (a) the spatial dispersion of previously divested foreign operations (i.e. the extent of geographical diversity of the foreign divestments the multinational enterprise [MNE] has conducted over a specified period of time), and (b) the temporal dispersion of previously divested foreign operations (i.e. the time between prior divestment episodes). Drawing on a panel of some of the largest retail MNEs over the 20-year period 1997–2016, we find that foreign divestment has a negative effect on retailers’ subsequent performance. Our results also indicate that the negative performance effect of foreign divestment is effectively mitigated by retailers’ prior divestment experience in spatially diverse and temporally dispersed settings.

Recent studies suggest that greater exposure to the market for corporate control matters for managers and shareholders since it affects firms’ ex-post risk of experiencing a stock price crash. The findings though question the direction of the effect. In contrast, in this study, we are the first to examine the effects of firms’ ex-ante risk of experiencing a stock price crash, a likely antecedent of which is managers’ concealment of news on aspects of the market for corporate control. We find that higher crash risk leads to greater takeover target likelihood. This relationship, which is robust to duly circumventing reverse causality, depends to a significant extent on inferior managerial quality and greater managerial discretion around financial accruals, affording richer insight into the notion that correction of managerial behaviour is a stimulus for the market for corporate control, but one that depends on the likely extent of managers’ concealment of news. We also concurrently find that actual takeover targets with higher crash risk generate a lower bid premium and receive more payment with stock. Overall, our findings strongly suggest that decision-making in the market for corporate control is at least partially explained by incentives linked to opportunistic prices and takeovers of lemons.

Blockchain has emerged as a key Industry 4.0 technology, enabling novel forms of governance and coordination mechanism among organizations and markets. However, extant literature has largely focused on the technical aspects of blockchain, with limited attention to the behavioural and institutional aspects. In this paper, we argue that blockchain-based smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations represent the potential for a radical departure from traditional forms of contractual governance and hierarchy, carrying profound implications for the design and governance of economic transaction and organizational structures. We elucidate how blockchain technologies, characterized by transparency, immutability, programmability and decentralization, reduce transaction costs and establish an industrialized and trustless transactional governance system. Finally, we present an agenda for future research, highlighting the need for new theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence to understand the impact of blockchain on organizational design and forms.

The psychological attributes of business angels are an important but understudied determinant of business angels’ investment behaviour. We derive hypotheses on how psychological attributes (i.e. clout, risk-taking, analytical thinking) affect business angels’ investments in successful portfolio ventures. Our theorized mechanisms draw on cognitive biases (i.e. overconfidence bias, loss-aversion bias, confirmation bias) to explain how business angels’ psychological attributes could affect their selection of portfolio ventures. Empirically, we perform a language-based text analysis using Twitter data to gain insights into the psychological attributes of 1511 US business angels who made 5209 investments. Our results show that the psychological attributes of clout, risk-taking and analytical thinking can indeed affect business angels’ likelihood of investing in portfolio ventures that successfully acquire follow-on funding, highlighting the importance of psychological attributes in business angel investments.

We investigate the relationship between operational leanness and institutional ownership. Based on a sample of 12,291 firm-year observations of US manufacturing firms from 1998 to 2020, we find leaner firms to attract significantly more institutional investors – both in terms of the fraction of shares held and the number of institutional investors holding shares of the firm. This finding holds in several tests addressing endogeneity concerns. Contrary to studies investigating the relationship between operational leanness and operating performance or credit ratings, our results do not provide consistent evidence that this relationship is also of a concave shape. However, we provide evidence that the relationship is stronger (i) for firms with weak corporate governance and high firm-specific monitoring costs and (ii) for active institutions, suggesting that not only firm performance considerations but also perceived lower agency costs are important mechanisms explaining why institutional investors prefer lean manufacturing firms. Taken together, these findings contribute to our understanding of institutional investors’ preferences in general and across institution types.

With ChatGPT being promoted to and by academics for writing scholarly articles more effectively, we ask what kind of knowledge does ChatGPT produce, what this means for our reflexivity as responsible management educators/researchers, and how an absence of reflexivity disqualifies us from shaping management knowledge in responsible ways. We urgently need to grasp what makes human knowledge distinct compared with knowledge generated by ChatGPT et al. Thus, we first explain how ChatGPT operates and unpack its intrinsic epistemological limitations. Using high-probability choices that are derivative, ChatGPT has no stake in the knowledge it produces and is thus likely prone to offering irresponsible outputs. By contrast, genuine human thinking—embodied in a contingent socio-cultural setting—uses low-probability choices both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the box of training data, making it creative, contextual and committed. We conclude that the use of ChatGPT is wholly incompatible with scientific responsibility and responsible management.

Unlike previous generations of artificial intelligence (AI), AI assistants today can autonomously perform actions without human input or intervention. Several studies have proposed but not tested the notion that increased levels of AI autonomy may ultimately conflict with consumers’ fundamental need for autonomy themselves. Across five experiments (N = 1981), including representative samples and pre-registered hypotheses, we investigate consumer responses to high (vs. low) AI autonomy in the context of online shopping. The results show a pronounced negative effect of high AI autonomy on consumers’ adoption intentions – an effect mediated by consumers’ relative state of powerlessness in the presence of high AI autonomy. However, when consumers face situations characterized by scarcity, such as when preferred options are being sold out rapidly (e.g. Black Friday), the aversive aspects of high (vs. low) AI autonomy are attenuated. Together, these findings offer novel insights regarding whether, when and why consumers are willing to adopt high (vs. low)-autonomy AI assistants in online shopping settings.