British Journal of Management

An historical review of research in three major sub‐fields within marketing: market structure and segmentation, market networks and interfirm relationships, and market orientation and the implementation of the marketing concept, suggests that there remain a number of key issues in terms of significance and interpretation. It is noteworthy that these issues, which have important strategic and managerial implications have not, in general, been reflected in the content of key marketing textbooks. A number of more general issues can be derived which are relevant not only to future research in the marketing arena but also the wider context of strategy research.

Working across organizations has long been recognized as a characteristic of public management, but recent years have seen a worldwide intensification in partnership working. Rhetoric about the benefits is endemic but so are complaints about the difficulty of partnership working in practice. Understanding the way that collaborative approaches may provide value is therefore an essential element of understanding the changing roles of public‐sector organizations. The particular aim of this paper is to contribute to a growing understanding of the way in which individuals enact leadership roles in such situations. The focus is on partnership managers, whose main role is to organize the activities of a collaboration. The way in which partnership managers enact leadership is explored and insight into the kinds of activities that typically occupy them, the types of challenges and dilemmas that they face and typical ways in which they respond to these is provided. We suggest that the main categories of activities split into two opposing perspectives on leadership. We propose an overarching concept which suggests that collaborative leadership involves the management of a tension between ideology and pragmatism.

Tiến hành một đánh giá về văn liệu là một phần quan trọng của bất kỳ dự án nghiên cứu nào. Nhà nghiên cứu có thể xác định và đánh giá lãnh thổ tri thức liên quan để chỉ định một câu hỏi nghiên cứu nhằm phát triển thêm cơ sở tri thức. Tuy nhiên, các bản đánh giá 'mô tả' truyền thống thường thiếu tính toàn diện, và trong nhiều trường hợp, không được thực hiện như những mảnh ghép đích thực của khoa học điều tra. Do đó, chúng có thể thiếu phương tiện để hiểu những gì tập hợp các nghiên cứu đang nói. Những đánh giá này có thể bị nghiên cứu viên thiên vị và thường thiếu đi tính chặt chẽ. Hơn nữa, việc sử dụng các đánh giá về bằng chứng sẵn có để cung cấp cái nhìn sâu sắc và hướng dẫn cho can thiệp vào nhu cầu hoạt động của người thực hành và nhà làm chính sách chủ yếu là yếu tố thứ cấp. Đối với người thực hành, việc hiểu một khối chứng cứ thường mang tính mâu thuẫn đã trở nên ngày càng khó khăn hơn. Chất lượng của bằng chứng hỗ trợ việc ra quyết định và hành động đã bị đặt dấu hỏi, vì bằng chứng không đầy đủ hoặc hoàn chỉnh nghiêm trọng cản trở việc hình thành và thực thi chính sách. Khi nghiên cứu các cách mà các đánh giá quản lý dựa trên bằng chứng có thể đạt được, các tác giả đánh giá quy trình đánh giá hệ thống được sử dụng trong khoa học y học. Trong 15 năm qua, khoa học y học đã cố gắng cải thiện quy trình đánh giá bằng cách tổng hợp nghiên cứu một cách hệ thống, minh bạch và tái sản xuất với cả hai mục tiêu nâng cao cơ sở tri thức và thông tin hoá việc ra quyết định chính sách và thực hành. Bài báo này đánh giá mức độ mà quy trình đánh giá hệ thống có thể được áp dụng cho lĩnh vực quản lý nhằm tạo ra một khối dự trữ tri thức đáng tin cậy và nâng cao thực hành bằng cách phát triển nghiên cứu nhạy cảm với bối cảnh. Bài viết nêu bật các thách thức trong việc phát triển một phương pháp luận thích hợp.

Though there have been many prescriptive accounts of career development procedures and techniques, there has been little systematic research into how extensive their use is in Britain, how effective they are, or how participants in such programmes react to them. Following a review of the availability, effectiveness, and acceptability of such programmes, we report the results of a survey of 120 British managers undertaking a distance‐learning Master of Business Administration programme. In particular, findings are presented concerning the availability and usage of a range of such procedures and respondents' reactions to them in terms of their perceived fairness and usefulness for personal, organizational and career development. These studies help to identify features that characterize well‐received career development programmes.

The emerging digital transformation in the twenty‐first century is rapidly and significantly changing the business landscape. The fast‐changing activities, expectations and new modes of collaboration suggest it is time to review the current theoretical insights from strategic alliance (SA) research, which are based on assumptions from a different era. We therefore aim to stimulate multidisciplinary debate and theoretical reflections to better understand emerging paradoxes and challenges that contemporary firms face in the formation, evolution and dissolution of strategic alliances. Specifically, we offer alternative visions of SA research and suggest fresh applications or supplements of existing theoretical perspectives and research methods that can better address the research questions emerging from an era of digital transformation.

This paper examines year‐on‐year changes to the composition of performance peer groups used for relative performance evaluation in setting CEO pay in FTSE 100 companies and finds evidence of peer selection bias. The authors find that firms keep their peer groups weak by excluding relatively stronger performing peers. They also show that peer selection bias is less pronounced in firms with higher institutional investor ownership, which suggests that institutional investors might be aware of the risks of peer selection bias. The results suggest that peer group modifications can be viewed, at least in part, as an expression of managerial rent‐seeking.

Do compensation consultants drive up CEO pay for the benefit of managers, or do they design pay packages to benefit firm owners? Using a large sample of UK firms from the FTSE All‐Share Index over the 2003–2011 period, we show a positive correlation between the presence of compensation consultants and CEO pay. Importantly, isolating this effect is somewhat dependent on the endogenous selection of consultants and the statistical modelling strategy deployed. We find evidence that compensation consultants improve CEO compensation design when their expertise is of greater importance (e.g. during the post‐financial crisis period, or for firms that have particularly weak compensation policies). In addition, our findings show that compensation consultants increase CEO pay–performance sensitivity. The balance of evidence supports optimal contracting theory more than managerial power theory, but the authors caution the limits to this verification. We are careful to note that the more compelling evidence for the positive effect of pay consultants on CEOs is based on advanced methods (such as propensity score matching and difference‐in‐differences), and that more standard approaches (such as OLS and fixed effects) are unlikely to reveal the same level of causality of consultants on CEO pay.

This empirical study examines the relationship between corporate governance and organizational performance (OP), measured using Tobin's Q (TQ) in the context of an emerging economy for which, as yet, only a handful of studies have been conducted. We employ a system generalized method of moments approach controlling for endogeneity and test it on a newly created dataset comprising 324 listed firms in Pakistan. We find that board size, number of board committees and ownership concentration are positively linked with high TQ ratio, whilst board independence and CEO duality display a negative relationship. In terms of moderating effects, we find that ownership concentration negatively moderates the relationship between board independence and OP, as well as that of CEO duality and OP. The relationship between the number of board committees and OP is positively moderated by ownership concentration. Our findings contribute towards a better articulation and application of a more concrete measure of OP − that of the TQ ratio − whilst, at the same time, testing the board composition–performance relationship in the context of an upcoming and increasingly important emerging market. Wider applicability of results and policy implications are discussed.

This paper identifies and explains a potential tension between a firm's emphasis on customer orientation (CO) and the extent to which employees value CO as a success factor for individual performance. Based on self‐determination theory and CO implementation research, the authors propose that firm CO may represent both autonomous and controlled motivations for CO, but that employees’ CO is more strongly linked to individual performance when employees experience solely autonomous motivation. Hence, the authors expect a substitution effect whereby the link between employees’ CO and their performance is weaker when firm CO is high. Furthermore, the authors examine a boundary condition for the previous hypothesis and propose that performance‐contingent rewards have a positive effect on the internalization of the extrinsic motivation stemming from firm CO. Two multilevel studies with 979 employees and 201 top management team members from 132 firms support these hypotheses. Against previous research, these findings offer a new perspective on the effectiveness of CO initiatives, propose employees’ motivational states as the theoretical explanation for the heterogeneity in the link between employee CO and performance, and reappraise the role of performance‐contingent rewards in CO research. Managerial implications for the effective implementation of customer‐oriented initiatives within firms are provided.