Signaling intelligence, signaling theory, Project A, and excellent management history research

Citation

Carraher, S. (2015), "Signaling intelligence, signaling theory, Project A, and excellent management history research", Journal of Management History, Vol. 21 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMH-02-2015-0007

Signaling intelligence, signaling theory, Project A, and excellent management history research

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Management History, Volume 21, Issue 2

Welcome to Volume 21 Issue 2 of the Journal of Management History (JMH). While I write this, I am waiting for the Association of Business Schools (ABS) to release their new ratings of journals, as we have sought to be reclassified. As of our last issue, we had 3,545 citations and now we are at 3,916. Our H-index has increased from 25 to 26, and our G-index has moved from 42 to 44. We currently have an Age Weighted Citation Rate of 434.34. At the beginning of Volume 20, we had an acceptance rate of 17.1 per cent. At the beginning of Volume 21, we had an 8.7 per cent acceptance rate based upon papers with final decisions – which counts editorials – and 7.2 per cent based upon competitive papers. Right now, we are at a 3.2 per cent acceptance rate based upon all papers with a final decision and 2.7 per cent based upon competitive papers due to a last minute rush of submissions at the end of 2014. I believe that we should level out around 10 per cent around the end of 2015. I was thinking of what to talk about, and in the last issue, I had mentioned that I had thought about talking about signaling intelligence and how it differs from signaling theory and when I showed that to a colleague apparently it did not come across as a joke, which is what it was meant to be, as signaling intelligence deals with the gathering of information typically for the purpose of spying, while signaling theory comes out of biology and deals with how animals attract mates. His comments did get me to thinking about how we could borrow more theories from other fields as just as signaling theory can be used to explain how animals seek mates, it could also be used to seek to explain how organizations attract employees, how employees attract employers and how organizations attract customers. The basic ideas of signaling intelligence could also be used to examine these same decision-making processes. For instance, right now, I am directing some longitudinal studies looking at expatriation, mentoring and performance going from a year before going overseas through a three-year appointment to a year after the assignment. I am seeking to bring together parts of Project A and signaling theory but could also borrow some ideas from signaling intelligence when it comes to the building of the models. I am also using Terri Scandura’s multiple mentors model whereby the expatriates have a mentor to get them ready for expatriation, they have three mentors while overseas (two in the overseas location – one to help them to adapt to the job and the other to help them adopt to the locations – and one at corporate headquarters to help them stay connected with the home office), and upon repatriation, they then have two mentors – one to help them get used to the USA again and one to help them adjust back in to their new job at corporate headquarters. As many of you might remember Project A was an old military project seeking to explain a higher percentage of variance than is done by typical instruments and frameworks like the Big Five personality factors. I am getting around 1,400 variables per expatriate. I had one comment about it just last week when she said that if she had known how many questions there were going to be that she would have been overwhelmed but because they were stretched out over ten assessments and five years that they did not seem that overwhelming. I, on the other hand, have been overwhelmed with the projects, as I have found that after the collection of the 1,400+ variables per expatriate that in many cases, the organizations have hundreds of additional variables of performance data that they could also provide to me.

As I write this editorial, I am in my office at the University of Texas at Dallas, and I find myself thinking about why individuals would want to publish in this journal and how it can influence individuals’ careers. While I have had the honor of doing several letters of support for authors going for promotion and/or tenure and done training of professors and doctoral students at some of the leading universities in the world, last semester, I was confronted by my students about the potential value of performing research and publishing. I like many of Humboldt’s about education and the importance of research in higher education. I then challenged them to calculate the value of research and publications for their non-academic careers. We often seem to forget that many of the major contributors to the management history field like Taylor, Dennison, etc. were not academics, so why in the world would they want to perform research and publish papers? According to Gomez-Mejia and Balkin (1992, p. 944), “each top-tier article published by a faculty member had a value of $1,210 in 1988, a future value of $9,589, and a cumulative annuity of $84,134 in 2011” but this is based on a 9 per cent inflation rate. My students chose to examine what the value for them being involved in research might be and it was a tad bit greater than for a faculty member. They assumed that they would likely have a career of about 40 years and used inflation rates of 2 to 4 per cent. Neeley (2014) interviewed Mike Peng and he (Mike) said that without research and publishing, we should rename our school as “The High School of Texas at Dallas”, as research and publishing are about contributing to the creation of human knowledge, and without this, universities are little different from high schools. They talked with previous students who had been involved in research and some who had avoided being involved in research. The lowest value for the present value of an annuity was $100,000, and it went up to over $2,500,000 – for one research paper. The Age Weighted Citation Rate also seems to serve as a good proxy for a professor’s potential contribution to a student’s learning and future earnings potential. The students then examined the potential organizational value of research. They were surprised to find that some projects can be worth millions of dollars to an organization, but there is a lot of research that has limited economic value.

We begin this issue with “Activist Manager: The Enduring Contribution of Henry S. Dennison to Management and Organization Studies” by Kyle Bruce of the MGSM at Macquarie University Sydney New South Wales in Australia. The overriding contribution of his is to our knowledge about Dennison’s progressive company practices and thinking that were novel contributions that influenced leading thinkers of his day. His lifelong concern with organizations – their governance and management – and their purpose, as well as that of their leaders in wider society, is as relevant today as it was during his lifetime. Also of relevance today is Dennison’s concern with the “human side” of industry. At the center of Dennison’s labor relations’ strategy was giving workers a degree of dialogue and consultation concerning vital company decisions and creating a family of workers and managers committed to the organization’s goals because all possessed a stake in the company’s fortunes. Apart from surfacing Dennison’s contributions to management and organization studies to broaden our knowledge as management historians, the second critical contribution of the paper is to problematize the shared assumptions underlying the mainstream perception of Scientific Management and Human Relations. Scientific management as practiced by Dennison was not inherently autocratic but rather was very much participatory; it was not narrowly focused and grounded on a simple, “economistic” view of human motivation, but rather on far more sophisticated view of humans as “social animals”. This complements both the revisionist history of the scientific management movement that has been the object of much research amongst a wide range of social scientists. He calls in to question the mythology of Taylor as “demon” and Mayo as “savior” that seems to be the mainstream of conventional wisdom. In this context, and by way of suggestions for further research, a critical question that remains unanswered is how and why this orthodoxy has been sustained for so long, particularly in the face of sustained primary evidence demonstrating it to be factually untrue? For instance, in an interview that I hope to publish in one of the next couple of issues of the JMH, we have the Historian of the Academy of Management discussing problems with the Hawthorne studies and how much of the underlying basis of the Human Relations movement is based on potentially distorted information.

This is followed with “An Intellectual Journey into the Historical Evolution of Marketing Research in Brand Switching Behavior – Past, Present and Future” by Osama Sam Al-kwifi of Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Zafar U. Ahmed of Lebanese American University. The aim of this article is to explore the historical development of brands and the development of the literature on brand switching to define the antecedents that cause switching behavior among consumers and the impact of switching on market share of companies. They tracked the historical development of brands using different secondary sources. Then an intensive literature review is conducted on brand switching at the consumer and business levels. At each level, studies on brand switching are divided into several categories, such as house-hold products, technological products and service providers, and the common factors behind switching for each category and between categories are determined. They find that no single model can explain brand switching behavior of consumers or businesses across different industries and products. This is followed with “Corporate governance as a reform movement” by Bernard Mees of the Centre for Sustainable Organisations and Work at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia. In this paper, Dr Mees considers the ways in which the agency theory has crowded out other approaches to understanding the governance of modern businesses. The article seeks to rescue the meaning and context which informed the American corporate governance reform movement originally and demonstrates how the economically predicated agency approach became dominant in academic considerations of corporate governance.

This is followed with “How Theory X Style of Management Arose from a Fundamental Attribution Error” by H. Kristl Davison of the University of Mississippi and Jack Smothers of the University of Southern Indiana. H. Kristl Davison is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Mississippi. She received her MS and PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Tulane University, while Jack Smothers is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Southern Indiana and he obtained a PhD in Management at the University of Mississippi. The purpose of their article is to propose that the Theory X style of Management arose from a fundamental attribution error, in which managers assumed that employees’ lack of motivation was a disposition rather than a function of unmotivating work situations. They reviewed the nature of work during the Industrial Revolution from a job characteristics model perspective, and compare Theory X and Theory Y perspectives in terms of their emphasis on dispositional or situational influences on behavior. They found that factory work performed during the industrial revolution was likely to be deficient in terms of the five core dimensions of the job characteristics model, and would have been unmotivating to the employees. Because of the fundamental attribution error, managers would have assumed that workers were unmotivated by nature, but the situation was likely the cause of their lack of motivation. The next article is “The historical evolution of employee engagement and self-efficacy constructs: an empirical examination in a non-western country” by Grace K. Dagher of Lebanese American University, Olga Chapa of the University of Houston Victoria and Noura Junaid of Bentley University. They have sought to highlight the historical roots of employee engagement and empirically examine the influence of self-efficacy on the three dimensions of employee engagement (vigor, dedication and absorption). They used a sample of 426 male and female respondents in the service industry from Lebanon to examine what they hypothesized. They find that the history of management continues to be the backbone of the modern concepts. Although the term employee engagement was not used in scientific management or in the human relations movement, the characteristics were incorporated in these early schools. The three factors of employee engagement explained 78 per cent of the total variance of employee engagement construct and were significantly influenced by self-efficacy. I would like to see more research like this submitted to the JMH. Finally, we have “Board interlocks and corporate performance among firms listed abroad” by Mike W. Peng of the University of Texas at Dallas, Canan C. Mutlu of the University of Texas at Dallas, Steve Sauerwald of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Kevin Y. Au of Chinese University of Hong Kong and Denis Y.L. Wang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Within this article, although strategic networks such as interlocking directorates have been found to affect a number of strategic behaviors, the link connecting board interlocks and corporate performance has remained ambiguous. Taking advantage of a relationship-intensive context whereby such a link is likely to be especially important, this article explores the interlock-performance relationship among mainland Chinese firms listed in Hong Kong. The data come from a particularly interesting historical period – the early 1990s prior to Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China. They also shed considerable light on the strategic networks of firms whose shares are listed abroad, which have been under-studied despite their rising importance in the global economy. Empirically, they find that good performance in an earlier period helps draw outside directors in a later period, and that network centrality and certain types of interlocks help improve performance, albeit with varying degrees. Overall, their results answer the question whether strategic networks such as interlocks matter for corporate performance with a qualified “yes”. They have used data from the 200 largest firms in Hong Kong. This is another example of a paper that I would like to see more of submitted to the JMH, as they have brought in real empirical data to examine historical concepts and hypotheses. Dagher et al. provide an excellent example at the individual level, while Peng et al. provide an excellent example at the organizational level. While I do not expect to have a large upswing in empirical papers like these ones, even with our non-empirical ones, we need to be speaking to concepts upon which others can build future research. For instance, looking at Davison and Smothers’ work, it came to mind why not have future research which shall test what they have discussed as well as looking at bringing in individual motivation potential scores to see the degree to which they might mitigate the relationship, or looking at Al-kwifi and Ahmed’s work, I know that empirical work can examine some of the issues that they have addressed, as I have coauthored several papers with a colleague from marketing which has done so – but more needs to be done like this.

I trust that you will enjoy these articles as much as I have and that they will provide you with ideas for future research which you can submit to the JMH. By the next issue, we will hopefully have broken over the 4,000 citation threshold as well as be reclassified by the ABS.

Shawn Carraher

References

Gomez-Mejia, L.R. and Balkin, D.B. (1992), “Determinants of faculty pay: anagency theory perspective”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 35 No. 5, pp.921-955.

Neeley, A. (2014), “The University of Texas at Dallas interview with ProfessorMike Peng”, Journal of Technology Management in China, Vol. 9 No. 2.