Successor CEO Functional And Educational Backgrounds: Influence Of Predecessor Characteristics And Performance Antecedents

This study seeks to examine if boards consider CEO educational and functional background when choosing a new CEO. It also examines which factors determine whether the board of directors will seek an incoming CEO with a different educational and/or functional background from that of the current CEO. Using a sample of 832 successions between 1992 and 2009, we found that the outgoing CEO characteristics and the firm characteristics influence the selection of the incoming CEO functional backgrounds. We found an increase in the likelihood of firms hiring incoming CEOs with the same functional backgrounds as the outgoing CEOs. Incoming CEOs with functional backgrounds in engineering/manufacturing are more likely to be hired by research-oriented firms.Incoming CEOs with functional backgrounds in accounting/finance are more likely to be hired by poorly performing firms. We also find that firms are more likely to change the functional background of the successor relative to the predecessor when there has been poor prior performance and the firm has higher institutional investor ownership

An Integrative Model for Understanding and Managing Ethical Behavior in Business Organizations

Managing ethical behavior is a one of the most pervasive and complex problems facing business organizations today. Employees’ decisions to behave ethically or unethically are influenced by a myriad of individual and situational factors. Background, personality, decision history, managerial philosophy, and reinforcement are but a few of the factors which have been identified by researchers as determinants of employees’ behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas. The literature related to ethical behavior is reviewed in this article, and a model for understanding ethical behavior in business organizations is proposed. It is concluded that managing ethics in business organizations requires that managers engage in a concentrated effort which involves espousing ethics, behaving ethically, developing screening mechanisms, providing ethical training, creating ethics units and reinforcing ethical behavior

An Integrative Model for Understanding and Managing Ethical Behavior in Business Organizations

Managing ethical behavior is a one of the most pervasive and complex problems facing business organizations today. Employees\u27 decisions to behave ethically or unethically are influenced by a myriad of individual and situational factors. Background, personality, decision history, managerial philosophy, and reinforcement are but a few of the factors which have been identified by researchers as determinants of employees\u27 behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas. The literature related to ethical behavior is reviewed in this article, and a model for understanding ethical behavior in business organizations is proposed. It is concluded that managing ethics in business organizations requires that managers engage in a concentrated effort which involves espousing ethics, behaving ethically, developing screening mechanisms, providing ethical training, creating ethics units and reinforcing ethical behavior

Empowerment, self-advocacy and resilience

This article critiques the relationship between the aims of ‘learning disability’ policy and the realities of the self-advocacy movement. A previous study found that self-advocacy can be defined as the public recognition of the resilience of people with learning difficulties. In the current climate of Valuing People, partnership boards and ‘user empowerment’, understanding resilience is crucial to the support of authentic forms of self-advocacy. This article aims to address such a challenge. First, understandings of resilience in relation to self-empowerment and self-advocacy are briefly considered. Second, the current policy climate and service provision rhetoric are critically explored. Third, it is argued that we need to recognize how self-advocacy groups celebrate resilience through a variety of social and identity-shifting actions. How current policy responds to these aspects of resilience is questioned. It is concluded that the lived reality of self-advocacy needs to be foregrounded in any attempt to understand empowerment

Defining a Standard Metric for Electricity Savings

The growing investment by governments and electric utilities in energy efficiency programs highlights the need for simple tools to help assess and explain the size of the potential resource. One technique that is commonly used in this effort is to characterize electricity savings in terms of avoided power plants, because it is easier for people to visualize a power plant than it is to understand an abstraction such as billions of kilowatt-hours. Unfortunately, there is no standardization around the characteristics of such power plants. In this letter we define parameters for a standard avoided power plant that have physical meaning and intuitive plausibility, for use in back-of-the-envelope calculations. For the prototypical plant this article settles on a 500 MW existing coal plant operating at a 70% capacity factor with 7% T&D losses. Displacing such a plant for one year would save 3 billion kWh/year at the meter and reduce emissions by 3 million metric tons of CO2 per year. The proposed name for this metric is the Rosenfeld, in keeping with the tradition among scientists of naming units in honor of the person most responsible for the discovery and widespread adoption of the underlying scientific principle in question—Dr Arthur H Rosenfeld