Refine
Document Type
- Article (8) (show_all)
Language
- English (8)
Has Fulltext
- yes (8) (show_all)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (8)
Keywords
- Familienunternehmen (2)
- Family business (2)
- Advisor (1)
- Affection (1)
- Asia (1)
- Asien (1)
- Auswirkungen (1)
- Berater (1)
- Bibliothek (1)
- Breach of trust (1)
Institute
- Chair of Family Business (1)
- Chair of Leadership (1)
- INTES Institute of Family Business (1)
- Kühne Foundation Endowed Chair of Logistics Management (1)
- Mercator Endowed Chair of Demand Management & Sustainable Transport (1)
- WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management (1)
- WHU Financial Accounting & Tax Center (FAccT Center) (1)
- WHU Library (1)
Today's global business landscape is marked by intricate technological and societal challenges, intensified by geopolitical shifts and economic disparities. The expectations for CEOs have undoubtedly evolved, now requiring a form of adaptive leadership capable of steering through unprecedented disruptions, managing vast organizational and environmental complexities, and navigating an unstable geopolitical landscape.
Added to these challenges is the urgent need to build inclusive, purpose-driven organizations that resonate with an increasingly demanding and discerning workforce.
In light of these transformative changes, a pressing question looms large for corporate boards and stakeholders alike: Are European CEOs adequately equipped and prepared for the future?
To address this, we carried out extensive empirical research on the 600 largest publicly listed corporations in Europe across 14 countries. We examined the life histories and career paths of approximately 1,350 CEOs. Our aim is to offer a comprehensive assessment of CEO profiles, highlighting strengths and potential challenges in the face of specific strategic imperatives. Our overarching findings underscore a duality; while there has been commendable progress in certain areas, distinct gaps remain in others, and these disparities further vary across European markets.
Future oriented libraries can make use of the current start-up trend. An orientation towards new and unorthodox target groups can lead to an enhanced extension of demand and can emphasize the status of libraries. The library of the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management is considering to involve a new target group, start-up founders amongst their alumni. To that end, a survey was carried out and evaluated in cooperation with the Institute of Information Science at the TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences in form of a bachelor thesis, which this article is based upon. Here, a structured pre-analysis tries to determine the demand of this specific target group (founders) and develops a concept to serve the demand of this target group specifically. The example of the case study illustrates a method for target groups specific information demand and also checks the consequences for libraries and their services who venture out of their regular clientele.
Inspire but don't interfere
(2021)
Managers play a pivotal role in the innovation process; yet, the mechanisms through which managers enhance or undermine innovation are not well understood. Drawing upon self-concordance theory, we argue that managers can augment employees’ self-concordance—defined as the congruence of goals and actions with inner values and preferences—through transformational behavior and thereby contribute to innovation. However, transformational behavior is closely coupled to another form of influence, namely process management, the attempt to directly manage innovation-related activities. This form of managerial influence reduces employees’ self-concordance and thereby undermines innovation. We test our conceptual model in a sample of 188 innovation projects using a contextualized method that asked employees to assess their self-concordance and their managers’ behavior during each project. Managers evaluated for each project the innovativeness of the outcome. Multi-level path-analysis provided support for our hypotheses. We discuss future research implications to disentangle innovation-facilitating and innovation-undermining facets of managerial influence.
The present study investigates how family firms respond to disruptive industry changes. We aim to investigate which factors prevent or support family firms` adoption of disruptive innovations in their industry and which mechanisms lead to more or less successful coping with disruptive change. Our analysis is based on 24 qualitative interviews with top executives and on secondary data from an industry in which disruptive innovations dramatically changed the way business was generated. The industry in question is the mail order industry, which, in its early days, disrupted the retail business. When the Internet and, with it, ecommerce started to disrupt the industry in the late 1990s, the industry was characterized by a high proportion of family firms and a low level of innovativeness. While incumbent firms had been very successful for decades, most of them were confronted with serious turbulence when new entrants started changing the face of the industry. Our findings show that different factors impact reactions to disruptive industry change in two different phases, namely, opportunity recognition and opportunity implementation. While some of the influencing factors are determined by industry factors, family influence may function for better or worse for incumbent firms. Specifically, we find that in firms with a family disruptor, a family member in a powerful position who drives the adoption of the new technology, hindrances can be overcome and firms tend to show more successful strategies when reacting to the disruptive industry change.
By building on foundations from psychology, we aim to enhance academic understanding of the advising process in family businesses. We find evidence, based on rich qualitative data, suggesting that trust serves as a key construct in the relationship between family businesses and their advisors. In particular, we empirically show and theorize that trusting relationships evolve via a nonlinear process characterized by a constant interplay between cognitive and—increasingly important—affective assessments of family business trustors. The following types of trust emerge from these internal assessments: an intention to trust, which develops into perceived trust and finally results in behavioral trust.
In e-commerce, customers are usually offered a menu of home delivery time windows of which they need to select exactly one, even though at least some customers may be more exible. To exploit the exibility of such customers, we propose to introduce exible delivery time slots, defined as any combination of such regular time windows (not necessarily adjacent). In selecting a exible time slot (out of a set of windows that form the exible product), the customer agrees to be informed only shortly prior to the dispatching of the delivery vehicle in which regular time window the goods will arrive. In return for providing this exibility, the company may offer the customer a reduced delivery charge and/or highlight the environmental benefits. Our framework also can accommodate customized exible slots where customers can self-select a set of regular slots in which a delivery may take place.
The vehicle routing problem (VRP) in the presence of exible time slots bookings corresponds to a VRP with multiple time windows. We build on literature on demand management and vehicle routing for attended home delivery, as well as on exible products. These two concepts have not yet been combined, and indeed the results from the exible products literature do not carry over directly because future expected vehicle routing implications need to be taken into account. The main methodological contribution is the development of a tractable linear programming formulation that links demand management decisions and routing cost implications, whilst accounting for customer choice behavior. The output of this linear program provides information on the (approximate) opportunity cost associated with specific orders and informs a tractable dynamic pricing policy for regular and exible slots. Numerical experiments, based on realistically-sized scenarios, indicate that expected profit may increase significantly depending on demand intensity when adding exible slots rather than using only regular slots.