Showing papers on "Opportunism published in 2018"

Coworking-spaces : how a phenomenon of the sharing economy builds a novel trend for the workplace and for entrepreneurship

Abstract: The sharing economy brings a new phenomenon—coworking-spaces. One aspect of coworking-spaces is the sharing of office space; another is the sharing of social spaces beside the office. Both give rise to social interactions and thus knowledge and idea exchanges which might provide more than a mere sharing of working-spaces but of entrepreneurship or of incubation. Coworking-spaces stimulate the finding of mates for teams, projects, and entrepreneurship. This paper introduces coworking-spaces into management research. We deliver an understanding of coworking-spaces and then identify key factors which lead to our conceptual model. Our model assumes that performance, especially entrepreneurial performance improves by the learning processes among coworking-users that take upon the individual efficacy, trust and community among coworking-users. All the concepts have a positive relation. Yet, opportunism, often as knowledge leakage, will directly and indirectly spoil learning processes and entrepreneurial performance as it reduces their antecedents trust and community building.

Institutions and opportunism in buyer–supplier exchanges: the moderated mediating effects of contractual and relational governance

Abstract: The marketing channel literature has paid limited attention to institutional environments that constrain buyer–supplier exchanges, though such institutions are fundamental determinants of transaction costs, and thus of the occurrence of opportunism in the buyer–supplier dyads. Drawing on transaction cost economics and institutional theory, this study uncovers the critical influence of formal and informal institutions (i.e., legal effectiveness and networking expenditure) on the use of governance in deterring opportunism, as well as the moderating role of government support on the efficacy of governance mechanism. The findings from a buyer–supplier dyadic survey and 2 secondary datasets reveal that legal effectiveness mitigates opportunism through increased use of both contractual and relational governance; in contrast, networking expenditure reduces opportunism through relational governance, yet increases opportunism via lowering contractual governance. In addition, contractual governance is more efficient in constraining opportunism when government support is high, whereas relational governance deters opportunism more when government support is low. These findings offer important implications for academic research and managerial practice.

Governing Interfirm Relationships for Social Sustainability: The Relationship between Governance Mechanisms, Sustainable Collaboration, and Cultural Intelligence

Abstract: The concept of social sustainability is gaining attention within the field of supply chain relationships and international business. There are conflicting arguments regarding the effectiveness of contract governance and collaboration in an interfirm relationship. Previous studies have investigated the effect of a national culture on contract governance and opportunism. This study examines the effects of contract governance on collaboration, incorporating the moderating influence of cultural intelligence. Survey data were collected from 239 export manufacturing firms in different industries. The current authors suggest that contract governance might be more effective under conditions of a greater level of firm cultural intelligence capabilities. Cultural intelligence plays an important role in the shaping and implementation of collaboration and is the key to manage cross-culture relationship management in a supply chain. Cultural intelligence constitutes one potential way for the export industry to manage intercultural differences and profitably achieve an increase in collaboration. Collaboration with a socially responsible partner brings about improved social performance. The social dimensions of sustainability, such as fair labor practices and decent worker conditions, health and safety, no child labor, and employee empowerment must be addressed to accomplish the most sustainable growth. Managers also need to take advantage of cultural intelligence to adapt, collaborate, and share cultural knowledge.

The science of organizational design: Fit between structure and coordination

Abstract: Organization design is a major factor determining an organization’s performance and how the people work together in these organizations. In the paper, we argue that designing organizations should be scientific-based and forward-looking. This raises challenges in designing organizations in contexts and situations that are new and have not been seen before. Experimentation of what is and what might be is the basis for exploring and examining what makes a good science for organizational design. Experimentation permits us to examine what might be for organization designs, which are not well understood or may not exist yet. Collaborative communities, new ventures, agile organizations, and temporary organizations are examples; experimentation permits us explore and examine what is and what might be and to examine the organizational design problem and perform experiments to understand the relationship between structure and coordination mechanisms of information, communications, decisions, trust, and incentives—the basis for the multi-contingency theory of organizational design. An organizational design must specify the fit between the structure of division of tasks in the organization with its coordination, or how to make these tasks work in concert. These tasks can be interdependent and uncertain. To design good organizations, we need empirical evidence about what is and exploration about what might be; we need a good theoretical basis for being able to generalize our knowledge. To illustrate our point, we examine two experiments on the classic M-form hypothesis—a computer simulation that examines coordination, organization structure, and interdependency and a laboratory experiment that examines the effect of incentives on opportunism and performance. Together, we find that the M-form is a robust organizational design, but with contingent conditions. Finally, we discuss how observation and experimentation together is the foundation for the development of scientific-based theory of organizational design.

Shaping service ecosystems: exploring the dark side of agency

Abstract: The extant service ecosystem literature rarely addresses the dark side of actors’ agency, which hinders further development of the service-dominant (S-D) logic, particularly with regard to understanding service ecosystem dynamics. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to delineate the dark-side facets of actors’ agency that adversely affect actor-to-actor relationships and resource integration, in the context of shaping service ecosystems.,With abductive reasoning, this study seeks to reorient results from prior literature in accordance with empirical findings. The empirical data pertain to 21 firms in Finland, New Zealand, Singapore and Sweden, representing various industries, sizes, international reach, technologies, ownership forms and histories.,The dark side of agency emerges as an actor’s deliberate attempts to influence a service ecosystem to achieve self-interested benefits, despite understanding that these actions inhibit other actors from providing service and can be detrimental to other actors and the ecosystem. The findings also reveal three facets of the dark side: conflict, ambiguity and opportunism. The process of shaping service ecosystems is prone to systematic conflict, ambiguous and opportunistic behaviours occurring between the focal actors’ ecosystem and other ecosystems vying for the same set of resources.,This study advances the S-D logic by addressing the crucial role of agency in a dialectical relationship with institutions and structures. Service-for-service exchanges can take place in asymmetric, ambiguous, opportunistic situations driven by self-interested motives.,Processes aimed at shaping service ecosystems can demonstrate the dark sides of actors’ agency, related to conflict, ambiguity or opportunism. Managers interested in shaping strategies should be prepared for this outcome.,A service ecosystem perspective requires policy makers and regulators to reconsider their role in shaping processes. No “invisible hand” guides markets to equilibrium, so they should be more proactive in shaping ecosystems, rather than merely fixing market failures.,This research offers the first S-D logic-based investigation into the dark side of actors’ agency in shaping service ecosystems.

Motives for strategic alliances in cultural and creative industries

Abstract: Cultural and creative industries are gaining importance in Western economies. In these industries, as in several other business sectors, micro‐firms, i.e., firms that employ fewer than ten employees, are the predominant firm type. As these industries have become an integral part of most economies, the literature has started to explore the strategic behavior of cultural and creative micro‐firms. Although micro‐firms are characterized by certain specificities that can affect how likely they are to engage in external relationships, there is a dearth of knowledge concerning collaboration through strategic alliances in this specific context. Seeking to advance the understanding of partnerships between micro‐firms in cultural and creative industries, the purpose of this article is to reveal the specific motives for engaging in strategic alliances in this context. In doing so, we focus on six case studies of strategic alliances between micro‐firms in cultural and creative industries in France. Our results show that strategic alliances involving creative micro‐firms seek the reduction of overspecialization, target a high degree of quality of life and pleasure at work, and are envisaged only if there is trust and mutual support among the partners. Moreover, opportunism and necessity motivations guide the creative micro‐firms' decision to enter strategic alliances.

Avoiding High Opportunism Is Easy, Achieving Low Opportunism Is Not: A QCA Study on Curbing Opportunism in Buyer–Supplier Relationships

Abstract: Past research on how opportunism in buyer-supplier relationships can be mitigated remains incomplete and often contradictory. Applying recent advances in qualitative comparative analysis to a sampl...

The cost of trust: A pilot study

Abstract: Trust is a fundamental precondition underpinning exchange and economic coordination but is costly to maintain. Given the potential for agents to enjoy zero-sum gains by opportunistically betraying the trust of exchanging counterparties, an edifice of occupational roles, organizational forms and institutional practices have emerged in an effort to uphold trust. In simple terms, there exists a "cost of trust." This paper provides numerical estimates of the cost of trust for the United States economy, based on an attribution of labor force occupational data with varying degrees of trust-maintenance. Occupations represented in high cost-of-trust activities include managers, lawyers and judges, tax professionals, accountants and auditors. Overall, it is estimated that the cost of trust accounts for 35 per cent of U.S. employment in 2010. The cost of trust has significant implications for the economic applicability of blockchain compared with conventional forms of ledger technology largely maintained by centralized third-party organizations.

Safeguards against Opportunism in Freelance Contracting on the Internet

Abstract: Based on a large sample of 5,756 Russian‐speaking freelancers from an international online labour market, this study provides rare quantitative evidence of the external labour market where freelancers act under constant threat of client‐side opportunism. We explore how the formalization of agreements, social embeddedness and mode of communication are associated with the incidence of opportunism and further possibilities of resolving problems caused by agreement violations. Social ties and face‐to‐face contact appear to be better safeguards against opportunism in freelance contracting, which is largely informal. The study has important implications for the debates about non‐standard work, online labour markets and job quality in the new economy.

Voter Reactions to Incumbent Opportunism

Abstract: Opportunistic incumbent behavior to gain electoral advantage flies in the face of democratic accountability and should elicit voter disapproval. Yet incumbents routinely behave opportunistically. T...

Me, myself and I:Non-collaborative customer behavior in service outsourcing – the key role of outcome orientation and outcome attributability

Abstract: This research focuses on the role of customer behavior in service outsourcing relationships that are governed by outcome-oriented contracts. The purpose of this paper is to explain how non-collaborative customer behavior impedes the effectiveness of outcome-oriented contracts to align the goals and incentives of the customer and service provider, and leads to service provider opportunism.,Nine hypotheses are developed regarding customer behavior and the reaction of the service provider to this. These are tested using structural equation modeling with data from 213 service outsourcing relationships.,Outcome-orientated contracts in service outsourcing may have unintended consequences because they create value attribution ambiguity. This ambiguity induces non-collaborative customer behavior, which, in turn, results in service provider opportunism. This reveals a paradox, where customer behavior aimed at curbing service provider opportunism instead induces such opportunism. This chain of effects can be counteracted by increased outcome attributability, which reduces the ambiguity and, thus, the motivation for non-collaborative customer behavior.,This research extends the existing literature by stressing that non-collaborative customer behavior is a key reason why outcome-oriented contracts fail in effectively governing outsourcing relationships, and that this can be counteracted by increased outcome attributability.

A Formal Account of Opportunism in Multi-agent Systems

Abstract: Opportunistic behavior is a selfish behavior that takes advantage of knowledge asymmetry and results in promoting agents' own value but demoting other agents' value. It is commonly existing in business transactions and social interactions, thereby gaining much attention and investigation from social science. In the context of multi-agent systems, it is normal that knowledge is distributed among different agents, which creates the opportunity for agents to perform opportunistic behavior to other agents. Since opportunistic behavior has undesirable results for other agents in the system, the aim of this thesis is to eliminate such a selfish behavior from the system. We first propose a formal account of opportunism based on the situation calculus, capturing the features of opportunism: knowledge asymmetry, intention and value opposition. Because opportunistic behavior has undesirable results for other agents in the system but cannot be observed indirectly, there has to be a monitoring mechanism that can detect the performance of opportunistic behavior. We secondly provides a logical framework to specify monitoring approaches for opportunism. We investigate how to evaluate agents' actions to be opportunistic with respect to different forms of norms when those actions cannot be observed directly, and study how to reduce the monitoring cost for opportunism. In order for monitoring and eliminating mechanisms to be put in place, it is important to know in which context agents will or are likely to perform opportunistic behavior. Therefore, we develop a framework to reason about agents' opportunistic propensity. Opportunistic propensity refers to the potential for an agent to perform opportunistic behavior. We characterize the situation where agents will perform opportunistic behavior and the contexts where opportunism is impossible to occur. Finally, we reach our goal through designing two mechanisms for eliminating opportunism: in the epistemic approach an agent's knowledge gets updated so that the other agent is not able to perform opportunistic behavior, and in the normative approach the system is updated with a norm so that it is not optimal for an agent to perform opportunistic behavior.

Fair value accounting and management opportunism on earnings management in banking sector: First evidence

Abstract: Financial reporting helps investors in the decisionmaking process. To reach this scope, IASB and FASB have chosen fair value accounting (hereafter “FVA”). The FVA links carrying amount to current market price rather than to the value of a past transaction, so it seems able to show potential cash flow generated from assets or liabilities included in financial statements (Tutino & Pompili, 2013). During recent years, an intense debate has arisen relative to FVA approach and the trade-off between relevance and reliability of accounting information reported adopting through FVA criterions. Many authors claim that fair value accounting based information is relevant and helpful for investors even if this approach makes a large use of unobservable inputs (Barth, 1994; Barth and Clinch, 1998; Barth, 2010). In our perspective, in case of lack of market values directly observable, the FVA approach could bring to adverse selection and moral hazard problem: when estimates are highly dependent on management choices, this potentially could bring to errors in estimates and, consequently, in an increase information asymmetry due to the use of private information not clearly reported to stakeholders. In such scenario, moreover, unobservable inputs could be used as earnings management tool in order to pursue their own goals aligning biased estimates able to meet investors’ expectations. After a quick look to the state of art on the management behaviour under FVA approach, adopting the Šodan Model (Šodan, 2015) this paper investigates whether application of FVA in financial instruments valuation could have some potential impacts on earning quality measures of banks listed in the US and Europe. In order to better explain the exposure to FVA approach of changes in fair value asset and liabilities reported as gain and losses through net income, the earning quality measure we Abstract

Opportunism in buyer-supplier exchange: a critical examination of the concept and its implications for theory and practice

Abstract: Claims that opportunism is widespread in the process of buyer–supplier exchange are commonplace, but direct supporting evidence for such claims is largely absent from the relevant literature This article offers a critique of the treatment of opportunism in supply chains by re-establishing the importance of guile in the concept and investigates existing published, empirical measures of buyer and supplier opportunistic behaviour This article offers evidence that, despite the frequency with which the concept is discussed in the literature and applied in research and the emphasis given to the risks it generates for management, opportunism with guile between buyers and suppliers appears to be rare in practice This article is the first critical assessment of the concept’s treatment in the Operations Management field, and it argues that practitioners are currently being poorly advised with respect to the phenomenon, as well as drawing conclusions for both practitioners and researchers that differ radically from the prevailing consensus on the subject

Being an excellent team: understanding how politics influence team performance

Abstract: This research develops a model based on the transaction cost theory and resource allocation theory to predict how politics (i.e. autocracy and opportunism) affect team performance in technology industries. Directly related to resource adequacy, team performance is associated with top management autocracy and peer teams’ opportunism indirectly via the mediation of collective affective commitment. The relationships between collective affective commitment and team performance and between resource adequacy and team performance are moderated by top management autocracy and peer teams’ opportunism, respectively. Empirical testing of this model, by investigating personnel of work teams in high-tech firms, explores changes in politics in technology industries. Lastly, this study provides managerial implications and research limitations based on its empirical findings.

(Mal)Adaptation opportunism: when other interests take over stated or intended climate change adaptation objectives (and their unintended effects)

Abstract: This paper introduces the terminology of (mal)adaptation opportunism – a situation in which projects undertaken in the name of climate change adaptation (CCA) are overrun by interests other than the stated or intended objectives of the CCA project. A goal of CCA projects is to reduce poverty and promote social justice. The case of the threat of displacement of the community of Kewunor by the Trasacco Estate Development Company (TEDC), after the construction of the Ada Sea Defense System (AdSDS) of Ghana as a CCA, is illustrative of this concept of (mal)adaptation opportunism. Through a narrative presentation of eight different accounts concerning this issue, I demonstrate how (mal)adaptation opportunism arises and is often motivated by economic interests. This case illustrates how economic interests can take over not only CCA projects but also their maladaptive effects.

Accounting Choice under IFRS: The Role of Accounting Tradition and Managerial Opportunism

Abstract: The present study investigates the role of accounting tradition and managerial opportunism when companies are given by IFRS the option to choose whether to book accounting items following the historical cost or the fair value method. We hypothesize that accounting tradition still plays a role in the choice, with Continental European companies preferring the historical cost and the Anglo-Saxon companies choosing more often the fair value. We also hypothesize that managers will act opportunistically, choosing the historical cost or the fair value method in order to influence the performance of the company and/or their remuneration. By using a hand-collected sample of 480 companies belonging to Continental Europe (Italy, Germany and France) and Anglo-Saxon countries (United Kingdom and Australia) we find support for the first hypothesis while we reject the second hypothesis. Accounting tradition does still play a role in the accounting choice, while managerial opportunism does not.

Opportunism Motivation of Environmental Protection Activism and Corporate Governance: An Empirical Study from China

Abstract: In the study of environmental protection issues for more than forty years, research on the impact of financial performance on environmental protection has been one of the important branches. In the framework of principal-agent theory, this paper explores the opportunism motives in a company’s environmental protection activism and the moderating role of corporate governance using the data of Chinese listed companies from 2005 to 2016. The study finds that: (1) the company’s environmental protection activism is driven by the opportunist motives of policymakers who want to mask their inability; and (2) environmental protection activism does not enhance the company’s future performance and value creation capability. Further studies find that corporate governance mechanisms play different moderating roles. Fund Shareholders play a positive governance role and reduce the correlation between financial performance and environmental protection activism. However, independence of the board of directors intensifies the opportunist motives. This paper provides new theoretical explanations for environmental protection decision-making, provides novel enlightenment for the protection of environmental protection policies in developing countries and regions.

Strong contracts: the relationship between power and action

Abstract: Purpose – There is a view that strong preventative contracts are essential to control supplier opportunism and delivery during an outsourcing implementation. This paper tests the proposition that contractual environments, typical of outsourcing engagements, are essentially conflictual and that context and circumstance can act to overwhelm formal contractual and project control and lead to poor outcomes. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports on a supply case study focused on the outsourced delivery of an application development in the defence sector. Data was gathered by a participant observation in situ for a period of three years. A grounded analysis from observations, diaries, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, documentary analysis, and emails was carried out with six case organisations within the extended supply chain. Findings – Collaboration between suppliers and buyers can be blocked by preventative fixed price contracts and as a result when requirements are incomplete or vague this adversely impacts success. Implications for practice Strong contractual control focused on compliance may actually impede the potential success of outsourcing contracts especially when collaborative approaches are needed to cope with variability in demand. Originality/value The research raises the important practical and conceptual notion that an outsourcing can be a conflictual inter-firm phenomenon, especially where multiple actors are involved and business uncertainty is present.

Teori agency dalam pemikiran organisasi ; pendekatan positivist dan principle-agen

Abstract: Agency theory has been used by researchers in accounting, economics, finance, marketing, political science, organizational behavior, and sociology. However, this theory is still surrounded by controversy. The purpose of this study is to describe the contribution of agency theory to organizations with a positivist and principalagent approach. This research method uses literature studies. The results of this study are agency theory giving two contributions specifically to organizational thinking. The first is the treatment of information. Organizations can intervene in information systems with the aim of controlling agent opportunism. The second is the risk implication. The organization is assumed to have uncertainty in the future. Results uncertainty combined with differences in willingness to accept risk will affect the contract between the principal and the agent. The idea of agency theory of risk, outcome uncertainty, incentives, and information systems is a new contribution to organizational thinking, and empirical evidence supports theory, especially when associated with complementary theoretical perspectives