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- corporatization, public corporate governance, state-owned enterprise, executive director pay, politicization (1)
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- economy, technology, digitalization, innovation, ambidexterity, exploitation, exploration, front-end of innovation, innovation fields, organization, organizational learning, strategic orientation (1)
- ego-depletion (1)
- enterprising family, entrepreneurial roles, next generation, multiple-role approach, family business, new venture, own venture, venture creation process, family, social cognition, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship (1)
- information and communication technology sector (ICT) (1)
- innovation and globalization (1)
- innovation clusters in Africa, Africa, Kenya (1)
- institutional theory (1)
- mindset theory (1)
- motivational states (1)
- networked public sphere (1)
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- organizational environment (1)
- organizational transformation, digital transformation, organizational identity, disruptive innovation, disruption, qualitative research, case study, systematic literature review (1)
- public human resource management, performance-related pay, public service motivation, employer branding, recruitment, vertical pay dispersion, public administration, state-owned enterprises (1)
- reinforcement heuristic (1)
- self-control (1)
- similarity of discourse (1)
- states of mind (1)
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With pressure rising in the global economy for companies to adopt AI, responsible business conduct and the consideration of stakeholder interests become more challenging. Since scholars have repeatedly highlighted the gap for research on AI governance, this thesis presents a theoretical contribution to this young research field. Due to the recent emergence of the field, hardly any publications examine AI governance from a theoretical perspective. Therefore, the thesis initially examines the problem structure AI governance seeks to address, defining it as wicked, exceptionally complex, and characterised by high uncertainty levels. Based on this need-oriented analysis, it chooses the Relational Economics as a suitable approach to develop a theoretical AI governance model. Subsequently, it introduces and conceptualises AI within the Relational Economics in the form of an autopoietic system. Building on this first theoretical contribution, the thesis proceeds to specify the Relational Governance approach inherent to the theory for AI and to complement it with self-developed inductive categories, subsuming main research streams AI ethics literature. Lastly, it conducts a systematic literature review of advances in the field of AI governance, with particular regard to the private sector. As a result, the thesis provides a structured overview, within which it clusters its review’s findings, addressing their research focus and level of analysis. With this, it allows for the positioning of the presented theoretical contribution within the research field. The thesis closes with implications for both theory and practice and a discussion of its findings.
Public sector reforms have made the corporatization of public services a global phenomenon. Worldwide, public corporations provide critical services and infrastructures for citizen’s daily lives. In many countries, public corporations represent a substantial portion of both gross domestic product and employment. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the high societal relevance of public corporations in areas such as social/health care, mobility, and digitalization. The United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasizes public corporations as key actors with role-model functions in the promotion and implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Standing midway between in-house provision and privatization, the corporatization of public services has high potential to improve public service performance by enhancing managerial autonomy and professionalism while maintaining political control. However, the independent corporate status of public corporations and their operations outside the traditional administrative system induce far-reaching governance challenges.
Being a substantial research and practice area, public corporate governance aims to provide perspectives on how public authorities could exercise their ownership function in order to ensure that public corporations act in accordance with public interest. It is executive directors in particular—occupying positions of great autonomy, power, and discretion—who play a key role in the governance of public corporations. This field, however, still has significant research gaps—one of which is the significant lack of theoretical understanding about how far different governance mechanisms could effectively mitigate critical issues in public corporate governance that are associated with the higher autonomy of executive directors operating in either profit-making or not profit-making public corporation forms.
The overarching research connections of this dissertation aims to enhance the theoretical understanding of instrumental and personnel governance of executive directors in corporatized public service provision and to derive theoretical perspectives on governance differences between profit-making and not profit-making public corporation forms.
Overall, this dissertation makes three key contributions. First, it elaborates novel perspectives of different governance mechanisms in the public corporation context by introducing a conceptual differentiation of instrumental and personnel governance. In this context, the dissertation enhances theoretical understanding and provides empirical findings on the effects of self-regulation and law as well as on the role of executive director characteristics in recruitment, pay, and turnover. Second, the presented work broadens the theoretical understanding of the interdependencies between different personnel and instrumental governance mechanisms, providing insights regarding their critical impact on the realization of policies and good public corporate governance at the executive director level. Third, this dissertation enriches the recent theoretical debates about the governance of decentralized public sector organizations by focusing on the increasingly relevant but still widely neglected organizational type “public corporation” and by accounting for governance differences between profit-making and not profit-making public corporation forms.
Road crashes play a substantial role in depressing GDP, especially in low- and
middle-income countries. The economic welfare of countries is adversely affected,
and governments must try to correct this market failure. The conditions that
obtain in Turkey, Costa Rica, and the European Union are conducive to analyzing
regulatory policies in the field of traffic accidents. Since Turkey and Costa
Rica introduced periodic technical inspections recently, data from before and
after their introduction is available and can be compared. I obtained exclusive
inspection data from Turkey for the analysis. For Costa Rica, I derived cost-unit
rates that had not been calculated before, which allowed me to rank and evaluate
regulatory measures that may be adopted in the future. The Covid-19 pandemic
made it possible to study another set of policy interventions. That study
complements the first two papers. The observed effects are examined in the
context of the efforts of the European Union to reduce deadly traffic accidents
over the last few decades. By analyzing data from before and after government
interventions, I show the impact as well as the shortcomings of specific policies
in different countries or regions and discuss their welfare effect. Furthermore,
this dissertation provides evidence for the claim that introducing periodic technical
inspections, a policy intervention that can tackle the problem of frequent
traffic accidents, is cost effective and thus exerts a positive effect on the economy.
The recurrent business scandals of the past decades have been a wakeup call for research and practitioners regarding the crisis organizational ethics is in. In an effort to remedy the situation many organizations have relied on the implementation of compliance- and/or integrity-oriented ethics programs. However, observations from practice and research show that the results of such programs are mixed, and it is still unclear when and why they are effective to reduce misconduct and promote ethical behavior. In this dissertation an answer to this question is sought. Building on literature that considers the overall organizational ethical context, I hypothesize that ethical culture can explain when and why compliance and integrity strategies are successful at preventing misconduct and promoting ethical behavior. To examine the proposed relationship, two new measures for ethics strategies and ethical culture are developed and validated. The Ethics Strategy Measure (ESM) is the first validated instrument to measure the strategic focus of ethics programs (compliance vs. integrity). The German Ethical Culture Scale 2.0 (GECS 2.0) is a 10-dimensional advanced measure of ethical culture. In three studies the psychometric properties, convergent and predictive validity of the two instruments are shown. Consequently, in four consecutive studies the new measures are applied to test whether the dimensions of ethical culture mediate the relationship between compliance and integrity strategies and (un)ethical behavior. The results show that the effects of compliance and integrity strategies on unethical behavior can fully be explained through their effect on the dimensions of ethical culture. Further, it is shown that compliance strategies are not able to inspire ethical conduct, while integrity strategies are. This relationship is also fully mediated by the dimensions of ethical culture. Different ethical culture dimensions emerge as drivers of different mediated effects. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Employees of public sector organizations serve as the backbone of democratic societies, making decisions that shape how and for whom vital public services are delivered. Public employees influence the realization of political goals and provide basic public goods as well as critical infrastructure. They are of high societal relevance as they represent the “human face of the state” and should incorporate public values to enable, serve, and protect the democratic system and the rule of law. According to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 16, effective public institutions must pay attention to employees as their most critical resource.
The public sector––the largest or among the largest employers in most countries––faces a looming human resource crisis. Public employers face the need to replace a wave of baby boomers retiring and a decline in the number of people interested in working in the public sector. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the shortage of professionals and leaders in the example of critical infrastructure such as public health authorities, hospitals, and social services.
As a major field of research and practice, public human resource management (HRM) aims to understand these challenges and develop adequate coping strategies. However, the field faces relevant research gaps. Among other factors, the current scientific understanding is limited regarding the role of differences amongst organizational types in the public sector. Although previous research indicates the role of organizational goals and publicness dimensions for human resource practices in general, there is a lack of understanding to what extent the effects of motivation and pay dispersion differ, for example, between public administrations and state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
The goal of this dissertation is to enhance the theoretical understanding of the role of motivation and pay dispersion for performance and recruitment focusing on differences amongst organizational types in the public sector, to derive theoretical perspectives on an integrated steering of human resources of public administration and SOEs.
Overall, this dissertation highlights three contributions of the four included articles. First, it shows the important conceptual role of SOEs as research objects and offers approaches to further integrate SOEs as research objects in public HRM, taking into account the different institutional arrangements of public service provision, as organizational goals and publicness can be crucial and insightful determinants for motivation and pay dispersion. Second, the presented work offers new theoretical approaches and field-experimental insights for the under-researched public sector recruitment literature. Third, it derives theoretical perspectives on an integrated steering of human resources of public administration and SOEs as well as implications for future research on motivation and pay dispersion as major factors for performance and recruitment in public sector organizations.
This dissertation is dedicated to extending scholarly understanding of organizational transformation in the context of disruptive change. For this purpose, three independent studies explore both organizational- and individual-level aspects of organizational transformation. In doing so, this dissertation integrates two literature streams – disruptive innovation theory and organizational identity. Study 1 lays the ground by providing a descriptive, thematic analysis of organizational transformation induced by digital innovations and technologies. The paper systematically reviews 58 articles to critically assesses where, how and by whom research on digital transformation is conducted and how it unfolds at the organizational level. Studies 2 and 3 are located at the intersection of disruptive innovation adoption and organizational identity in the context of incumbent firms. Both studies apply an inductive, field-based single case design and primarily build on qualitative data gathered from 39 (Study 2) and 35 (Study 3) semistructured personal interviews at a major German car manufacturer. Study 2 examines how organizational identity change unfolds in an incumbent attempting to adopt multiple different disruptions at the same time, while Study 3 moves more towards the individual-level and attempts to understand how and why organizational members respond heterogeneously to disruption. Overall, this dissertation contributes in the following ways: (1) Studies 1 and 2 extend the conceptual- and organizational-level knowledge of disruptive innovation adoption during organizational transformation. In particular, Study 2 shows that different drivers of identity-induced organizational transformation become observable, dependent on the nature of a disruption, (2) Studies 2 and 3 extend the individual-level knowledge of organizational member’s attitudes and behavior during identity-threatening organizational transformation. For this purpose, Study 3 develops a typology which gives evidence for the existence of three types of member’s sensitivities and shows that identity and knowledge function as cognitive frames of reference to interpret change, whereas culture is seen as a contextual factor to support the transformation of identity and knowledge.
Being a next generation member in an enterprising family is accompanied by a central question: What is my role within the enterprising family and why? Taking a unified systems perspective, this dissertation thesis focuses on the next generation in enterprising families and their entrepreneurial roles within the orchestration of three elements: the individual, the family and the business. Taking into account that those three elements constantly influence each other and change over time, this dissertation thesis introduces a more holistic understanding of the next generation in enterprising families. Using a multiple-role approach conceding that the next generation can have more roles within the enterprising family next to being the successor, this dissertation thesis encompasses three studies on overall 413 next generation members focusing on their entrepreneurial roles within the family business and new venture context. This dissertation thesis uses different methodological (quantitative and qualitative) and theoretical approaches (family, social cognition and organizational behavior science) to address the limited knowledge about the different roles of the next generation within the enterprising family. Study 1 focuses on the family business versus new venture context and aims at understanding how the intentions and actions of entrepreneurial roles of the next generation emerge and develop over
time. Study 2 investigates the entrepreneurial roles of the next generation within the family
business and how it shapes their strategic decision making within this context. Study 3
researches the role of the next generation as a founder of an own venture, and how the
enterprising family shapes the venture creation process. By that, this dissertation thesis
contributes to: (1) obtaining a better understanding of the family side in entrepreneurship, which becomes especially well-observable from the (to date) under-researched perspective of the next generation in enterprising families, (2) creating a common understanding that the next generation can have entrepreneurial roles within the enterprising family beyond being the successor in the family business, which offers the opportunity to understand how
entrepreneurial behavior develops within life stages and life cycles of a family and how
entrepreneurship is transferred through generations, (3) emphasizing the relevance of the next generation within the family as well as the business side in investigating the potential
entrepreneurial capacity of enterprising families and their business initiatives contributing to theory building on enterprising families, and (4) providing further research aspirations
concerning the next generation and their roles in enterprising families, including ideas for future research on how to assess the entrepreneurial roles of the next generation within the enterprising family.
Confidence judgments and decision making are part of everyday life. In an ideal world, people would assess their skills and knowledge accurately and base their decisions only on rational deliberations. Yet, this is often not the case. Confidence judgments in own skills or performance are often biased (e.g., Dunning, 2011; Moore & Healy, 2008; Moore & Schatz, 2017; Sanchez & Dunning, 2018; Pikulina, Renneboog, & Tobler, 2017; Michailova & Schmidt, 2016). Also, people tend to deviate from rational decision strategies (e.g., Achtziger & Alós-Ferrer, 2014; Alós-Ferrer, Hügelschäfer, & Li, 2016, 2017; Charness, Karni, & Levin, 2010; Erev, Shimonovich, Schurr, & Hertwig, 2008; Fiedler, Brinkmann, Betsch, & Wild, 2000; Tschan et al., 2009). Therefore, the research aim of the present dissertation was twofold. In the first chapter of the present dissertation I investigated confidence judgments in own skills and the confidence bias, the processes underlying these confidence judgments, and the influences of gender and monetary incentive on confidence judgments. The second aim was to investigate the influence of goal and implementation intentions on rational decision making and how this influence is reflected in the neural correlate of reinforcement learning.
A common finding in research on confidence judgments is the confidence bias (e.g. Moore & Schatz, 2017; Moore & Healy, 2008; Pikulina et al., 2017; Sanchez & Dunning, 2018; Lebreton et al., 2018). In most cases, the confidence bias reflects overconfidence, which means that people’s subjective confidence exceeds their actual ability or performance (Fischhoff, Slovic, & Lichtenstein, 1977). In some cases, there is also evidence for underconfidence, suggesting that people underestimate their abilities (Kruger & Dunning, 1999; Kruger & Burrus, 2004). Gender is an important predictor of the confidence bias. Underconfidence is more prevalent in females, whereas males often display overconfidence (e.g., Barber & Odean, 2001; Hügelschäfer & Achtziger, 2014; Niederle & Vesterlund, 2007). In Study 1, I investigated the processes underlying confidence judgments and the confidence bias by means of response times, and I examined potential gender differences.
Participants answered general knowledge questions and judged their confidence on the correctness of each answer. Participants had overall a good sense of whether their answer was correct or incorrect. This was reflected by higher confidence judgments on correct answers compared to incorrect ones. The analysis of response times on the confidence judgments revealed that male participants who took longer to judge their confidence were made more accurate judgments than males who responded quickly. This relationship was not found for females. In Study 2, half of the participants received a monetary incentive for good performance in the general knowledge test. The monetary incentive for performance increased the time invested in both tasks (the knowledge questions and the confidence judgments). However, this increased effort did not lead to better performance on the knowledge questions, nor did it yield more accurate confidence judgments. The response times suggested that males who invested more time in the confidence judgments were more accurate (as in Study 1). However, the opposite was true for females. The more time females invested in their judgment the more underconfident they were. This influence of the response time on the confidence bias was only found for incentivized participants. In Study 3, the accuracy of the confidence judgment was incentivized. Contrary to the expectations, the monetary incentive did not reduce the confidence bias but led both males and females to be overconfident. In this study, the response time on the confidence judgment did not predict the confidence bias. On the whole, the results demonstrate that (a) the processes of confidence judgments differ between females and males, and (b) the effectiveness of monetary incentives for improving the accuracy of confidence judgments depends strongly on the incentive being contingent on the performance in the task at hand.
The second chapter of the present dissertation investigated the influence of goal and implementation intentions (P. M. Gollwitzer, 1999) on rational decision making (see also Hügelschäfer & Achtziger, 2017). The impact of intentions was examined by the neural correlate of reinforcement learning, i.e. the feedback-related negativity (FRN; Holroyd & Coles, 2002). Participants worked on a probability updating task in which the optimal strategy to maximize the expected payoff was to follow Bayes’ rule by integrating new information with prior probabilities (Bayes & Price, 1763). The optimal decision rule conflicted with a simpler suboptimal decision strategy, i.e. the reinforcement heuristic (see Achtziger & Alós-Ferrer, 2014; Charness & Levin, 2005). The goal and implementation intention manipulation was proposed to control the automatic process of the reinforcement heuristic and hence foster rational decision making. The results showed that the goal intention and the implementation intention had no influence on the number of reinforcement errors (in contrast to the findings of Hügelschäfer & Achtziger, 2017). However, both, the goal and implementation intentions increased the amplitude of the FRN which, on the neural level, indicated a stronger reliance on the reinforcement heuristic than in the control group. The findings shed some light on the impact of goal and implementation intentions on rational decision making. They demonstrate that careful consideration of the use of intentions as an intervention for improved decision making is required to avoid undesired side-effects. Taken together, the present dissertation provided new insights into the processes underlying confidence judgments, the confidence bias, rational decision making, and its neural correlates.
Despite various efforts to decrease gender differences in organizations and the underrepresentation of females in management positions, progress is little. However, efforts can only be effective if the source of the problem is identified and understood. Thus, a considerable number of studies has been carried out in an attempt to understand which aspects facilitate the underrepresentation of females in management (e. g., Joshi, Son,& Roh, 2015; Niederle & Vesterlund, 2007; Eagly & Karau, 2002). Research has shown that the reason for the gender disparity in leading positions is twofold. First, individual differences in characteristics and behavior are compelling predictors of gender imbalance in organizations (Bass & Bass, 2009; Joshi & Roh, 2009; Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002; Mumford et al., 2000). Second, current research on gender inequality emphasized that some work contexts seem to be more vulnerable to this phenomenon (Joshi & Roh, 2009; Gardiner & Tiggemann, 1999). Although the topic is ubiquitous and has been widely discussed in various disciplines, research has often been conducted within the confines of laboratory settings, and field research neglected to systematically include the work context as an explanatory variable.
In order to shed new light on this issue, the work presented here investigated gender
differences in career-relevant psychological aspects and behaviors, depending on the
position and the female/male dominance of work environment. In a literature review, three constructs emerged that have not been systematically explored in the workplace as
potential indicators of gender differences in managers and non-managers. Therefore, cognitive reflection, confidence in one’s own skills, and deceptive behavior were investigated in three field studies, looking directly at females and males in leading and non-leading positions in female- and male-dominated fields.
Study 1a and 1b focused on the examination of the constructs within the private sector. Female and male managers and non-managers in multiple companies in Germany from the male-dominated manufacturing and the female-dominated service sector were surveyed. Results indicated a strong influence of business sectors on gender differences in self-image and work-related behavior. In order to cope with gender-incongruent work environments, males and females followed different strategies. In the female-dominated service sector, males coped with the incongruency by engaging in impression management by being overconfident as well as using self-enhancement by deceiving. In contrast to males, females only engaged in self-enhancement by deceiving in the male-dominated manufacturing sector. Both strategies were used to appear in a more positive light and to cope with the gender-incongruent workplace. Study 2 examined the three constructs in the government sector, more specifically, in female and male politicians from Germany’s national and its sixteen state parliaments and civil servants. In contrast to the private sector, males and females did neither use self-enhancement nor impression management strategies. This finding was surprising as the underrepresentation of females is an issue in both, business and politics.
Overall, the findings of the present work on cognitive reflection, confidence and deception shed new light on gender differences as overconfidence and deception functioned as impression management and self-enhancement strategies for males and females to manage the demands of female- and male-dominated industries. In contrast, this does not apply for politics where those strategies were not used. Moreover, the results suggest that the investigation of female- and male-dominated environments is crucial to explain the behavior of females and males and truly provides a better understanding of gender
differences at work.
People face economic decisions on a daily basis. Quite often, these decisions involve high stakes and some degree of personal risk, as choices produce real consequences that set the course for future actions. Although decades of decision research in the intersection of psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience have much advanced our knowledge about the psychological underpinnings of economic decisions, several academic disputes remain unsettled. Indeed, surprisingly little is known about the role of motivation and volition in guiding economic decisions. Certainly, people’s motives, goals, and their expectations of attractive rewards are important drivers of decision making. Yet, motivation and volition cannot be reduced to goals and incentives. The cognitive mechanisms underlying economic decisions are rather complex, and motivation and volition may impact decisions at the level of these cognitive processes.
This dissertation considers the role of motivation and volition in economic decisions by examining the impact of experimentally induced motivational and volitional states of mind on economic choices and decision processes. Using different methods and decision making paradigms, four experiments provide novel evidence that informs the ongoing debates in motivation research, decision science, and psychophysiology. In short, Experiments 1a and 1b explore the possibility of interactive effects between motivation, volition, and financial incentives in determining economic performance. Moving on to the level of decision processes, Experiment 2 examines the impact of motivation and volition on decision processes under risk. Decision times, eye movements, and pupil dilations provide process measures of cognitive effort, pre-decisional information search, and affective arousal, respectively. Finally, Experiment 3 investigates how particular decision attributes relate to affective and motivational processes in decisions under risk.
The findings of the present dissertation can be summarized in terms of four main conclusions. First, incentives are effective for improving economic performance when the payment of attractive monetary rewards is contingent on performance. Yet, higher incentives do not further improve performance. Second, the experimental manipulation of motivational and volitional mindsets does not directly affect choices, but notably impacts decision processes. Third, the influence of motivation and volition on economic decisions appears to depend on the appropriate incentivization of the task at hand. Fourth, risky choice attributes that entail no gain at all, i.e., zero-outcomes, elicit high levels of affective arousal and motivational avoidance tendencies that guide selective attention and decision making in the lottery choice paradigm. The implications of these findings are discussed for theory development in motivation research and decision science, as well as in terms of their practical implications for decision making in managerial contexts and other high-stakes decision environments.