Investment dealers' ways of working: Integrating compensation with relational capital

Abstract

AbstractFor the past 20 years, practitioner and academic research has highlighted that the performance of companies is linked to staff and management's ways of working, particularly in service‐oriented enterprises (A. P. Kakabadse, Savery, Kakabadse, & Lee‐Davies, 2006). Yet despite the monumental impact that financial institutions have on a nation's economy, few studies have examined the ways of working of investment dealers. In the finance literature, two distinct bodies of thought have endeavored to grasp the enigmatic nature of financial markets, investor behavior, and investment decision making. These are, on the one hand, the more traditional finance theories and, on the other, behavioral theories that examine, respectively, the quantitative and qualitative psychological attributes of individually driven investment decisions. Yet it appears that both areas do not meaningfully consider the impact of contextual dynamics on investment decisions (A. Kakabadse, 2000). In response, this article attempts to redress this imbalance by presenting emerging findings from 41 interviews with corporate finance specialists and managers employed in retail and institutional broker departments. Presented is an array of evidence highlighting that employees' ways of working are influenced by investment‐related demographics—namely, structure of compensation and the disciplined pursuit of relational capital. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.