Fictitious Company Research Articles

THE EFFECT OF DECARBONIZATION SIGNAL ON JOB APPLICATION INTENTION: A PARALLEL MEDIATION MODEL

This study examines how including decarbonization signals in job postings influences prospective job seekers' perceptions and intentions. Using an experimental approach with senior students (N=334), the research explored the effects of decarbonization signals on organizational attractiveness, person-organization fit, and intention to apply for a job vacancy. Participants viewed job postings either with or without explicit decarbonization signals from a fictitious company, "Victory Holding". Results confirmed that decarbonization signals significantly enhanced perceptions of environmental sensitivity (M=4.02 vs. M=3.51, p<.001), validating the manipulation. Mediation analysis revealed that while decarbonization signals did not directly affect job application intentions (β=.008, p=.831), both organizational attractiveness (β=.20, p<.001) and person-organization fit (β=.16, p=.003) mediated this relationship. Theoretical implications highlight organizational attractiveness and person-organization fit as parallel mediators in the relationship between environmental signals and job application intentions. This study underscores the strategic potential of decarbonization signals in enhancing organizational attractiveness to environmentally conscious talent.

Sparked Intuition Power: An Audit Risk Activity

This case explores the subjective nature of professional judgment related to audit risk through the lens of a fictitious company, Sparked Intuition Power (SIP). SIP has just been accepted as a new audit client by an international accounting firm. Students play the role of associates on the audit engagement team. As part of their work on the audit, the students identify potential risks present at SIP as part of the initial risk assessment process. Once these risks have been identified, the students decide how to assess the potential severity of each risk and determine the resulting effect on the overall auditor workload. Through interaction and discussion with their instructors, the students should be better able to navigate the decision-making process related to risk evaluation in an audit engagement.

The impact of corporate governance statement assurance on financial professionals’ decisions

Corporate Governance (CG) reporting receives increasing attention. This study examines the impact of voluntary CG statement assurance on financial analysts’ and bankers’ decisions. An experiment with a 2 × 2 + 1 between-subject design was conducted. The independent variables comprise the assurance provider (Big Four statutory auditor vs. another Big Four audit firm) and assurance level (limited vs. reasonable). Additionally, a control condition without assurance provision is used. The participants’ reliance on the CG statement, their likelihood to recommend an investment in shares of the fictitious company, their credit risk assessment, and the likelihood to purchase shares of the fictitious company themselves served as dependent variables. Our results indicate that CG statement assurance increases the likelihood for investment recommendation. Moreover, they do not indicate a significant impact of the type of assurance provider. Reasonable assurance predominantly results in decisions of financial professionals which are more favorable for the fictitious company than limited assurance.

Deepfake at Star Isle Real Estate Group

This paper is a teaching case based on a fictitious company inspired by the actual experiences of employees working at a UK-based engineering group intended for use in information systems or business courses at the undergraduate or graduate level. In this teaching case, students are introduced to Star Isle Real Estate Group, Inc. (“Star Isle”), a fictitious American real estate investment, development, and management company developing a planned community named Spiral Galaxy with smart city features. The teaching case provides the opportunity for students to explore real-time video deepfakes.

Contribution of the Psychologist in the Resolution of Conflicts in a Fictitious Company

Contribution of the Psychologist in the Resolution of Conflicts in a Fictitious Company

Simulating Cybersecurity Risk Using Advanced Quantitative Risk Assessment Techniques

This paper; a scenario-based teaching case study, aims to introduce students in a Cybersecurity Risk Management course to advanced quantitative risk assessment techniques. The case study utilizes a fictitious company for which a risk assessment is underway. Assuming the role of the Cybersecurity Risk Team of the company, students are tasked with determining the risk exposure the company faces from a threat scenario against one of its mission-critical information resources. Specifically, the students are required to (1) quantify the monetary losses that could result from a threat scenario, (2) compute the inherited risk exposure from the threat scenario, (3) compute the residual risk given the implantation of certain security controls, and (4) compute the rate of return on the security controls. The case study holds the promise of enhancing the overall learning of the students and boosting their marketability as future cybersecurity professionals.

Firm-serving or public-serving? Analyzing public responses to employee volunteer program communication

PurposeDrawing on the elaboration likelihood model, this study aims to examine how employee volunteer program (EVP) type, corporate visual identity, and issue involvement affect external publics' attributions of EVPs and attitudes toward the company.Design/methodology/approachA 2 (EVP type: skills-based vs. not-skills-based) × 2 (salience of corporate visual identity: high vs. low) randomized experiment was conducted with 157 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. A fictitious company and its EVP messages were created to control for the company's existing reputation and participants' past experiences with the company.FindingsParticipants responded positively toward EVP messages regardless of the EVP type. However, salient corporate visual identity significantly aroused participants' more attributed firm-serving motives, which led to more negative attitudes toward the company. Next, issue involvement presented its value in EVP communication as highly involved participants displayed favorable attributions of EVPs and positive attitudes toward the company.Originality/valueThis study approaches EVPs as an important CSR practice and expands the discussion on strategic CSR communication by uncovering the roles of central and peripheral cues in public responses to EVP messages. Moreover, the findings highlight the importance of fostering and enhancing publics' issue involvement in achieving successful EVP communication.

Breaking the Sound of Silence: Explication in the Use of Strategic Silence in Crisis Communication

Crises present organizations with the “rhetorical exigency” to enact control. Silence is not an option. This study, as the first empirical examination of Le et al’s (2019) seminal study on silence in crisis communication, examines, first, if silence can be strategically used as a bona fide strategy; second, under what circumstances should silence be broken; and third, when silence is broken, how it affects (a) organizational reputation, (b) societal risk perception, and (c) the publics’ crisis information sharing intention. An online experiment was conducted using a nationally representative sample in the United States. Participants were recruited in 2019 via a Qualtrics panel. The stimuli used in this study consisted of two components: (1) an explanation about a fictitious company; and (2) two types of silence breaking (forced vs. planned) embedded in each stimulus accordingly after the same crisis incident. Four hypothesis were conceptualized. They were all supported. Collectively, they showed that the effect of silence-breaking type on crisis information sharing intention was mediated by societal risk perception, which is conditioned by participants’ level of perceived organizational reputation. Silence, or failure to fill the information vacuum, has not been an option to consider thus far as it suggests the organization is “not in control.” However, this study suggests the types of silence organizations can adopt and the modes the organizational silence can be broken. It provides a new lens for organizations to engage in business communication.

TIME is of the Essence: An Audit Escape Room Activity

ABSTRACTThis case gamifies several topics from a typical auditing curriculum by placing students in a modified escape room activity. Students act as new associates in Audit and Assurance services of CBA Associates, LLP. As part of their external audit orientation and training, students are provided with background information for a fictitious company, Tinsley Industrial Medical Equipment (TIME). Drawing on knowledge learned in traditional undergraduate auditing courses, students are tasked with solving several puzzles disguised as audit tasks. Topics and skills needed to unlock a series of locks include analysis of fraud scenarios, evaluation of the audit risk model, calculation of planning materiality and tolerable misstatement, identification of management assertions and related audit procedures, and detailed scrutiny of control process narratives and document flow diagrams. To successfully complete the case, students must effectively communicate and collaborate to solve the puzzles in the allotted time.

Impact of Enterprise Resource Management System on Industrial Revolution 4.0

The world is going through its fourth industrial revolution right now. Managing large workspaces in big Enterprises has been made easy with the advent of particular software categories popularly known as ERP short for Enterprise Resource Planner. With ERPs, management of data from all kinds of fields of work like finance, operations, sales, manufacturing, marketing, sales, pre-sales/post-sales, HR, etc are easy now. What’s even more enticing about it all is that all of this can now be stored on Cloud storage and can be acces-sed from pretty much any device. This makes it incredibly easy for business owners to manage their enterprise from anywhere in the world, anytime. Our project tries to demonstrate the impact of the ERP software ecosystem using a prototypeERP system built using Codeigniter Framework built on PHP, and a front-end based on boot-strap with a comprehensive My-sql database and a Google Cloud Infrastructure. Our Project will make use of some open-source repositories and build on it a working prototype that can manage the data of a fictitious company.

Comprehensive Data Analytics Project Using Excel and Tableau for the Sales and Purchases Cycles

ABSTRACTUsing materials from PwC's data analytics case study using a fictitious company, Pixystems Toy Company, Inc. (PwC 2017), the authors developed a comprehensive, multi-part data analytics project that is applicable for a variety of accounting courses. The project follows the common data analytics framework (ask the right questions, extract, transform, and load [ETL] the data, perform appropriate analyses, and present the results). Students apply this framework to the sales and purchases cycles. For each, students develop relevant questions, build a data model, and perform other ETL procedures, perform analytics, and prepare a presentation to convey insights and recommendations. For the sales cycle, Microsoft Excel is the analytics tool; for the purchases cycle, Tableau is used. This project provides an opportunity for students to gain experience with two analytics tools, understand the process of building a data model, and wrestle with how to convey the results of their analysis.

Motivational Factors in Organisational Change

The presented paper gives an overview of the most important and most common theories and concepts from the economic field of organisational change and is also enriched with quantitative publication data, which underlines the relevance of the topic. In particular, the topic presented is interwoven in an interdisciplinary way with economic psychological models, which are underpinned within the models with content from leading scholars in the field. The pace of change in companies is accelerating, as is technological change in our society. Adaptations of the corporate structure, but also of management techniques and tasks, are therefore indispensable. This includes not only the right approaches to employee motivation, but also the correct use of intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors. Based on the hypothesis put forward by the scientist and researcher Rollinson in his book “Organisational behaviour and analysis” that managers believe motivational resources are available at all times, socio-economic and economic psychological theories are contrasted here in order to critically examine this statement. In addition, a fictitious company was created as a model for this work in order to illustrate the effects of motivational deficits in practice. In this context, the theories presented are applied to concrete problems within the model and conclusions are drawn about their influence and applicability. This led to the conclusion that motivation is a very individual challenge for each employee, which requires adapted and personalised approaches. On the other hand, the recommendations for action for supervisors in the case of motivation deficits also cannot be answered in a blanket manner, but can only be solved with the help of professional, expert-supported processing due to the economic-psychological realities of motivation. Identifying, analysing and remedying individual employee motivation deficits is, according to the authors, a problem and a challenge of great importance, especially in the context of rapidly changing ecosystems in modern companies, as motivation also influences other factors such as individual productivity. The authors therefore conclude that good motivation through the individual and customised promotion and further training of employees is an important point for achieving important corporate goals in order to remain competitive on the one hand and to create a productive and pleasant working environment on the other.

Monitoring Remote Employees at FinPro

In response to the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, governments across the world have issued containment and mitigation restrictions to hinder the disease from spreading. To sustain operations and ensure continuity, businesses moved to remote working for their employees. To better hold work-from-home (WFH) employees accountable, employers have begun to use monitoring software, including emotion recognition software, to track employee productivity, their compliance with information security policy, and so on. This paper presents a teaching case based on a fictitious company inspired by the actual experiences of employees working at a global financial services provider. Educators worldwide in information systems or business courses can use the teaching case at the undergraduate or graduate level. The case introduces students to Financial Professional Services (“FinPro”), a fictitious American firm that makes the decision to monitor remote employees. It implements both software that records and controls end user activity and emotion recognition software. The teaching case overviews artificial intelligence and emotion recognition software and provides an opportunity for students to examine employers’ and employees’ different perspectives regarding monitoring.

AI Recruiting Tools at ShipIt2Me.com

In recent years, we have seen a dramatic increase in business interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and the number of companies that implement AI-related technologies. Thus, current and future employees need understand AI. In this paper, we present a teaching case based on a fictitious company for information systems or business courses at the undergraduate or graduate level. The case introduces students to ShipIt2Me.com (“ShipIt2Me”), a fictitious American e-commerce company that developed an AI human resources recruiting tool to help it hire cloud computing talent. The teaching case summarizes AI concepts and the opportunity for students to examine the advantages and disadvantages of using AI tools in human resources recruiting.

Retooling our anti-corruption arsenals: exploring the potential use of CAQDAS in corruption investigation

Purpose This paper aims to explore the potential of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) to be used as a corruption investigation tool to help investigators in carrying out their investigative works. Design/methodology/approach By reviewing the literature on qualitative research and fraud investigation, this exploratory study identifies similarities between the two types of inquiries and thus proposing the use of CAQDAS as an innovation in the field of corruption investigation. To demonstrate how a QDA application can support corruption investigators, NVivo is used as a case study from which various key analytical tools are discussed to highlight their potential in supporting a corruption investigation. Findings As a fundamental part of anti-corruption practice in a country, corruption investigation must be planned and executed professionally and adequately. This paper highlights various stages in fraud investigation to identify areas that can be improved with the use of a CAQDAS. Based on the discussion in this paper, the author concludes that the capability of a CAQDAS to assist users in data reduction and data display has the potential to increase the effectiveness and efficiency in various stages of a corruption investigation. Research limitations/implications Based on a self-funded study, this paper only uses a simulation case with a fictitious company to illustrate how a CAQDAS application can be used to support a corruption investigation process. Future studies may benefit from using actual corruption cases in illustrating how such an application can support the investigation process. Practical implications This paper contributes to the innovation in anti-corruption practice by proposing a new framework and tool to develop corruption investigation capacity. Originality/value This paper brings a new perspective into the field of anti-corruption to stimulate innovation in the area of corruption investigation.

"Daltexpharma": A Case Addressing Potential Pharmaceutical Cargo Theft.

This paper is provided as an innovative resource for those in the academic and training arenas to use as a case example in discussing the problem of pharmaceutical cargo theft. The case delves into the worldwide, on-going dilemma of pharmaceutical trucking cargo theft losses and the effects of such theft. For those unfamiliar with the case method of instruction, the paper's ending may be rather unsettling. But that is where the student's learning and faculty instruction process come together. Typically, students (whether in teams or individually) will fully develop their responses based on the queries provided at the end. Faculty may then proceed in any number of ways to elicit the students' insights in a classroom setting. For decades the pharmaceutical industry has been plagued with a plethora of criminal acts that impact the daily processes and procedures of operations. Pharmaceutical warehouse and trucking thefts have not only aided in the currently debilitating state of the opioid crisis in the United States, but these thefts also aid the black market in the illegal sale of diverted prescription drugs. Due to the lack of security measures, vulnerability of the truck drivers, their rigs, and the value of the cargo being transported, pharmaceutical theft is a lucrative opportunity for organized crime. The case presented here describes the issues within the pharmaceutical industry as companies must deal with "last mile" cargo thefts. Daltexpharma represents a synthesized, hypothetical example of a pharmaceutical firm that must develop policies to deal with such potential thefts in its supply chain. Although a fictitious company, the case realistically details the important factors to consider in establishing strong security practices that may be necessary for a pharmaceutical company operating in today's environment. In order to protect the integrity and security of the authors' case notes, particularly for use in an academic setting, the Journal's editor will maintain control of them. They may be obtained by faculty upon presenting their request to the Editor.

The importance of using a business intelligence tool for decision making

We seek to point out the importance, the main expectations and positive points in the use of a Business Intelligence (BI) tool for decision making, so that it can become a competitive advantage for the organization. Its main methodologies were bibliographic research, quantitative research and the case study of a fictitious company, as resources for collecting information, questionnaires were used in Google Forms, with quantitative analyzes of the data collected. As a result, we have the confirmation of the importance of using a Business Intelligence tool for operational growth, because the veracity of this data is fundamental for the construction of scenarios that can help during decision making and boost competitiveness, adding knowledge about the market to the company, it was concluded that data processing and the use of BI tools are extremely important for decision making, because in this way managers have assertive data in their hands and in an agile way gaining a competitive advantage in relation to organizations that do not use a BI tool.

Assurance on CSR reports: impact on the credibility perceptions of non-financial information by bank directors

PurposeThis paper aims to clarify whether assurance on non-financial corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports impacts the perceptions and decisions of banks as capital providers. The authors investigate the effects of the type of assurance provider and the level of assurance provided on decisions by banks to grant credit, make their own personal investments or recommend share purchases to their customers. The study aims to expand the domain of assurance on CSR reports (CSRR) by taking up a call by Cohen and Simnett (2015), who ask for behavioral research on how non-financial report’s intended users interpret and react to assurance.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on an experiment case on a fictitious company with a 2 × 2 + 1 between-subjects design. To overcome concerns regarding external validity and to prove results in a real-world setting, the authors selected German bank directors as subjects due to the extremely high relevance of banks to the German economy. The authors investigated the perceptions of 69 bank directors and analyzed the influence of CSR assurance on their decisions.FindingsThe findings suggest that assurance positively influences confidence in CSRR and that, consequently, bankers are more likely to make favorable decisions toward the reporting companies, such as approving applications for credit, investing themselves in the company or recommending the purchase of shares to their clients. These effects are stronger when an accounting firm provides the assurance and when the assurance level is reasonable rather than limited.Research limitations/implicationsThe arguments presented are, strictly speaking, limited to the case in the experiment and the views held by the bank directors at the time the authors sent out the questionnaires. Moreover, the cell sizes are quite small. Nevertheless, the authors were able to find highly significant results.Practical implicationsThe main implication of the paper is that the purchase of CSRR assurance services has a positive effect on bank directors’ perceptions and decisions. They favor the provision of such services by accounting firms and they prefer a reasonable assurance level. Thus, it can be concluded that bank directors perceive quality differences between assurance providers, are able to recognize the difference between reasonable and limited assurance and that the related information is relevant for their decisions.Originality/valueThis paper fulfils an identified need to study the influence of CSRR assurance on decisions by bank directors. The observation of a high decisions-usefulness of CSRR assurance suggests that regulators should consider mandating some form of assurance on non-financial reports throughout the EU member states.

Not Taking a Joke: The Influence of Target Status, Sex, and Age on Reactions to Workplace Humor.

The current study tasked undergraduates with serving as hypothetical human resource workers to evaluate complaints of offensive and inoffensive humor used by male and female employees in a fictitious company who varied in employment status and age. Offensive humor was deemed more problematic in its usage, particularly among female perceivers. Contrary to hypotheses, its usage was more problematic for male and older employees than for female and younger employees. In addition, participants were more averse to both offensive and inoffensive humor from high-status and older men relative to women with similar characteristics. We frame results with consideration of recent social trends.

Information specificity, social topic awareness and message authenticity in CSR communication

PurposeThis paper explores how companies can improve consumer attitudes towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages and companies by designing the content of the message, which should provide specific information and improve social topic awareness among consumers. The paper also explores the mediating role of message authenticity between the CSR message content and consumer attitudes towards the information and the company.Design/methodology/approach302 participants evaluated the website of a fictitious company that included information about its CSR activities. The authors collected data through a questionnaire of Likert-type and dichotomous scales and contrasted the hypotheses with a causal model, analysing the relationships among variables through structural equation modelling (SEM) with the software EQS 6.1.FindingsThe findings suggest that information specificity and social topic awareness improve consumer perceptions of message authenticity. The findings also show that message authenticity improves consumer trust and attitudes towards the information and the company. Attitude towards the information, message authenticity and social topic awareness show the largest impacts on trust and attitude towards the company, while information specificity also has a positive although smaller effect.Originality/valueIntegrating information specificity and social topic awareness within the conceptual model presented in this paper, based on the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) and attribution theory, allows researchers and practitioners to close the gap between companies' CSR activities and consumers' perceptions, attitudes and behaviours.