Managerial Tactics Research Articles

Confronting the Gray Market Problem

Gray markets involve the sales of legitimate products by way of channels of distribution that are not authorized by the brand owners. Gray markets may benefit consumers and even brand owners under certain circumstances. On balance, however, gray markets are detrimental to brand owners because gray market traders access genuine product in both physical and virtual markets and reap profits stemming from the resale of goods owing to price differentiation between markets, thus depriving brand owners of those profits. In this study, we discuss the principal factors that encourage a gray market and the legal underpinnings that permit gray markets in the United States. We then summarize managerial tactics—both reactive and proactive—to combat gray markets.

Research on Initiative Turnover Rate of the Post-90s Workforce―Taking Labor-Intensive Enterprises as an Example

Based on the investigation of the traditional research on the factors which affect employee turnover rate, this paper aims at establishing a dynamic model of the post-90s workforce to explain the phenomenon of continuously high employee turnover rate of the post-90s workforce in labor-intensive enterprises. The model has explored the intervening factors of employee turnover and provided theoretical guidelines for companies to take actions against high turnover rate. The incentives for the post-90s employee initiative turnover have been probed thoroughly from the three aspects of employee, company and society and thus the managerial tactics have been proposed for companies to manage high turnover rate of employees. These tactics include mental health education, employee ethics education, improvement of working environments, rebuilding corporate culture, transforming employee management style, enhancing employee career planning management and setting up keep-to-the-point incentive mechanism, etc.

Services and value compatibility with low-cost airlines: a case of Go-Air International

This paper highlights applied customer services concerns to be analysed by the services organisations for reaching higher operational efficiency. A case is presented to address some of these critical concerns in airline companies with the aim of illustrating critical areas of opportunity for improving customer service. The case presents an emergency occurring during a flight of a worldwide–known airline company and how service responsiveness failed to match customer expectations. The case calls for selecting a different approach to service responsiveness according to varying degree of circumstances, such as adequate innovative active practices vs. passive managerial tactics. In addition to addressing customer service in relation to the dynamics of the situation, the case poses challenges to overall service quality improvement amidst a high competitive industry.

Making invisible forces visible. Managing employees' values and attitudes through transient emotions

This paper investigates managerial tactics of visualisation when a need to know and manage employees' values and attitudes is expressed. Using the Danish public school as a case study, we explore how school managers use teachers' emotions to render visible presumably invisible information about their 'true' attitudes and values. The paper draws on theories of affect as well as actor–network theory to analyse three incidents where managers turn their interpretations of teachers' emotions into such information. These incidents suggest that the efforts to render employees' attitudes and values visible install a normative emotional scale where an ideal employee displays emotional investment and self–control. This has implications, not only for employees who are expected to exhibit the 'right' emotions, but also for management, which comes to depend on transient emotions and co–presence in situations that cannot be planned for.

Employee Turnover in Unique Contexts: How to Retain an Organization's Best Employees

Despite the well-known costs of employee turnover, both management scholars and practitioners require better understandings of the causes, consequences, and mitigating factors of turnover. Debate exists within the turnover literature about who will voluntarily turnover, what causes that turnover, when that turnover will occur, and how organizations can mitigate the outflow of its best employees. In this presenter symposium, we seek to address these questions. The first two papers seek to understand the causes and timing of voluntary turnover among high performing or high skilled employees. The final two papers address how organizations can retain employees, even amid high turnover, developing work environments, through organizational or managerial interventions. Taken together, these four papers highlight the role that managers play in fostering environments that can decrease the turnover of an organization’s best employees even when experiencing uncertain economic conditions. From Care to Control: Managerial Tactics for Retaining Focal Employees Presenter: Timothy Gardner; Utah State U. Presenter: Peter Hom; Arizona State U. Presenter: Rodger Griffeth; Ohio U. Can We Get You to Stay? Organization Identification Contagion and Employee Turnover Presenter: Sumita Raghuram; Pennsylvania State U. Presenter: Xiangmin Liu; Pennsylvania State U. It's not Who Leaves but How Quickly: The Role of Shocks in Turnover of High Performing Employees Presenter: Anthony R. Wheeler; U. of Rhode Island Presenter: Jonathon R. B. Halbesleben; U. of Alabama Presenter: Samantha C. Paustian-Underdahl; Kennesaw State U. A Contextualized Model of Embedding or Leaving Forces for America's Offshore Manufacturing Workforce Presenter: Peter Hom; Arizona State U. Presenter: Mian Zhang; Tsinghua U. Presenter: Blanca Rosa Garcia Rivera; U. Autonoma de Baja California

Impact of value added tax on management and performance of enterprises in Serbia

The aim of this paper is to show that in the recession economic conditions, and current business environment in Serbia can be regarded as that, due to the impact of the global economic crisis, market, social, political and other factors, Value Added Tax is not neutral on the business results of the company. Namely, because of lower economic activity and lower GDP, companies on the market have problems with collecting receivables. Therefore their liquidity position is deteriorated. In this situation, collecting VAT, not VAT itself, even more contributes to the current problems. So the way in which the VAT is collected by the tax authorities indirectly affects companies cash flow, operational management and overall performance of the company. Also, the aim of the study is to present the managerial tactics by which these negative effects can be overcome or at least reduced. These tactics largely rely on the detailed planning and enhanced control of cash flow.

The practice of risk management: Silence is not absence

In contrast to risk management studies on organisations that overtly deal with risk, this article explores organisational risk management in a context in which risk is more or less absent from managerial vocabulary or organisational communication. It presents a single case study of a Swedish public transportation authority in which managers actually attend to a multitude of risk matters through contracts, a selective view of responsibility and dialogues, but without explicitly referring to them as risks. Two related claims are made on the basis of this case study. One is that the practice of risk management needs to be decoupled from the theories of risk management; another is that risk management practices do not need to be explicit but can be embedded in the managerial tactics (after De Certeau, 1990) that characterise the organisation's operational mode. Put concisely, silence does not necessarily mean the absence of risk management. This calls for a redefinition of the boundaries and nature of risk management theory and practice.

Double play: creating the sport customer experience using an interdisciplinary framework for managing service employees

This study investigated high-performance Human Resource Management (HPHRM) practices and social identification processes among part-time frontline service staff of five professional sport clubs. Significant effects of HPHRM practices and employees' identification with club and with customers emerged, influencing employees' customer orientation. We discuss managerial tactics to enhance identification and HPHRM practices as well as future research directions directed at developing techniques for enhancing customer orientation.

Normalizing Dirty Work: Managerial Tactics For Countering Occupational Taint

Dirty work refers to occupations that are viewed by society as physically, socially, or morally tainted. Using exploratory, semistructured interviews with managers from 18 dirty work occupations, we investigated the challenges of being a manager in tainted work and how managers normalize taint--that is, actively counter it or render it less salient. Managers reported experiencing role complexity and stigma awareness. Four types of practices for countering taint were revealed: occupational ideologies, social buffers, confronting clients and the public, and defensive tactics. We discuss links between these practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Academy of Management Journal is the property of Academy of Management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Performance measurement and institutional processes: a study of managerial responses to public sector reform

Institutional aspects of performance measurement (PM) in public sector organizations are attracting increasing research interest. Only recently, however, has the literature on this topic recognized the pertinent critique of neo-institutional sociology (NIS) pivoting around its view of managers and organizations as primarily passive adaptors to change. This paper explores how the properties of institutional processes associated with recent reforms in the Norwegian health care sector impinge on the extent of pro-active choice exercised by senior management in the development of multidimensional PM reflecting the interests of a wider range of institutional constituencies. Addressing this issue, we draw on Oliver’s (1991) conceptual framework, based on a continuum of responses characterized by a varying degree of pro-active choice. The study thus provides a more detailed analysis of the managerial tactics in developing organizational PM than most prior research informed by NIS. We find support for several of Oliver’s hypotheses regarding the influence of institutional aspects, particularly those pertaining to the causes of the adoption of PM practices, the pattern in which these are diffused and the influence of constituency multiplicity and dependence, but also identify some areas requiring conceptual refinement in this respect.

Supporting managerial intelligence tactics through information technology

What tactics do managers use to identify emerging problems and opportunities? What are the impacts of information technology on the problem finding process? This study investigated the use of computer-based information and communications support in 90 problem and opportunity finding episodes within the banking industry. The technology permitted managers to use multiple stimuli and multiple problem finding tactics to identify emerging problems or opportunities. Furthermore, information technology allowed managers to use data external to the organisation to identify problems and opportunities. Managers were eight times more likely to use transaction-based processing systems and management information systems than decision support and executive support systems to identify problems and opportunities. Information technology tools supported problem finding by providing: (1) data to identify significant deviations from historical performance, budgets, or industry norms, and (2) timely communication among branch managers including uncovering potential criminal activity. The paper concludes with suggestions to enhance managerial intelligence activities through IS planning and possible research extensions.

Incorporating the New Woman in Wharton's The Custom of the Country

At any rate, I must protect myself from the recurrence of the wearing and unprofitable discussions about money which have made the chief subject of our talk whenever we have been together lately; and I want to remind you again, before we meet, that this applies not only to talks about the management of my property, but to the question of managing household affairs for me. --Edith Wharton in a letter to Edward Teddy Wharton, May 30, 1911 Written during the course of Wharton's break with her husband, her affair with Morton Fullerton, the sale of her beloved home, the Mount, and growing tension with Scribner's, her long-time publisher, The Custom of the Country (1913) reflects Wharton's own marital, domestic, and financial anxiety.(1) A crisis of managerial control is at the heart of many of these anxieties--how would she manage Teddy, her sexual transgressions, her career, and her growing wealth? Wharton's self-described great American Novel illustrates the consequences of not developing managerial tactics in a rapidly incorporating American culture, a culture that promulgated its message of unity through subordination.(2) Throughout The Custom of the Country, Wharton validates a shift from entrepreneurial to managerial values that reflects her own concerns as well as progressive reformers' demands to regulate a vicissitudinous Wall Street. Attentive to contemporary debates in social science, Wharton creates a dialogics of evolutionary discourse to legitimate this shift.(3) She transforms her novel's central protagonist, Undine Spragg, from an unregulated force into a well-managed employee. That the icon of this unregulated, potentially dangerous energy is Undine Spragg, arguably Wharton's most developed woman protagonist, suggests not merely Wharton's own ambivalence toward sexually and socially transgressive women but her feminization of larger cultural anxieties over unregulated power. In many respects, Undine embodies what Walter Benn Michaels has theorized as the corporate personality at the turn of the century. It was the corporation's ability to act as an intangible person, intangible in its insatiability for wealth and person-like in its power to act, that made it a source of cultural anxiety: To writers like James `Cyclone' Davis and Henry D. Lloyd, it was this combination of personhood and intangibility that conferred upon corporations `unprecendented' powers--above all, the `power to act as persons, as in the comission of crimes, with exemption from punishment as persons.'(4) With her relentless appetite and status as simultaneously person, product, and abstract force, Undine is like a corporation in which she owns all of the capital stock. As a person, she lies and misleads; as an abstract force of nature she seems exempt from punishment. If her seemingly inhuman voraciousness makes her culturally unlocatable--she continually propels herself and others into unfamiliar social and moral terrain--it also makes her theoretically overdetermined. As a entity, Undine is at once consumer of others, producer of herself, and vehicle through which products and commodities are parlayed. Indeed, in her fiction prior to World War I, Wharton represents her new women protagonists foremost as desiring subjects who defy easy categorization. Their social ambitions create a kind of moral indecipherability that frustrates the anthropologist's reading. In Wharton's novella Sanctuary (1903), the antagonist Clemence Vemey is patently of the `new school' because her ambition overrides any commitment to traditional moral precepts; her feverish activities and broad-cast judgments ... made her hard to define.(5) In The Fruit of the Tree (1907), Justine Brent is so free and flexible in all her motions that she seemed akin to the swaying reeds and curving brambles which caught at her as she passed, a flexibility that when extended to the ethical arena suggests a disconcerting ability to reconcile selfless idealism with a conceivably selfish act of euthanasia. …

Early debt extinguishment transactions and auditor materiality judgments: A bounded rationality perspective

Critics have characterized bond refundings and in-substance defeasances as managerial tactics that artificially inflate reported earnings during periods of rising interest rates, and various accounting and auditing pronouncements suggest that such transactions be subjected to more stringent materiality criteria. Extending work that interprets audit judgment formation as a cognitive phenomenon, this study examines hypothesized relationships between materiality judgments and the size and nature of these debt transactions, client earnings trend, and experience of the auditor. Proceeding beyond this cognitive orientation, the study then interprets judgment formation as a social-behavioral phenomenon by examining the applicability of the bounded rationality perspective to auditing. The results obtained from an experiment involving 212 practitioners at the ranks of partner, manager and senior suggest that the size of item, earnings trend and nature of transaction influence materiality judgments, as mitigated by an auditor's experience. Further, quantitative and qualitative, interview-based evidence suggests the usefulness of viewing audit judgment processes as boundedly rational, social-behavioral phenomena.

Plotting cost and quality interests on the same field can elicit effective managerial tactics for balancing them.

is Professor of Education at University of Toledo; Mary Keenan, EdD, MSN, BSN, is Associate Professor, School of Nursing, and JOHN MINNICK, BA, is Vice President of Finance at Medical College of Ohio, in Toledo, Ohio.

Guayule:A case study in civilian technology

This case study documents the difficulty of initiating civilian technology programs in government. Earlier work has focused on the political actions of supporting and opposing constituencies. This paper deals with institutional factors in the process of resource allocation, which are designed to create obstacles to the initiation of new programs. The paper also outlines managerial tactics available to government executives, which may mitigate the obstacles when coupled with responsible analysis of public needs and values. It concludes that civilian technology programs are difficult but feasible undertakings and that, despite their scanty record of success, they can be deserving of public resources and support.

Predicting managers’ choice of influence mode: The effects of interpersonal trust and worker attributions on managerial tactics in a simulated organizational setting

The present study examined the effects of induced trust on subjects’ preferences for modes of influence in a simulated organizational setting. Using an exchange model, the authors predicted that coercive measures would be preferred by managers over reward or persuasion in conditions involving nontrusted workers; that persuasion would be perferred when workers were highly trusted; and that in intermediate situations, managers would prefer the use of reward as an influence tactic. In addition, the effects of sex of subject and sex of worker on preferred influence mode were examined. Results indicate that managers tend to use coercion with low‐trust workers and persuasion with high‐trust workers. Similarly they tend to attribute external motives (e.g., fear of punishment) to workers who are not trusted, and internal motivations (desire to do one's best) to highly trusted workers. Managers in the present study did not discriminate on the basis of worker sex. In the discussion the implications of the interaction of trust and influence mode are explored, and the likelihood of the occurrence of an inflationary power spiral is discussed.