infonet-economy

Despite the fact that most companies have embraced social media as part of the mar-keting mix, there still remains a significant lack of knowledge as to what drives com-munication effectiveness in this new kind of peer-to-peer environment where tradi-tional, well-settled marketing communication paradigms like domination and control do show their limits. Accordingly, corporate attempts to leverage marketing opportuni-ties in the social media ecosystem often prove to be a highly experimental trial-and-error process with uncertain outcomes.
Therefore, this book sets out to expand companies’ understanding of how to success-fully manage corporate social media sites by providing a set of key drivers, which, when appropriately managed and controlled, can help to increase the audience base of a firm’s social media presence. To this end, the author theoretically and quantitatively investigated within a corporate blog setting how specific characteristics of corporate postings affect future audience size. The selected characteristics are identified on three investigative levels that arise from the generic structure of social media postings, namely the source of information, the presentation of information, and the interaction with information. In this way, the author was able to map and to analyze a customer’s integrated experience with a corporate social media message.
The research findings led to some applicable recommendations for companies running a social media presence. For instance, it is shown that selecting the right corporate spokespersons, presenting vivid content, or promoting conversational activity can be-come important tactical levers when it comes to the augmentation of corporate social media site attractiveness. Hence, this book helps to assist companies to effectively lev-erage the power of a wide set of pull factors.

This study estimates the earning losses of workers experiencing an involuntary job separation. We employ, for the first time in the earning losses literature, a Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimator with fixed effects that has several advantages with respect to conventional fixed effects models. The Poisson estimator allows considering the full set of involuntary separations, including those with zero labor market earnings because of unemployment. By including individuals with zero earnings and by using our new method, the loss in the year of separation becomes larger than in previous studies. The loss starts with roughly 30% and, although it quickly shrinks, it remains at around 15% in the following years. In addition, we find that compared to other reasons for separation, the earning loss pattern is unique for involuntary separations, because no other type of separation implies such permanent scarring. This latter finding makes us confident that the self-reported involuntariness of a separation is a reliable source of information.

This paper explores, based on the varieties-of-capitalism approach, configurations of key human resource management practices that explain radical innovation in subsidiaries. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis is conducted with data for 69 subsidiaries of US-based MNEs in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Contrary to the implications of the varieties-of-capitalism literature, combining numerical flexibility and employing a high share of academics does not necessarily achieve radical innovation. Various paths to radical innovation exist, and most of them involve functional flexibility. Overall, the findings emphasize the strategic discretion MNEs have, and accentuate that functional flexibility is a key HR practice to achieve radical innovation across differing varieties of capitalism countries.

As downsizing and restructuring have become global phenomena, the impact of job insecurity on employee attitudes has received significant attention. However, research examining the role of cultural dimensions has been largely unexplored. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, we investigated whether the relationships between both quantitative job insecurity (i.e. the perceived threat of job loss) and qualitative job insecurity (i.e. the perceived threat of losing valued job features) and employee attitudes (job satisfaction and turnover intention) differ in culturally distinct regions. This was examined using representative employee samples from two regions of Switzerland which differ in societal practices uncertainty avoidance and performance orientation: the German-speaking (n = 966) and the French-speaking (n = 307) regions. Our research indicates that whereas the relationship between quantitative job insecurity and turnover intention is stronger in the French-speaking region where there is higher societal practice uncertainty avoidance, the relationship between qualitative job insecurity and job satisfaction is stronger in the German-speaking region where there is higher societal practice performance orientation.

We study how startup teams are assembled in terms of team member human capital characteristics. To this end, we derive a statistically motivated benchmark for new venture team heterogeneity in terms of observed team member characteristics to generate stylized facts about team member diversity at startup and how it evolves as the new venture matures. We use the population of Danish startups that were established in 1998 and track them until 2001. Main findings are that teams are relatively more homogeneous at startup compared to our benchmark, indicating that difficulties associated with workforce heterogeneity (like affective conflict or coordination cost) as well as “homophily” (people’s inclination to bound with others with similar characteristics) may overweigh the benefits of heterogeneity. While workforce heterogeneity does increase over time, the increase is smaller compared to our benchmark but substantially larger than if team additions and replacements had the same characteristics as the initial team members.