infonet-economy

DE: Ein Unternehmen als Ganzes wie auch seine einzelnen Profit-Center sollen Wert generieren. Nur, wie lässt sich diese Größe eigentlich messen? Wie tragen einzelne Strategien und Maßnahmen sowie traditionelle Stellgrößen des operativen Geschäfts zu einer Erhöhung des Unternehmenswerts bei?
Dieses Buch orientiert sich stark an der praktischen Arbeit des Controllers, der an der Schnittstelle zu allen Entscheidungsträgern die Managementprozesse koordiniert. Es vermittelt die Prinzipien, Methoden und Instrumente vor allem des operativen Controllings im Rahmen der renditeorientierten Unternehmensführung. Die Umsetzung geschieht in einem in der Praxis entwickelten und angewandten Controlling-Cockpit, das die wichtigsten operativen Steuerungsgrößen für das Management von Unternehmen und Profit-Centern übersichtlich darstellt. Die ausführlichen Fallbeispiele aus der Praxis im zweiten Teil decken einen repräsentativen Querschnitt unternehmerischer Entscheidungen ab.

FR: L’entreprise doit, et avec elle chacun de ses centres de profit, générer de la valeur. Mais qu’est-ce que la «valeur»? Comment les stratégies, les mesures et les variables classiques de l’activité opérationnelle contribuent-elles à augmenter la valeur de l’entreprise? Cet ouvrage est essentiellement axé sur le travail du contrôleur de gestion qui, à l’intersection entre les décideurs, coordonne les processus de décision. Il décrit les principes, les méthodes et les outils du contrôle de gestion opérationnel dans l’entreprise focalisée sur le rendement. Ils sont concrétisés dans le cockpit du contrôle de gestion, un outil pratique qui regroupe les principales variables opérationnelles nécessaires à la gestion d’entreprises et de centres de profit. La seconde partie présente des études de cas pratiques offrant un survol représentatif des décisions en entreprise.

IT: Un’azienda nel suo insieme, come anche singoli centri di profitto, devono generare valore aggiunto. Ci si domanda però come è misurabile questo valore. E come possono essere valutate le strategie e le decisioni che concorrono ad un valore aggiunto di un’azienda? La struttura del libro si orienta al lavoro pratico del controller, che coordina, assumendosi le competenze metodologiche, tutti i processi decisionali che si impongono tra coloro che hanno facoltà di decisione. L’opera trasmette i principi, i metodi e gli strumenti, in particolare del controlling operativo, nell’ambito della gestione aziendale rivolta alla redditività. L’applicazione avviene tramite il controlling cockpit, realizzato ed adottato nella pratica, che permette la chiara evidenziazione degli indici operativi per il management dell’azienda e di profit center. I casi pratici nella seconda parte trattano in maniera esaustiva le più importanti decisioni aziendali. Grazie alla combinazione di un’esperienza decennale nel management e controlling industriale con le esigenze di mediazione del sapere nelle scuole superiori ed in occasione di programmi di formazione e perfezionamento pratici questo libro è adatto sia a coloro che esercitano un potere decisionale (direzione, manager di progetti, responsabili di settore e di centri di costo) come anche agli studenti e coloro che si affacciano al mondo del lavoro per i quali risulta essere un importante strumento di lavoro e opera di consultazione.

To enable a better understanding of corrupt activities, I develop the paper around fundamental dimensions: Firstly, corruption is exerted by the supply side, this means I analyze the regulation effects on providers of corruption activities. Second, I enrich existing compliance concepts with the integrity approach and point out the effects on individual behavior.

The relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and economic payoff has been an increasingly important issue for scholarly discussion. To enable a better understanding of the similarities, distinctions and complementarities between explaining theories, I set forth a theoretical basis for constituting CSR activities on an individual level. An alternative modeling of the utility function and economic concepts like happiness research, stewardship theory and intrinsic motivation can give some further explanations why managers act in a social responsible way beside normative considerations.

The UN Global Compact (UNGC) is the largest “corporate citizenship” (CC) initiative in the world. Almost 4000 companies have signed up for the initiative whereby they voluntarily commit themselves to adhere to ten principles in the areas of human rights, labor rights, the environment and corruption (www.unglobalcompact.org).

Eight years after the launch of the UNGC the question rises how far the participants have progressed in the implementation of the Compact’s principles.

This paper presents the results of an empirical assessment of the implementation process at five Swiss UNGC participants. The results illustrate that CC is a learning process and corporations are at different stages of development. To date, only few companies are implementing CC as intended by the founders of the UNGC yet some aspects show that companies assume a political role in their global business activities. Thus, the study confirms the theoretical argument of corporations contributing to emerging global governance structures (Palazzo/Scherer 2006).

Whereas the theoretical literature on organizational reward systems repeatedly points to the importance of tournament models from an efficiency perspective, very few is known about the application and effectiveness of tournament compensation in organizations, especially when contestant heterogeneity is taken into account. While the distorting effects of contestant heterogeneity on tournament incentives have been theoretically analyzed for the two-contestant-case, tournament incentives in a typical organizational context with more than two and with heterogeneous contestants and with more than one prize, have not been studied so far. In our paper, we analyze these effects theoretically as well as empirically by studying in-centive travel sales contests as a quantitatively important component of compensation, and we also present first empirical evidence on (successful and unsuccessful) organizational attempts to reduce contestant heterogeneity by active handicapping and league-building.

In this survey article, we review results from behavioural and experimental economics that have a potential application in the field of personnel economics. While personnel economics started out with a «clean» economic perspective on human resource management (HRM), it has recently broadened its perspective by increasingly taking into account the results from laboratory experiments. Besides having inspired theory-building, the integration of behavioural economics into personnel economics has gone hand in hand with a strengthening of empirical analyses (using field experiments and survey data) complementing the findings from the laboratory. Concentrating on employee compensation as one particular field of application, we show that for personnel economics there is indeed much to be learnt from the recent developments in behavioural economics. Moreover, integrating behavioural economics into personnel economics bears the chance of eventually reconciling personnel economics and «classic» HRM analysis that has a long tradition of relying on social psychology as a classical point of reference.

The new developments of the globalization process bring with them new responsibilities for the multinational corporation and its leaders. The aim of the paper was to identify those new responsibilities and to look at the changing role of leadership due to those responsibilities. This paper thereby acknowledges the need for a more descriptive and prescriptive social scientific approach by aiming for an understanding of what will be called globally responsible leadership. The article starts with pointing to the changing role of leadership due to new ecological, societal and business obligations leaders in organizations are facing. The following literature review of leadership theories shows that there is no theory that can fully address the new developments. Thus, it is developed a new framework of globally responsible leadership that encompasses those new obligations and that exemplifies the personal preconditions of globally responsible leaders. It is therefore drawn upon theories of responsibility form the philosophy of law and further disciplines. The elements of the framework of globally responsible leadership are explained and suggestions are made of how to empirically capture globally responsible leadership behaviour. At the end, the article points to future research directions.