 Christian Vögtlin, Verantwortungsvolle Führung im Kontext der Globalisierung: Konzeptionalisierung und Operationalisierung eines erweiterten Führungsverständnisses, University of Zurich, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Information Technology, 2011. (Dissertation)
Nicht erst seit der Finanzkrise ist die Verantwortung von Managern und Führungskräften in Unternehmen ein intensiv diskutiertes Thema in öffentlichen Debatten. Gerade im Zuge einer fortschreitenden Globalisierung sehen sich Führungskräfte mit neuen Herausforderungen konfrontiert. Sie müssen versuchen, dem steigenden ökonomischen Druck des weltweiten Wettbewerbs zu begegnen, dabei aber gleichzeitig Mitarbeiter aus verschiedensten kulturellen Hintergründen motivieren und anleiten. Erschwerend kommt hinzu, dass sie in ihren Entscheidungen zunehmend weitreichende gesellschaftliche Auswirkungen berücksichtigen müssen, wollen sie den wachsenden Anforderungen ihrer Anspruchsgruppen gerecht werden.
Der vorliegende Beitrag beleuchtet die neuen Herausforderungen für Führungskräfte in einer global vernetzten Wirtschaft. Dabei wird der grundsätzlichen Frage nachgegangen: Wer ist verantwortlich für was gegenüber wem? Unter dem Begriff verantwortungsvolle Führung wird dabei ein Führungsverständis eingeführt, das über das dyadische Führer-Geführten-Verhältnis hinausgeht. Verantwortungsvolle Führung bedeutet den Austausch mit den relevanten Anspruchsgruppen zu suchen und konsensfähige Lösungen zu erarbeiten. Ein solches Führungsverhalten kann unter anderem dazu beitragen, die Legitimität des Unternehmens zu sichern und vertrauensvolle Stakeholder-Beziehungen aufzubauen. Dieses Verständnis wird in den Unternehmenskontext gestellt. Dabei werden Einflüsse auf und Auswirkungen von verantwortungsvoller Führung diskutiert sowie ein empirisches Messinstrument entwickelt. Insgesamt bietet der Beitrag Ansatzpunkte für weitere Forschung und Impulse für die Führungspraxis in multinationalen Unternehmen. |
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Uwe Jirjahn, Jens Mohrenweiser, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Works councils and learning: On the dynamic dimension of codetermination, Kyklos, Vol. 64 (3), 2011. (Journal Article)
This study provides the first econometric analysis on the dynamic dimension of establishment-level codetermination in Germany. We hypothesize that learning implies a change in the nature and scope of codetermination over time. Using unique data from small- and medium-sized establishments, our empirical analysis provides strong evidence that learning indeed plays a crucial role in the functioning of works councils. First, the probability of an adversarial relationship between management and works council is decreasing in the age of the council. Second, the council's age is positively associated with the probability that the council has an influence even on decisions where it has no legal powers. Third, productivity is increasing in the age of the council. Fourth, the quit rate is decreasing in the age of the council. However, the estimates also provide evidence of a codetermination life cycle. |
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Steven W Kennerley, Philippe Tobler, Decision making in frontal cortex: from single units to fMRI, In: Neural Basis of Motivational and Cognitive Control, MIT Press, Cambridge, p. 75 - 94, 2011. (Book Chapter)
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Christian Ruff, A systems-neuroscience view of attention, In: Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, p. 1 - 23, 2011. (Book Chapter)
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Nim Tottenham, Todd Anthony Hare, B J Casey, Behavioral assessment of emotion discrimination, emotion regulation, and cognitive control in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 2, 2011. (Journal Article)
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Christopher John Burke, Philippe Tobler, Coding of reward probability and risk by single neurons in animals, Frontiers in Neuroscience, Vol. 5, 2011. (Journal Article)
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Nim Tottenham, Todd Anthony Hare, Alexander Millner, Joseph T Gilhooly, Jason D Zevin, B J Casey, Elevated amygdala response to faces following early deprivation, Developmental Science, Vol. 14 (2), 2011. (Journal Article)
A functional neuroimaging study examined the long-term neural correlates of early adverse rearing conditions in humans as they relate to socio-emotional development. Previously institutionalized (PI) children and a same-aged comparison group were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing an Emotional Face Go/Nogo task. PI children showed heightened activity of the amygdala, a region that supports emotional learning and reactivity to emotional stimuli, and corresponding decreases in cortical regions that support perceptual and cognitive functions. Amygdala activity was associated with decreased eye-contact as measured by eye-tracking methods and during a live dyadic interaction. The association between early rearing environment and subsequent eye-contact was mediated by amygdala activity. These data support the hypothesis that early adversity alters human brain development in a way that can persist into childhood, and they offer insight into the socio-emotional disturbances in human behavior following early adversity. |
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Todd Anthony Hare, Jonathan Malmaud, Antonio Rangel, Focusing attention on the health aspects of foods changes value signals in vmPFC and improves dietary choice, Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 31 (30), 2011. (Journal Article)
Attention is thought to play a key role in the computation of stimulus values at the time of choice, which suggests that attention manipulations could be used to improve decision-making in domains where self-control lapses are pervasive. We used an fMRI food choice task with non-dieting human subjects to investigate whether exogenous cues that direct attention to the healthiness of foods could improve dietary choices. Behaviorally, we found that subjects made healthier choices in the presence of health cues. In parallel, stimulus value signals in ventromedial prefrontal cortex were more responsive to the healthiness of foods in the presence of health cues, and this effect was modulated by activity in regions of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest that the neural mechanisms used in successful self-control can be activated by exogenous attention cues, and provide insights into the processes through which behavioral therapies and public policies could facilitate self-control. |
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Leah H Somerville, Todd Anthony Hare, B J Casey, Frontostriatal maturation predicts cognitive control failure to appetitive cues in adolescents, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 23 (9), 2011. (Journal Article)
Adolescent risk-taking is a public health issue that increases the odds of poor lifetime outcomes. One factor thought to influence adolescents' propensity for risk-taking is an enhanced sensitivity to appetitive cues, relative to an immature capacity to exert sufficient cognitive control. We tested this hypothesis by characterizing interactions among ventral striatal, dorsal striatal, and prefrontal cortical regions with varying appetitive load using fMRI scanning. Child, teen, and adult participants performed a go/no-go task with appetitive (happy faces) and neutral cues (calm faces). Impulse control to neutral cues showed linear improvement with age, whereas teens showed a nonlinear reduction in impulse control to appetitive cues. This performance decrement in teens was paralleled by enhanced activity in the ventral striatum. Prefrontal cortical recruitment correlated with overall accuracy and showed a linear response with age for no-go versus go trials. Connectivity analyses identified a ventral frontostriatal circuit including the inferior frontal gyrus and dorsal striatum during no-go versus go trials. Examining recruitment developmentally showed that teens had greater between-subject ventral-dorsal striatal coactivation relative to children and adults for happy no-go versus go trials. These findings implicate exaggerated ventral striatal representation of appetitive cues in adolescents relative to an intermediary cognitive control response. Connectivity and coactivity data suggest these systems communicate at the level of the dorsal striatum differentially across development. Biased responding in this system is one possible mechanism underlying heightened risk-taking during adolescence. |
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Thorsten Kahnt, Marcus Grüschow, Oliver Speck, John-Dylan Haynes, Perceptual learning and decision-making in human medial frontal cortex, Neuron, Vol. 70 (3), 2011. (Journal Article)
The dominant view that perceptual learning is accompanied by changes in early sensory representations has recently been challenged. Here we tested the idea that perceptual learning can be accounted for by reinforcement learning involving changes in higher decision-making areas. We trained subjects on an orientation discrimination task involving feedback over 4 days, acquiring fMRI data on the first and last day. Behavioral improvements were well explained by a reinforcement learning model in which learning leads to enhanced readout of sensory information, thereby establishing noise-robust representations of decision variables. We find stimulus orientation encoded in early visual and higher cortical regions such as lateral parietal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). However, only activity patterns in the ACC tracked changes in decision variables during learning. These results provide strong evidence for perceptual learning-related changes in higher order areas and suggest that perceptual and reward learning are based on a common neurobiological mechanism. |
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B J Casey, Todd Anthony Hare, Adriana Galván, Risky and impulsive components of adolescent decision-making, In: Decision making, affect and learning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, p. 425 - 445, 2011. (Book Chapter)
Adolescence is a developmental period which is often characterized as a time of impulsive and risky choices leading to increased incidence of unintentional injuries and violence, alcohol and drug abuse, unintended pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. Traditional neurobiological and cognitive explanations for such suboptimal decisions have failed to account for nonlinear changes in behaviour observed during adolescence, relative to childhood and adulthood. This chapter provides a biologically plausible conceptualization of the neural mechanisms underlying these nonlinear changes in behaviour, of a heightened sensitivity to incentives while impulse control is still relatively immature during this period. Recent human imaging and animal studies provide a biological basis for this view, suggesting differential development of limbic reward systems relative to top-down control systems during adolescence, relative to childhood and adulthood. Finally, a mathematical model is provided to further distinguish these constructs of impulsivity and risky choices to further characterize developmental and individual differences in suboptimal decisions during this period. |
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Claire Sergent, Christian Ruff, Antoine Barbot, Jon Driver, Geraint Reese, Top–down modulation of human early visual cortex after stimulus offset supports successful postcued report, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 23 (8), 2011. (Journal Article)
Modulations of sensory processing in early visual areas are thought to play an important role in conscious perception. To date, most empirical studies focused on effects occurring before or during visual presentation. By contrast, several emerging theories postulate that sensory processing and conscious visual perception may also crucially depend on late top-down influences, potentially arising after a visual display. To provide a direct test of this, we performed an fMRI study using a postcued report procedure. The ability to report a target at a specific spatial location in a visual display can be enhanced behaviorally by symbolic auditory postcues presented shortly after that display. Here we showed that such auditory postcues can enhance target-specific signals in early human visual cortex (V1 and V2). For postcues presented 200 msec after stimulus termination, this target-specific enhancement in visual cortex was specifically associated with correct conscious report. The strength of this modulation predicted individual levels of performance in behavior. By contrast, although later postcues presented 1000 msec after stimulus termination had some impact on activity in early visual cortex, this modulation no longer related to conscious report. These results demonstrate that within a critical time window of a few hundred milliseconds after a visual stimulus has disappeared, successful conscious report of that stimulus still relates to the strength of top-down modulation in early visual cortex. We suggest that, within this critical time window, sensory representation of a visual stimulus is still under construction and so can still be flexibly influenced by top-down modulatory processes. |
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Annelies Gerits, Christian Ruff, Olivier Guipponi, Nicole Wenderoth, Jon Driver, Wim Vanduffel, Transcranial magnetic stimulation of macaque frontal eye fields decreases saccadic reaction time, Experimental Brain Research, Vol. 212 (1), 2011. (Journal Article)
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is increasingly used to perturb targeted human brain sites non-invasively, to test for causal effects on performance of cognitive tasks. TMS might also be used in non-human primates to complement invasive work and compare with human studies. Here, we targeted the frontal eye fields (FEF) in two macaques with a continuous theta-burst (cTBS) protocol, testing the impact on visually guided saccades. After unilateral cTBS over the FEF in either hemisphere, a small (mean 7 ms) but highly consistent decrease in saccadic reaction times (RTs) was observed. Lower latencies arose for saccades both contra- and ipsilateral to the stimulated FEF after cTBS. These results provide the first demonstration that TMS can be used to affect saccadic behavior in non-human primates. The unexpectedly bilateral impact on RTs may reflect an impact on 'fixation' neurons in the FEF and/or transcallosal modulation of both FEFs induced by unilateral cTBS. In either case, this study demonstrates a clear behavioral effect induced by TMS in awake behaving monkeys performing a cognitive task. This opens new opportunities for investigating the causal roles of targeted brain areas in behavior, for measuring physiological consequences of TMS in the primate brain, and ultimately for human-monkey comparisons. |
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Felix Kübler, Verifying competitive equilibria in dynamic economies, Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 78 (4), 2011. (Journal Article)
In this paper, I examine ε-equilibria of stationary dynamic economies with heterogeneous agents and possibly incomplete financial markets. I give a simple example to show that even for arbitrarily small ε > 0, allocation and prices can be far away from exact equilibrium allocations and prices. That is, errors in market clearing or individuals' optimality conditions do not provide enough information to assess the quality of an approximation. I derive a sufficient condition for an ε-equilibrium to be close to an exact equilibrium. If the economic fundamentals are semi-algebraic, one can verify computationally whether this condition holds. The condition can be interpreted economically as a robustness requirement on the set of ε-equilibria which form a neighbourhood of the computed approximation. I illustrate the main result and the computational method using an infinite horizon economy with overlapping generations and incomplete financial markets. |
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Andreas Scherer, Moritz Patzer, Beyond universalism and relativism: Habermas's contribution to discourse ethics and its implications for intercultural ethics and organization theory, In: Philosophy and Organization Theory, Emerald, Bingley, p. 155 - 180, 2011. (Book Chapter)
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Andreas Scherer, Moritz Patzer, Corporate social responsibility, In: Handbuch Wirtschaftsethik, Metzler, Stuttgart, p. 321 - 329, 2011. (Book Chapter)
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Peter Fiechter, Reclassification of Financial Assets under IAS 39: Impact on European Banks' Financial Statements, Accounting in Europe, Vol. 8 (1), 2011. (Journal Article)
In response to the financial crisis, the IASB issued on 13 October 2008 an amendment to IAS 39 which enables entities to reclassify non-derivative financial assets held for trading and financial assets available-for-sale. This paper examines the influence of this controversial amendment on the 2008 financial statements of 219 European banks which apply IFRS. I find that approximately one-third of the sample banks have taken extensive advantage of these reclassification opportunities. The mean reclassification amount is 3.9% of total assets and 131% of the book value of equity, respectively. I further document that reclassifying banks avoid substantial fair value losses, and hence, report significantly higher levels of return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), book value of equity and regulatory capital. In particular, the mean ROE switches sign from a negative ROE of -1.4% to a positive ROE of 1.3% due to gains from reclassifications. Overall, this paper documents a substantial impact of the amendments on banks' financial statements and suggests analysing these reclassifications with particular caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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Peter Fiechter, The effects of the fair value option under IAS 39 on the volatility of bank earnings, Journal of International Accounting Research, Vol. 10 (1), 2011. (Journal Article)
Using an international sample of 222 banks from 41 countries, this study examines whether the fair value option (FVO) affects earnings volatility. Prior empirical studies associate higher levels of earnings volatility with fair value accounting (Barth et al. 1995; Hodder et al. 2006). In contrast, I find evidence that banks applying the FVO to reduce accounting mismatches exhibit lower earnings volatility than other banks. I assign this alternative outcome to the optional characteristic of the FVO. Banks can use the flexibility in accounting to reduce artificial earnings volatility. The cross-sectional results are robust against outliers and several model alterations, including controls for endogeneity bias. Furthermore, I predict and find that banks from countries with high regulatory quality are more likely to apply the FVO to reduce accounting mismatches. Overall, the findings confirm the IASB’s initial intention on introducing the FVO. Hence, the study contributes to the current debate on the use of fair values in financial reporting. |
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Andreas Scherer, Guido Palazzo, The new political role of business in a globalized world: A review of a new perspective on CSR and its implications for the firm, governance, and democracy, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 48 (4), 2011. (Journal Article)
Scholars in management and economics widely share the assumption that business firms focus on profits only, while it is the task of the state system to provide public goods. In this view business firms are conceived of as economic actors, and governments and their state agencies are considered the only political actors. We suggest that, under the conditions of globalization, the strict division of labour between private business and nation-state governance does not hold any more. Many business firms have started to assume social and political responsibilities that go beyond legal requirements and fill the regulatory vacuum in global governance. Our review of the literature shows that there are a growing number of publications from various disciplines that propose a politicized concept of corporate social responsibility. We consider the implications of this new perspective for theorizing about the business firm, governance, and democracy. |
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Andreas Scherer, Moritz Patzer, Where is the theory in stakeholder theory? – A meta-analysis of the pluralism in stakeholder theory, In: Stakeholder Theory: Impact and Prospects, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, p. 140 - 162, 2011. (Book Chapter)
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