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The EU legislature, through the approval of the Non-financial Information Directive, has made a decisive step towards a mandatory regime for Sustainability Reporting as an essential condition to promote sustainable behavior across European countries. This paper aims at examing the impact of managers' beliefs and attitudes on NFI mandatory reporting practices through the Theory of Planned Behavior. We test whether managers' attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control impact the quality of sustainability reports in Spain and Italy. We built a reflective-formative hierarchical component PLS-SEM model, tested in a survey of 104 Italian (56.73%) and Spanish (43.27%) managers, that combines different latent variables and their relationships, which confirms all our hypotheses. This cross-country analysis is motivated by some differences between Italy and Spain in their cultural orientation and in the area non-financial reporting. To measure Non-financial Information, we crafted a Sustainability Reporting Quality Index for the same companies of the surveyed managers, that combines several reporting features of disclosure quality. We also consider whether other external factors, such as governance characteristics, social influence, and sustainable education, affect managers' intention to engage in Sustainability Reporting. The results reveal that our model, along with sustainable education and social influence explain more than 56% of the intention to engage in Sustainability Reporting. This indicates that the latter latent variable is well predicted, confirming the relevance of managers' beliefs in driving quality Sustainability Reporting practices. Our findings may specifically help business managers and decision-makers to identify the factors that are likely to influence sustainability reporting in Italy and Spain and contribute to develop efficient sustainable reporting strategies by decision-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature showed mixed results about the impact of CEOs' financial literacy (CFL) on small and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) innovation. This relationship can be motivated by relevant variables, which are missing in the previous literature and make a difference as mediators. In this sense, based on the theoretical framework related to upper echelon theory and resource-based view, this study focuses on the mediating effect of risk-taking attitude and management control systems (MCS) variables. Empirical data from 310 SMEs gathered using a qualitative research questionnaire are analyzed using structural equation modeling methodology. Specifically, estimations are carried out considering the partial least square method. Findings show that MCS and managers' risk attitudes fully mediate the relationship between financial literacy (FL) and innovation. Between these two mediating variables, the implementation of MCS stands out because it also enables the mediating effect of CEOs' risk-taking in the CFL–technological innovation relationship. As the results do not support the significant direct relationship between FL and risk attitude, they confirm an indirect effect through MCS. Furthermore, based on the study findings, SMEs' directors and owners, business associations, and public authorities can improve SMEs' technological innovation by implementing training programs and policies to foster CFL. They can also acknowledge the interdependency between organizational factors and individual characteristics to enhance SMEs' technological innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide here a general mathematical framework to model attitudes towards ambiguity which uses the formalism of quantum theory as a "purely mathematical formalism, detached from any physical interpretation". We show that the quantum-theoretic framework enables modelling of the Ellsberg paradox, but it also successfully applies to more concrete human decision-making tests involving financial, managerial and medical decisions. In particular, we elaborate a mathematical representation of various empirical studies which reveal that attitudes of managers towards uncertainty shift from ambiguity seeking to ambiguity aversion, and viceversa, thus exhibiting hope effects and fear effects. The present framework provides a promising direction towards the development of a unified theory of decisions in the presence of uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to develop a theoretical framework for understanding compassion. It contributes to the research of compassion from an indigenous theory perspective to complement the Western theory of this important topic. We do this by adopting self-cultivation, a Confucian indigenous theoretical perspective based on xin (mind-heart) to guide our grounded study and thus develop an integrative framework. With an analysis based on extensive interviews with top executive leaders in Chinese enterprises, we thus show that (1) integrating compassion and self-cultivation enriches our understanding of the moral growth of compassion; (2) compassion affects performance outcomes at the individual, relational, and organizational levels; and (3) self-cultivation and compassion have an ultimate interaction effect on organizational performance outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a vignette experiment among Dutch managers we examine employers' considerations in the decision to rehire employees after mandatory retirement. We specifically focus on the effects of the employee's downward wage flexibility (i.e., the willingness to accept a lower wage) and contract flexibility (i.e., preference for a contract which allows flexible hours or employment). The results show that employers are strongly affected by employees who offer to work for a significantly lower wage, but not by the employees' preference for a particular labor contract. Employers are overall quite disinclined to rehire employees after mandatory retirement, although large differences exist between employees. Part of these differences can be explained by employers having higher retirement age norms (i.e., the maximum age at which employers consider employees suited for work in their organization). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]