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In recent years the integrity of corporate leaders has increasingly been questioned as allegations of moral misconduct or dubious decisions have been made. Indeed, integrity is an important element of leadership. We develop a theory-based model for judging a corporate leader's integrity and address the questions: What are the criteria for judging? When are integrity judgments particularly important? Who is the judge? We present three components of integrity criteria that enable the relevant set of moral values and norms of stakeholders to affect such judgments: laws, codes of conduct, and informal moral values and norms that relevant stakeholders expect a corporate leader to abide by. Such an integrity judgment is particularly relevant during times of change, when a new corporate leader is appointed, and when allegations of moral misconduct are made while a leader is in office. We illustrate our model with the Royal Ahold case. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper focuses knowledge and networks in the global startup process of science-based ventures. A global startup process is a process of organisational emergence in which ventures engage in the exchange of knowledge, information and other resources with international contacts, to recognise opportunities for business, and prepare for the exploitation of these activities on the global market. We examine how knowledge-related needs change during the global startup process in terms of classification, function, network composition and interaction patterns. We formulate propositions to guide founders in their global startup process in building on theoretical insights and examples.

This article introduces the special issue on New Perspectives on the Trust-Control Nexus in Organizational Relations. Trust and control are interlinked processes commonly seen as key to reach effectiveness in inter- and intraorganizational relations. The relation between trust and control is, however, a complex one, and research into this relation has given rise to various and contradictory interpretations of how trust and control relate. A well-known discussion is directed at whether trust and control are better conceived as substitutes, or as complementary mechanisms of governance. The articles in this special issue bring the discussion on the relationship between both concepts a step further by identifying common factors, distinctive mechanisms, and key implications relevant for theory building and empirical research. By studying trust and control through different perspectives and at different levels of analysis, the articles provide new theoretical insights and empirical evidence on the foundations of the trust-control interrelations. © 2007 Sage Publications.

This paper reports on a case study on the introduction of organization development (OD) techniques in a traditionally top-down lead public sector organization in the Netherlands. The findings suggest that an OD-inspired bottom-up change approach can have a place next to a top-down strategic management change approach. However, to reap the benefits of OD, the top management role appeared to be pivotal, especially with regard to creating the circumstances under which sufficient participation can take place.

Previous research has demonstrated that intra-group respect can strengthen people's group identification, and encourage them to exert themselves on behalf of their group. In the present contribution, we focus on the possibility that those who are not respected by other group members (i.e., the disrespected) can also display group beneficial behavior. Experiment 1 (N = 159) confirms this paradoxical premise and reveals that systematically disrespected group members indeed exert themselves on group-serving tasks. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2 (N = 110). Additional indicators in Experiment 2 demonstrate that the effort by systematically disrespected group members cannot be attributed to a desire to improve their acceptance in the group, but should be interpreted as attempts to assert the worth of the self separately from the group. Results are discussed in relation to the group-value model and insights on marginal group membership and social exclusion. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From the perspective of Organisational Learning, organisations have the capacity to learn. Processes of organisational learning and knowledge development have been described mostly in idiosyncratic studies. In this paper, the question raised is how these learning processes can be mapped in a more general way? Can phenomena such as learning abilities of organisations or characteristic learning cycles as several authors broadly describe them, be detected? Unlike other theoretical currents of organisation research, the absence of shared research instruments makes it difficult to compare organisations and be able to pronounce upon their learning capabilities in a more general way.In this paper, the learning abilities of organisations are distinguished and described according to the model of the social learning cycle. A questionnaire was designed and validated to characterise the dimensions of a knowledge space and the stages of a learning cycle. The results, given by the four departments of three knowledge-intensive organisations, are analysed. © 2006 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved.

Previous research has demonstrated that intragroup respect can strengthen people's commitment to the group and encourage them to exert themselves on behalf of it. In the present research, the authors argue that similar behavior can ensue from self-focused concerns when group members are disrespected. Experiment 1 (N = 174) confirms that high respect as well as low respect motivates people to increase their actual discretionary efforts on behalf of the group. These findings were replicated and extended in Experiment 2 (N = 138), where it was established that enhanced efforts only emerge when people consider the way they are evaluated by others as diagnostic for their position in the group. In addition, it is demonstrated that whereas the efforts of respected people were primarily motivated by affective commitment to the group (group-focused concerns), the behavior of disrespected people was driven by anxiety about their acceptance into the group (self-focused concerns). © 2006 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

In spite of the increasing popularity of international joint ventures, managers express a high level of dissatisfaction with them. This paper argues that overemphasis on the outcome has resulted in a neglect of the social processes underlying the outcome. The paper elaborates upon the rationale for a cooperative approach towards interorganizational collaborative relationships based on trust, and discusses it in the context of joint ventures. This is then applied towards understanding multinational ownership preferences and tolerance for joint ventures. It is argued that trust-centered logic is largely consistent with approaches that emphasize the issue of ownership, and deepens and enriches the insights provided by the latter. A shift in focus from ownership to relational dynamics is encouraged. Journal of International Business Studies (2006) 37, 30–43. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400161

The use of electronic data is steadily gaining ground in the study of the social organization of scientific and research communities, decreasing the researcher's reliance on commercial databases of bibliographic entries, patents grants and other manually constructed records of scientific works. In our work we provide a methodological innovation based on semantic technology for dealing with heterogeneity in electronic data sources. We demonstrate the use of our electronic system for data collection and aggregation through a study of the Semantic Web research community. Using methods of network analysis, we confirm the effect of Structural Holes and provide novel explanations of scientific performance based on cognitive diversity in social networks. copyright © 2006 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest. All rights reserved.

International new ventures use e-mail frequently to communicate with globally dispersed contacts. In this paper we present and discuss a qualitative research method to map international network development based on company e-mails. Our approach also allows for combinations of inductive and deductive analysis and combines the possibility of content analysis and descriptive statistics with sensemaking through qualitative analysis of the narratives unfolding in the e-mail chains between the firm and its alters. We discuss these issues and examine to what extent and how structural and relational network variables and dimensions can be examined using e-mails and why this is relevant. In this discussion e-mails are also triangulated with and compared to other sources of data. The data used to exemplify our method are taken from an in-depth case study of a Dutch International New Venture. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007.

Contains fulltext : 46868.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 27 oktober 2006 Promotor : Leroy, P. 232 p.

* Corporate giving as an expression of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been researched less than the more general theme of CSR. In addition, much of the research in this area focuses on countries with an Anglo cultural tradition. * The study outlined in this paper offers a comprehensive longitudinal study of corporate giving in the Netherlands. An overview is provided of corporate giving in the Netherlands in the period from 1995 till 2003. * The data are gathered by means of a biennial survey of Dutch companies as part of the ‘Giving in the Netherlands’ project. Based on these findings, recent developments in corporate giving can be sketched out. * Moreover,literatureonmotivesforcorporategivingbehaviorisfocuseduponandapplied in exploring Dutch managers’ motivations for offering donations. Nonprofit organizations could use this knowledge to increase the efficiency of their fund raising. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley &S ons, Ltd.

This paper seeks to elucidate the day-to-day activities comprising the strategy process at the senior management level as part of a layered discussion. The recent interest in micro-strategy has stimulated a re-examination of data gathered during an eight-month stay with the senior management group of one of the larger construction companies in the Netherlands in 1990 and 1991. It emerged that the intended strategy was rarely debated deliberately or openly. If strategy content was ever discussed, it was usually in an implicit manner while dealing with other subjects, where the outcome appeared to have a bearing on the strategic direction of the firm.

This article contributes to the debate on the relation between trust and control in the management of inter-organizational relations. More specifically, we focus on the question how trust and formal contract are related. While there have been studies on whether trust and contract are substitutes or complements, they offer little insight into the dynamic interaction between the two. They fail to answer, first, whether contract precedes trust or follows it, in other words, what causal relationship exists between the concepts; second, how and why trust and contract can substitute or complement each other; and third, how the various combinations of trust and contract affect a relationship's development and outcome. In search of answers, we conducted longitudinal case studies to reveal the relationship between trust, contract and relationship outcome in complex inter-firm relationships. We find trust and contract to be both complements and substitutes and find that a close study of a contract's content offers alternative insight into the presence and use of contracts in inter-firm relationships. Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications.