First Look

Abstract—Prepare your students, as managers, to confront today's challenges and opportunities that are more dynamic and complex than ever before with the interconnected approach found only in Gulati, Mayo, and Nohria's Management. This unique text demonstrates how success within a constantly changing business environment requires a clear understanding of the interactive and dynamic nature of strategy, organizational design, and leadership. Students clearly see how today's managers need to harness technological advances, manage and lead a dispersed and diverse workforce, anticipate and react to constant competitive and geopolitical change and uncertainty, compete on a global scale, and operate in a socially responsible and accountable manner. Management demonstrates the mutual interconnectivity among the three key facets of management: strategic positioning, organizational design, and individual leadership. The authors highlight both the manner in which strategy informs leadership and how leaders influence strategic positioning and, ultimately, performance. Your students effectively prepare for leadership roles and truly think like managers as they master and address the many integrated facets involved in answering the key question: How are leaders successfully managing competitive companies in the 21st century?

Publisher's link: http://www.cengage.com/aushed/instructor.do?disciplinenumber=1028&product_isbn=9781133626701&courseid=MN05&codeid=2A3A&sortBy=copyrightYear&sortByShow=all

Abstract—We examine which independent directors are held accountable when investors sue firms for financial- and disclosure-related fraud. Investors can name independent directors as defendants in lawsuits, and they can vote against their re-election to express displeasure over the directors' ineffectiveness at monitoring managers. In a sample of securities class-action lawsuits from 1996 to 2010, about 11% of independent directors are named as defendants. The likelihood of being named is greater for audit committee members and directors who sell stock during the class period. Named directors receive more negative recommendations from Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), a proxy advisory firm, and significantly more negative votes from shareholders than directors in a benchmark sample. They are also more likely than other independent directors to leave sued firms. Overall, shareholders use litigation along with director elections and director retention to hold some independent directors more accountable than others when firms experience financial fraud.

Publisher's link: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2285776

Abstract—No description available.

Publisher's link: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/download.aspx?name=Psychological%20Inquiry.pdf

Abstract—The article looks at research on people's attitudes and behaviors with respect to noticing and referring to a person's race. It explains the 2013 study, in which participants played a "Guess Who?" style game of asking yes-or-no questions about a group of faces pictured, half white and half African-American. The authors suggest that people's discomfort and avoidance of referring to race imposes costs in terms of information gathering and effective workplace diversity programs.

Publisher's link: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/download.aspx?name=norton%20apfelbaum%202013.pdf

Abstract—Many theories of moral behavior assume that unethical behavior triggers negative affect. In this paper, we challenge this assumption and demonstrate that unethical behavior can trigger positive affect, which we term a "cheater's high." Across six studies, we find that even though individuals predict they will feel guilty and have increased levels of negative affect after engaging in unethical behavior (Studies 1a and 1b), individuals who cheat on different problem-solving tasks consistently experience more positive affect than those who do not (Studies 2-5). We find that this heightened positive affect does not depend on self-selection (Studies 3 and 4) and it is not due to the accrual of undeserved financial rewards (Study 4). Cheating is associated with feelings of self-satisfaction, and the boost in positive affect from cheating persists even when prospects for self-deception about unethical behavior are reduced (Study 5). Our results have important implications for models of ethical decision making, moral behavior, and self-regulatory theory.

Publisher's link: http://www.francescagino.com

Abstract—I document sources of value creation in mergers by analyzing novel data on the quality and price of goods sold by merging firms. When two competitors in a product market merge, their products converge in quality, and prices fall relative to the competition. These effects take two to three years to be fully realized and are stronger in mature, slow growth industries. Prices do not fall, however, when the acquirer is diversifying into a new product market. This direct evidence of real changes induced by merger activity is consistent with consolidation by related merging firms to achieve operational efficiencies and lower costs.

Publisher's link: http://people.hbs.edu/asheen/consumer%20mergers%206-28-13.pdf