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The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Private Equity
No full textWhile since long venture capital investors have been considered rational and unbiased investors, more recently scholars have challenged this view and shown that venture capitalists’ – like many other investors’ – actual behavior does not always align with assumptions of rationality. One particularly interesting stream of research has adopted the Behavioral Theory of the Firm to study venture capitalists’ strategic decision making. This chapter will review this nascent, yet promising, line of research
Sustainability in the Digitised Supply Chain
No full textSustainability is like teenage sex: everybody says they're doing it, but few actually are. And those who do it, do it rather badly.” This catchy quote has been around in various forms for a long time and provided a tantalising hook for the introduction to a workshop on Sustainability, the first in the 2023 series of workshops organised by the Vlerick Centre for People in the Smart Digitised Supply Chain. The speakers were Vlerick professors Xavier Baeten and Ann Vereecke, and representatives from H.Essers, ExxonMobil and Volvo. If anything, the latter three companies showed how they have made their supply chains more sustainable - and they've done it rather well! Here are some of the highlights for those who were unable to attend
Nederland versus België: het narcisme van de kleine verschillen
No full textIn dit artikel gaan de auteurs dieper in op de verschillen en leerpunten die Nederland en België vertonen als het gaat over personeel(sbeleid). Het ‘narcisme van de kleine verschillen’ duidt op het feit dat de kleine verschillen worden uitvergroot en ze als het ware gekoesterd kunnen worden
Digital for all: Developing and evaluating an intervention to stimulate the digital growth Mindset of knowledge worker
No full textIn a rapidly changing and digitalising world of work, in which new professional roles are emerging and skill requirements are shifting, change readiness and learning motivation have become crucial assets for employees. In order to thrive at work, workers need a growth mindset (Dweck, 2007), characterised by positive self-beliefs, such as high self-efficacy and strong malleability beliefs about one’s ability to learn new skills. A digital growth mindset, in particular, which we define as having a growth mindset towards digitalisation and digital skills, has become a necessity for workers in all industries. This is especially the case for knowledge workers, as their jobs are becoming more complex due to automation and new business models, leading to new skill demands that are more technical, digital, and interpersonal.Consequently, there’s a growing interest within the field of Work and Organisational Psychology when it comes to developing workplace interventions that stimulate positive self-beliefs, as they positively impact people’s motivation to learn and actual learning behaviour (Bandura, 1977; Burnette, O’Boyle, VanEpps, Pollack, Finkel, 2013; Mangels, Butterfield, Lamb, Good, Dweck, 2006; Rigolizzo, 2021). A related challenge is the quest for effective yet pragmatic methods to assess the effectiveness of these interventions and understand why certain interventions work while others don’t (Berge, 2008; Griffin, 2011). Relying on the Double Diamond Process (British Design Council) and following an iterative process of prototyping and user testing, the online mindset intervention ‘Digital For All’ (DFA) was developed in 2020-2021, to positively shape mindset beliefs of knowledge workers in the context of digital transformation and digital skills. The intervention consists of 8 different learning modules, all related to the general concept of the growth mindset: (1) digital awareness, (2) digital technology, (3) digital growth mindset, (4) digital (re)thinking, (5) digital self-leadership, (6) careers in the digital world, (7) digital resilience and (8) digital data.From February to June 2022, DFA has been implemented in several organisational contexts to evaluate its effectiveness by means of case studies. In line with the formulated selection criteria and striving at a diverse set of cases (diversity in terms of employment status, function, age and gender), the research team selected and analysed a total of 12 cases. We relied on multiple data sources for the case studies: interviews with participants, interviews with observers or coaches who were part of the intervention, and survey data. Process tracing analysis (Beach & Pedersen, 2013) was used as a within-case method for theory-based impact evaluation to understand how our intervention led to increased growth mindset beliefs in most of our cases, and why positive effects were missing in others. Process tracing is seen as a promising methodological avenue for empirically studying causal mechanisms, especially in social science disciplines (Beach & Pedersen; 2013; George & Bennett,2005; Bennett, 2008). As part of the symposium ‘Attitudes and Mindsets During Organisational Transformation’, we will first introduce our developed DFA intervention to practitioners and scholars in the field of Work and Organisational Psychology. Secondly, we will provide an overview of the insights and results derived from the conducted case studies, and we will elaborate on the causal mechanisms explaining how 2282DFA has led to its hypothesised effects. Thirdly, we will share our lessons learned with the audience and reflect on limitations of our research. Doing so, we want to inspire practitioners seeking for effective and rigorous ways to support employees in futureproofing their skillset via mindset interventions. Also, we want to inspire academics interested in exploring process tracing as a research method for evaluating those interventions. For Work and Organisational Psychologists conducting research in real-world business settings, process tracing might be an interesting approach to assess and increase the effectiveness of certain practices in a profound yet pragmatic manner.We hope to contribute to two Sustainable Development Goals, as described by the United Nations. First, our work is relevant in relation to ‘Decent work and economic growth’, by encouraging employees to invest in their employability and considering growth mindsets as a prerequisite for sustainable employment and economic growth. Second, we will contribute to ‘Quality education’, considering DFA as a training intervention stimulating lifelong learnin
A perfect match or an arranged marriage? How chief digital officers and chief information officers perceive their relationship: a dyadic research design
No full textSeveral organisations have introduced a new leadership role, the Chief Digital Officer (CDO), as a centralised role in their top management team (TMT), tasked with accelerating and coordinating their digital transformation. While previous research proposes a complementary, tight alignment between the CDO and the Chief Information Officer (CIO), role redundancies and the fight for recognition and resources also suggest an inherent tension. We provide insights into the CIO-CDO collaboration quality based on role, TMT cooperation, conflict theory, and a dyadic design approach of 11 CIO-CDO relationships with 33 expert interviews in two waves. Our findings indicate that the CIO-CDO relationship may not always be as complementary as proposed in the literature; instead, in the vast majority of our dyads, there is too much role conflict to achieve tight alignment, leading to separation behaviour between the roles. We identify the involvement in the introduction of the other role, the CIO demand-side orientation, and the CDO supply-side orientation as important contingency factors determining the quality of the CIO-CDO relationship. Finally, unless the CIO-CDO relationship resembles a perfect match, a unified Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO) role may better resolve the challenges we identify in our sample’s dyads. Our insights extend the understanding of the CIO-CDO relationship.We are grateful for the excellent guidance in the review process provided by the Special Issue Editors Noel Carroll, Nik Rushdi Hassan, Iris Junglas, Thomas Hess and Lorraine Morgan. We would also like to thank the Associate Editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their help in improving the manuscript
Optimizing the preventive maintenance frequency with causal machine learning
No full textMaintenance is a challenging operational problem where the goal is to plan sufficient preventive maintenance (PM) to avoid asset overhauls and failures. Existing work typically relies on strong assumptions (1) to model the asset’s overhaul and failure rate, assuming a stochastic process with known hazard rate, (2) to model the effect of PM on this hazard rate, assuming the effect is deterministic or governed by a known probability distribution, and (3) by not taking asset-specific characteristics into account, but assuming homogeneous hazard rates and PM effects. Instead of relying on these assumptions to model the problem, this work uses causal inference to learn the effect of the PM frequency on the overhaul and failure rate, conditional on the asset’s characteristics, from observational data. Based on these learned outcomes, we can optimize each asset’s PM frequency to minimize the combined cost of failures, overhauls, and preventive maintenance. We validate our approach on real-life data of more than 4000 maintenance contracts from an industrial partner. Empirical results on semi-synthetic data show that our methodology based on causal machine learning results in individualized maintenance schedules that are more accurate and cost-effective than a non-causal approach that does not deal with selection bias and a non-individualized approach that prescribes the same PM frequency to all machines
Increased bullwhip in retail: A side effect of improving forecast accuracy with more data?
No full textA study of 4,523 products at the leading Belgian food retailer with various explanatory variables (e.g., promotions and national events) showed how additional data sources improve
the accuracy of statistical and machine learning forecasting methods. Simulating the replenishment orders of each product with an adjusted order-up-to policy using the actual demand of one store reveals how adding explanatory variables reduced the inventory needed to maintain a target service level (or a certain amount of stockouts)– an
expected positive effect of increased forecast accuracy. However, the inclusion of explanatory variables made replenishment more responsive toward changes in customer demand patterns due to the more responsive sales forecasts, thereby increasing the volatility of replenishment orders (the bullwhip effect). It becomes a question for each retailer whether to optimize inventory availability versus
replenishment order volatility.Can there be side effects of improved forecast accuracy? In this study of the Belgian food retailer Colruyt Group, we show how adding explanatory variables (such as promotions, weather forecasts, national events, etc.) increases forecast accuracy compared to methods using only historical sales data. Furthermore, when using these sales forecasts to determine inventory levels and order decisions in a numerical experiment, we see that these more accurate forecasts require less inventory to maintain a target service level, indicating that more accurate predictions may reduce stockouts and operational costs related to high inventories. These are expected findings. We also found the use of explanatory variables makes the sales forecasts (and consequently the replenishment) more responsive towards changes in customer demand patterns. This creates a higher bullwhip effect regarding the variability of the supermarket’s replenishment orders -- a less desirable outcome of more accurate forecasting using explanatory variables
The effect of corporate governance on corporate environmental sustainability: A multilevel review and research agenda
No full textAbstract Climate change is a major challenge facing society. Given its intricate links with business, governance scholars have shown an increasing interest in understanding how corporate governance (CG) actors can improve corporate environmental sustainability (CES). In this article, we review the literature focusing on CG and CES. We assess the importance of the motivations, expertise, and power of CG actors at different levels (individual, team, firm, and supra‐firm) for CES. Using this as a guiding framework, we build a multilevel synthesis highlighting the theoretical mechanisms around motivations, expertise, and power suggested in the literature. Based on this synthesis, we present critical reflections on the extant knowledge. Finally, we develop a future research agenda that calls for research at single levels, but also for integrative research examining how CG actors at multiple levels collectively shape CES
Too close for comfort: The effect of relationship closeness and procedural justice on managers' experiences of layoffs
No full textOrganizational justice is a powerful predictor of employee and survivor reactions to layoffs. However, less is known about the perspective of managers during layoffs, who often feel responsible for fairness violations. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, we argue that managers’ perceptions of the procedural justice of layoffs influence the extent to which they assess the task of having to lay-off people as a stressor, and that the quality of the relationship between the manager and laid-off employees attenuates the positive effect of procedural justice. We propose a serial mediation whereby managers’ exit intentions after layoffs are influenced by their well-being, which in turn is influenced by their sense of control, and, ultimately by their perceptions of procedural justice. Finally, we argue that relationship quality moderates the serial mediation such that it weakens the positive effect of procedural justice on managers’ well-being through sense of control. We test our hypotheses in a field study of 79 managers in an organization undergoing change and in a scenario study (N=302). Our results confirm the positive effects of procedural justice during layoffs on managerial well-being through sense of control. Close relationships with the affected employees weaken the positive effect of procedural justice on perceptions of control