Ann K. Buchholtz

Rutgers Business School · Management and Global Business

The rise in corporate scandals and the dawning of the great recession motivated frustrated shareholders to seek greater power in order to influence the actions of the firms in which they own equity. Shareholder democracy has become the umbrella term for these shareholder empowerment efforts.1 Shareholder democracy is a worldwide movement (Fairfax,...

Most psychological contract research examines single-agency situations in which a breach only affects one firm. In a multiple-agency relationship, however, the individual performs work that simultaneously satisfies the requirements of two firms, allowing for the possibility that breach outcomes extend across both the breaching and the nonbreaching...

As a new perspective for understanding firm responsiveness to stakeholder concerns, we propose a strategic cognition view of issue salience that is, the degree to which a stakeholder issue resonates with and is prioritized by management. Specifically, we explain how a firm's cognitive structures of organizational identity and strategic frames use d...

Business, government, and society courses have been offered in colleges and universities for approximately 35 to 40 years. Today, they are vari-ously called business, government, and society (BGS) or, more frequently, business and society (B&S). Other titles given to such courses include business and its environment, business and public policy, or...

Corporate governance and finance are dynamic academic fields that offer myriad opportunities for business ethics analysis. Within the corporate governance triad in recent years, shareholders have increased their power over boards of directors and executives through both regulation and movements to change corporate by-laws. The impact of board chara...

Scholars of social issues in management have consistently argued that corporate philanthropy is one key factor of a firm’s discretionary responsibilities. Several researchers have examined the links between philanthropy and such outcomes as financial profit and organizational reputation. It is interesting to note that the determinants of corporate...

With its focus on product-market rivalry, competitive dynamics research fails to tell the whole story. We develop a theory of factor-market rivalry to shed light on atypical rivals and competitive blind spots. Focusing on resource versatility and mobility, the theory introduces dynamic constructs-resource discontinuities, leapfrogging, and captivit...

While corporate governance research has had some success tying boards' demographic characteristics to relatively distant outcomes such as CEO pay and succession, numerous studies have indicated that a major weakness of this research is that it has largely ignored the intervening behaviours associated with board vigilance. This study begins to answe...

Agency theory focuses on monitoring and incentives as two solutions to agency problems. Prior research suggests that monitoring and incentives may act either as substitutes or as complements, and that the context of the agency relationship plays a major role in determining the direction of the relationship between them. In a corporate governance se...

This study examines the relationship of the entrepreneur's personality to long-term venture survival. We measure survival in two ways: (1) the likelihood the venture will survive for at least 8 years and (2) the overall life span of the venture. The “Big Five” personality attributes—extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousnes...

In this study, we examined the postacquisition departure of target firms' CEOs and found support for the predictions of Becker's (1962) human capital theory. Firms and CEOs appear to weigh the costs of firm-specific CEO human capital investment against (1) the window of time available for returns from that investment and (2) the perceived value of...

Scholars and practitioners alike indicate a movement in corporate philanthropy toward “strategic” giving, for example, giving that improves the firm's strategic position (ultimately the “bottom line”) while it benefits the recipient of the philanthropic act. Although the existence of this trend is widely accepted, it is represented in the literatur...

Despite its strategic importance, researchers have given little attention to when CEOs are willing to delegate decisions to top management team members. Prior studies and conventional wisdom suggest that CEOs will be more willing to delegate in times of good performance. Drawing from prospect theory, we suggest an alternative view: that CEOs will b...

Strategic human resource management involves creating and maintaining employee skills as well as encouraging employees to perform at their maximum. Both require developing the appropriate psychological contract between the organization and the employee [Human Resource Management Review 8 (1998) 265]. This is no less true for the chief executive off...

Does owner management necessarily eliminate the agency costs of ownership? Drawing on agency literature and on the economic theory of the household, we argue that private ownership and owner management expose privately held, owner-managed firms to agency threats ignored by Jensen's and Meckling's (1976) agency model. Private ownership and owner man...

Shareholders’ relationship to the firm is a central theme in corporate governance, yet the investors’ perspective has been virtually ignored in governance research. This paper attempts to explain the previously unexplored role of trust in the investor decision-making process. The proposed model suggests that trust acts as the antecedent of the risk...

Little theoretical attention has been given to divestiture; that is, to the question of why two firms that face similar environments make different selling decisions and reap different performance outcomes from a sale. This article proposes a framework of divestiture built around the core concept of seller responsiveness, which is defined as the re...

Little theoretical attention has been given to divestiture; that is, to the question of why two firms that face similar environments make different selling decisions and reap different performance outcomes from a sale. This article proposes a framework of divestiture built around the core concept of seller responsiveness, which is defined as the re...

Prior studies have advanced our knowledge of the individual determinants of corporate philanthropy; however, little empirical research has been conducted on how these determinants combine to influence giving. In this study, the authors develop and test an integrated model of the relationship between firm resources and corporate philanthropy as medi...

This study examines the CEO pay and firm performance link from two competing perspectives managerial power and board vigilance. From the managerial power perspective, a powerful CEO dominates the board and decouples the pay-performance link. In contrast, board vigilance maintains that boards represent shareholder interests by effectively tying the...

Firms often adopt strategies in spite of mixed evidence about the strategy's performance and of evidence that the strategy leads to inefficient outcomes. Here, we describe the conditions prompting the spread of inefficient strategies through a population of firms, as well as the characteristics of individual firms that affect their propensity to ad...

This study examined the influence of chief executive officers' (CEO) incentives and individual characteristics on the likelihood that target firms will resist takeover attempts. Results showed that the greater the level of CEO stock ownership, the lower the likelihood of takeover resistance; however, neither the existence nor the magnitude of a CEO...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, Leonard N. School of Business, 1991. Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 90-100).