Gloria Cuevas Rodríguez

Incentives Management During Privatization: An Agency Perspective

This paper explains, through a field study and from an agency perspective, how monitoring and incentive alignment mechanisms change to support the interests of a privatized firms new ownership. In this case, privatization led to important changes in the board of directors and to more formal performance evaluation and compensation systems for top managers, as profitability and financial control gained relevancy with the firm ownership change. Our results show that differences in incentives management before and after privatization are due to different agency relations in the two periods. We also argue that in a privatization framework the relation between monitoring and incentive alignment mechanisms is complex, not simply substitutive as agency theory would predict, and this finding allows us to refine and extend agency theory for this specific context.

Hacia la medida de la innovación empresarial: el proceso de validación de escalas

RESUMEN La validación de escala consiste en el estudio de la fiabilidad y la validez de un instrumento de medida. Ambas condiciones permiten asegurar que el instrumento utilizado mide lo que pretende medirse (validez) y es reproducible (fiabilidad). La verificación de estos dos requisitos se realiza a través de un proceso de análisis con una metodología propia: el proceso de validación de escalas. Este proceso, básicamente, se concreta en las siguientes fases: 1) definición de los elementos simples que conforman el objeto de medida (delimitación de los contenidos del constructo) y diseño del cuestionario donde cada uno de los elementos viene representado por uno o más ítems; 2) análisis de la fiabilidad y validez del instrumento; 3) estudio piloto y aplicación definitiva de la escala. El objetivo de nuestro trabajo es realizar una descripción de las líneas metodológicas básicas de un estudio de validación de escalas y su aplicación al campo de la investigación sobre la innovación empresarial. Finalmente, realizamos una revisión de aquellos estudios empíricos que analizan la utilidad de escalas validadas en la medida de la innovación en procesos y productos.

The role of control systems in partner selection/evaluation processes in established distribution channels

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the partner selection/evaluation processes in established distribution channels (DCs) and the role played by control systems (CS) over major changes in the internal complexity and the external uncertainty of the distribution network. Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a longitudinal case study of a manufacturing firm and its outsourced DC. Findings – Over time, the manufacturers market-focused strategy provoked the adoption through CS of more objective and formal selection processes. It was very clear in this case that while the growth of internal complexity indeed required changes towards formalisation, only the rapidly increasing environmental uncertainty in the 1990s required significantly more elaborate CS to evaluate partners. Research limitations/implications – Original longitudinal case – limitations typical for such design of study, e.g. not possible to expand the findings out of company type and historical periods. Practic...