William H. Bommer

Meta-Analysis of the Relationships Between Kerr and Jermier's Substitutes for Leadership and Employee Job Attitudes, Role Perceptions, and Performance

A meta-analysis was conducted to estimate more accurately the bivariate relationships between leadership behaviors, substitutes for leadership, and subordinate attitudes, and role perceptions and performance, and to examine the relative strengths of the relationships between these variables. Estimates of 435 relationships were obtained from 22 studies containing 36 independent samples. The findings showed that the combination of the substitutes variables and leader behaviors account for a majority of the variance in employee attitudes and role perceptions and a substantial proportion of the variance in in-role and extra-role performance; on average, the substitutes for leadership uniquely accounted for more of the variance in the criterion variables than did leader behaviors.

Searching for a Needle in a Haystack: Trying to Identify the Illusive Moderators of Leadership Behaviors

Because the notion that various individual, task, or organizational-level variables moderate the relationships between leader behaviors and subordinate criterion variables is a fundamental assumption of most situational approaches to leadership, it is not surprising that a number of studies have been conducted in order to test these effects. Unfortunately, no systematic assessment of this research has been conducted to determine: (a) the nature of the tests for moderation that have been used, or (b) the degree to which the findings actually support the hypothesis that the effects of leader behaviors are moderated by situational variables. For the purposes of this review, we identified studies designed to test the moderators specified by two related theories of leadership: House’s (1971) Path-Goal Approach, and Kerr and Jermier’s (1978) Substitutes for Leadership Model. We then examined the methods used by researchers who tested for the moderating effects predicted by these models, the percentage of moderating effects actually found, and the nature of the moderating effects identified, The results indicate that: (1) although the percentage of moderators identified is clearly better than chance; (2) many of the tests conducted to identify moderating effects in this leadership area are inappropriate; (3) most of the results reported in this domain have not been replicated; and (4) the information reported by many of the authors is incomplete. The implications of the results of the review for both researchers and practicing managers are then discussed.

Life Satisfaction and Student Performance

Although it seems intuitively obvious that the happy student will be a more productive student, empirical tests of that assumption are curiously sparse. We tested a model that included satisfaction...

Measuring the Impact of Product and Promotion-Related Factors on Product Category Price Elasticities

Abstract Our study relates product category price elasticities to factors associated with the product being promoted and the products promotional history. Examining product category elasticities is relevant because category management techniques are playing an increasingly important role in the promotional and merchandising activities of retailers and packaged goods manufacturers. We developed and tested a cross-section model using 52 weeks of scanner data and company records from a large supermarket chain. We hypothesized that brand market share, shelf space allocation, and product type (national brand or store brand) would have a positive impact on product category elasticities, whereas brand price, frequency of promotion, frequency of product display, and the bulkiness of the brand would have a negative effect on product category price elasticities. We found product-specific factors, such as brand market share and price, had a significant impact on category elasticity, whereas most of the promotion-related factors, including the frequency and magnitude of price specials, did not affect category elasticities. Our results offer retailers and manufacturers the opportunity to influence category sales through recognition of brand-level differences.

CEO Successor Choice, its Antecedents and Influence on Subsequent Firm Performance An Empiricalanalysis

Prior CEO succession research has been inconclusive, and studies suffer from threats to external validity from sampling limitations. This study uses 219 succession events over a 2-year period to investigate the antecedents and consequences of CEO successor type. Our findings suggest that institutional ownership interacts with firm performance to influence successor choice. Firm performance subsequent to the succession is not influenced by the successors origin.

Improving The Estimation of Moderating Effects by Using Computer-Administered Questionnaires

A program designed to administer questionnaires on IBM and IBM-compatible personal computers is documented. The program prompts subjects to indicate their response by clicking on a graphic line segment displayed on the screen or by entering a numeric value using the keyboard. Features of the program include (a) easily modifiable anchors for the graphic line segment (e.g., agree-disagree, satisfied-dissatisfied), (b) no limit to the number of questions included, and (c) responses that are stored directly into an ASCII file. The program enhances the accuracy in estimating moderating effects because it overcomes two limitations of the more traditional paper-and-pencil mode of administration: (a) transcriptional errors and (b) scale coarseness.

ALL FORCED RANKING SYSTEMS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL: A POLICY CAPTURING STUDY.

Few areas of management development have generated more passionate recent discourse than force-ranking performance management systems. Unfortunately, while strong and well articulated arguments hav...