Strengthening Systems
CSR, Firm Performance and Financial Executive Compensation: An Empirical Analysis of Moderating Effect
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniel Shim
This study empirically examines whether Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) affects the remuneration of bank and other financial executives. Specifically, we test whether CSR performance directly impacts executive compensation or indirectly moderates it. To test the proposed hypotheses, we employed the lagged regression analysis. Our initial sample includes all U.S. banks and financial institutions (SIC 6000–6799) listed on COMPUSTAT. Our final sample consists of 1,425 firm-year observations for the 5-year period from 2014 to 2018, immediately prior to COVID. The results show that CSR performance significantly and positively impacts bank and financial executives’ cash compensation (salary and bonus). As expected, CSR performance significantly and positively moderates and interacts with market performance (stock price) and cash compensation, CSR performance also significantly and positively moderates the relationship between firm size and cash compensation, Contrary to expectations, CSR performance has a significant but negative moderating effect on the relationship between accounting performance (ROE) and executive pay. The results of additional studies suggest that CSR performance does not influence the long-term and total compensation of bank and financial executives, which accounts for a major portion of executive compensation. Our research is significant and important because it represents a new line of study examining the moderating effect of CSR performance on the remuneration of bank and financial executives. Prior research on this relationship has been limited and, at best, shows mixed results. Our study provides additional insights into the pay-for-performance relationship between bank and financial executives.
Strengthening Transformational Change and Sustainable Knowledge Transfer: Insights from an Engineering Research Organization with an Interdisciplinary Future Orientation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Falk Kunadt
Engineering research often tends to take a strong technology-centric view leaving out important driving factors such as political, economic or ecological perspectives. Such a techno-centric perspective hinders the dialogue with important stakeholders inside and outside the organization on long-term socio-economic developments of technologies including opportunities and barriers. It can also be a showstopper to new technologies as external future developments are not fully considered. In this paper, I argue that engineering research needs a wider perspective that considers the past, present and future of driving forces of technologies. Such an approach looks for tipping points from one dimension to another, e.g. from politics to the market or ecology to technology. In widening the perspective throughout the entire technology lifecycle, transformational pathways can be better perceived, analyzed and integrated into the development process. This paper presents case studies from a large engineering organization with more than 10.000 employees using methods from foresight and innovation management like future questions, future theses, scenarios, roadmaps and ai/big data approaches. It shows how diverse and complex organizations can organize knowledge on technologies and prepare for future technology demands from various perspectives such as politics, sustainability requirements or markets. Furthermore, the presented methods show how interorganizational and interdisciplinary knowledge transfer can enhance external technology transfer.
Threats and Capacities of Artificial Intelligence: Temporal Work Transforming Organizations
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rannveig Røste
There has been an increasing interest for emerging artificial intelligent (AI) technologies in organization theory, emphasizing ethical and societal challenges of computerizing of human work. However, how AI disrupts existing organizational routines and creates new ones has received little attention. This paper argues for a need for a more solid theoretical foundation for understanding how organizations can innovate with AI to overcome ethical and societal challenges, and contributes to this by discussing findings from a longitudinal case study of temporal work with AI. The notion of temporal work is based on the influential contribution by Kaplan and Orlikowski, which shows how the organizational actors are guided by temporal assumptions of the past, the present and the future. The case study brings to the field rich data of temporal assumptions collected over time in an organization considering using AI. The selected organization provides an interesting setting to study temporal work of AI given its pioneering role as the first public organization in Norway that launched a strategy for AI in 2015, and that established an innovation lab of data scientists in 2017. Still, the organization has not launched any “real” AI-product by 2023. The findings show that the use of AI depends on several organizational processes involving temporal assumptions of threats and capacities of AI. Moreover, these temporal assumptions are co-constructed in organizational and technological shifts. The organizational interests for AI change in correspondence with technological shifts, but also with the temporality of work, in existing experiences and beliefs of AI.
Cultural Change in an Academic Department
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Massood Towhidnejad
Over the past 50 years, there has been little change in the way that most academic departments conduct their day-to-day affairs. Research suggests that faculty and specifically scientists and engineers are highly individualistic, self-directed, with a strong desire to share their knowledge and the need for approval from their peers (Cain 2012, Soderhjelm et al., 2016, Shannon, 1980), and this culture is rewarded by the way the faculty performance is evaluated toward their promotion and tenure. However, for the past four years, we have adopted a strategy where we use an agile process to operate the department’s day-to-day operations. As a result, we have seen a significant improvement in faculty collaboration. In addition, we also recognized an improvement in the hierarchical relationship between faculty, thereby encouraging the junior faculty to incorporate their ideas in the department mission, vision and strategies. This paper shares some of our lessons learned over the past four years.
