Studies done in developed economies have demonstrated a positive relationship between financial resource availability and CSR. Arguments that we term the Institutional Difference Hypothesis (IDH) drawn from the institutional literature, however, suggest that institutional differences between developed and developing economies are likely to result in different CSR implications. Integrating the logic of IDH with insights from slack resources theory, we argue that there exists a negative relationship between financial resource availability and CSR expenditures for firms in Ghana, a sub‐Saharan African emerging economy. We use lagged data from the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre and find that Return on Sales, Return on Equity, and Net Profitability were consistently associated with lower CSR expenditures. We highlight the implications of our findings for research and managers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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This study investigates organizational and environmental determinants of functional and dysfunctional turnover. Functional turnover is negatively associated with levels of pay and unemployment and positively associated with the availability of individual incentive programs. Dysfunctional turnover is positively associated with the presence of group incentive programs and negatively associated with the presence of unions. The implications of these findings are explored.

There exist two prominent accounts of how managers make sense of and take action in relation to strategic issues. The threat–opportunity (TO) and feasibility–urgency (FU) approaches primarily emphasize automatic/affective and active/deliberative strategic issue diagnosis processes, respectively. Current research, however, does not effectively integrate or fully explore the relationship between these two frameworks. We employ theory‐building literature to develop a framework that highlights four distinct and increasingly integrative lenses through which such an exploration can be systematically carried out. Analyzing data from how firms reacted to the economic uncertainty of early 2003, the results of our study indicate that the FU approach is a better predictor of both intentions and actual responses than the TO approach. Our results also indicate that threat is positively related to urgency and negatively related to feasibility, while opportunity is positively related to feasibility and negatively related to urgency. Further, using the expectancy–instrumentality–valence (EIV) motivational theory as a framework, we factor analyze both TO and FU items, identifying three underlying constructs of favorability, urgency, and influence (which we dub FUI). FUI has a higher predictive efficacy than the TO approach alone. We highlight implications for theory building and research in the strategic issue diagnosis literature. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

With the increasing prominence of special interest group activity in the organizational external environment, we build on the stakeholder literature on strategic management to explain how organizations respond to pressures from such groups. Using a model integrating institutional, resource dependence, resource-based, and cognitive theoretical perspectives, we examine the restaurant industry's response to the fat reduction pressure campaign run by a nutritional interest group, the National Heart Saver's Association (NHSA) in the early 1990s. Our findings indicate that susceptibility to institutional pressures partially affected accommodation to NHSA's demands, and more strongly affected organizational cognitions of those pressures. Our measure of resource dependence did not directly affect accommodation, but was significantly related to managerial cognitions. Resource-based factors had a strong direct effect on the extent of accommodation to the pressures of NHSA, and partially influenced measures of cognition. Further, our findings indicate that managerial cognition strongly influenced an organization's response to NHSA pressure. From these results we suggest strategies for managers as they try to make sense of and respond to interest group pressures. We also point to future avenues of inquiries for researchers.