Despite increased research on the various effects of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the question of whether CSR is worthwhile for firms still remains to be addressed. Prior work suggests that CSR offers firms insurance-like protection against negative publicity due to greater levels of goodwill with various stakeholders. Yet, we still miss an answer to the following question: How effective, if at all, is CSR in insulating firms from scrutiny compared to other important marketing measures, such as customer orientation and service quality orientation? This study develops and empirically tests a theoretical framework that demonstrates the relative impact of CSR on consumer resistance to negative information when confronted with negative information about a firm. The results demonstrate that CSR shields firms from negative information about CSR practices but not information related to firms’ core service offerings. Managerially, the findings demonstrate that CSR may offer less of blanket insurance than assumed in previous research. Furthermore, results indicate that firms with a consumer base of experts should favor a focus on service quality orientation over CSR; conversely, when consumers are novices firms should focus on CSR for greater consumer resistance to negative information.

An increasing body of research suggests interorganizational relationships as being critical to the financial performance of firms. Similarly, innovation has been considered a key driver of the growth and success of firms. However, little work has examined how the extent firms' interorganizational relationship commitment and diversity influence their innovation focus and performance. In this article, the authors show that diverse interorganizational relationships reduce the positive impact of innovation focus on firm performance. In contrast, interorganizational relationship commitment increases service innovation focus and strengthens the innovation focus—firm performance relationship. The findings are based on multisource and longitudinal performance data and highlight the positive impact of relationship commitment on the effects of service innovation focus on firm performance. Implications for management and research are discussed.

We study the conditions that influence judgmental forecasting effectiveness when predicting demand in the context of fashion products. Human judgment is of practical importance in this setting. Our goal is to investigate what type of decision support, in particular historical and/or contextual predictors, should be provided to human forecasters to improve their ability to detect and exploit linear and nonlinear cue-criterion relationships in the task environment. Using a field experiment on new product forecasts in the music industry, our analysis reveals that when forecasters are concerned with predictive accuracy and only managerial judgments are employed, providing both types of decision support data is beneficial. However, if judgmental forecasts are combined with a statistical forecast, restricting the decision support provided to human judges to contextual anchors is beneficial. We identify two novel interactions demonstrating that the exploitation of nonlinearities is easiest for human judgment if contextual data are present but historical data are absent. Thus, if the role of human judgment is to detect these nonlinearities (and the linearities are taken care of by some statistical model with which judgments are combined), then a restriction of the decision support provided would make sense. Implications for the theory and practice of building decision support models are discussed.Abstract. We study the conditions that influence judgmental forecasting effectiveness when predicting demand in the context of fashion products. Human judgment is of practical importance in this setting. Our goal is to investigate what type of decision support, in particular historical and/or contextual predictors, should be provided to human forecasters to improve their ability to detect and exploit linear and nonlinear cue-criterion relationships in the task environment. Using a field experiment on new product forecasts in the music industry, our analysis reveals that when forecasters are concerned with predictive accuracy and only managerial judgments are employed, providing both types of decision support data is beneficial. However, if judgmental forecasts are combined with a statistical forecast, restricting the decision support provided to human judges to contextual anchors is beneficial. We identify two novel interactions demonstrating that the exploitation of nonlinearities is easiest for human judgment if contextual data are present but historical data are absent. Thus, if the role of human judgment is to detect these nonlinearities (and the linearities are taken care of by some statistical model with which judgments are combined), then a restriction of the decision support provided would make sense.Implications for the theory and practice of building decision support models are discussed.

We investigate the extent to which transformational leadership behaviours enacted by team members – shared transformational leadership – relate to safety behaviours of team members, teams, and team leaders. We also consider the role of perceived organizational support in moderating the relationships between shared transformational leadership and safety behaviours. We collected data from 2,139 crew members (‘team members’) and 98 chief engineers (‘team leaders’) working on merchant shipping vessels (‘teams’). Team members’ perceptions of shared transformational leadership positively related to team members’ safety compliance and safety participation. Shared transformational leadership became less effective in relation to team members’ safety compliance under conditions of high levels of perceived organizational support. Shared transformational leadership at the team level related to higher levels of safety participation of teams. Teams’ shared transformational leadership was positively related to team leaders’ safety participation, but only under low levels of perceived organizational support. Taken together, our findings demonstrate the important role of shared transformational leadership in relation to safety behaviours and suggest that the effectiveness of shared transformational leadership might vary depending on perceived organizational support. Practitioner points Transformational leadership behaviours exercised by team members – shared transformational leadership – are associated with higher levels of mandated and discretionary safety behaviours of team members. Teams that have higher levels of shared transformational leadership demonstrate higher levels of team‐level discretionary safety behaviours. Shared transformational leadership is more strongly associated with employees’ mandated safety behaviours under low levels of perceived organizational support. When leaders perceive low levels of organizational support, their teams’ shared transformational leadership becomes a more important correlate of leaders’ discretionary safety behaviours. In addition to traditional leadership training that involves formal leaders only, organizations should consider implementing activities that foster shared leadership behaviours.

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