Dear readers,
This edition of RAM - Revista de Administração Mackenzie (Mackenzie Management Review) presents eight papers. The research of Adilson Aderito da Silva and Fernando Coelho Martins Ferreira, authors of the paper “Uncertainty, flexibility and operational performance of companies: modelling from the perspective of managers”, designs a theoretical model that presents convergent, discriminant validity, and good reliability. The model makes possible to estimate the perceived uncertainty, flexibility, and operational performance from a set of evaluated companies. The results reveal moderate managers’ ability to predict the state of the environment and its effects on their organization’s activities. Also, it shows that uncertainty does not influence the operational performance when mediated by flexibility, thus, in a moderate environmental stability, flexibility can be adopted to mitigate the effects of uncertainty on operational performance.
The second paper of this edition, “Contemporary slavery in Brazil: what have companies (not) done to prevent it?”, by Tobias Coutinho Parente, Angela Christina Lucas, and Rafaela Almeida Cordeiro, points out the reasons that lead companies to adopt or avoid contemporary slavery, investigating it from the perspective of management, reputation, and institutional environment literature. The results show that the practice adopted by most companies is related to sanctions on contracted suppliers that are caught using slave labor. The element that distinguishes groups of companies that adopt monitoring practices from those that do not, is whether they are or not signatories of the National Pact to Eradicate Slave Labor.
The last paper composing the first section of RAM, “Consumer’s evaluation about service recovery: the role of social comparison” was written by Luiza Venzke Bortoli and Cristiane Pizzutti. It is a theoretical essay that aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of distributive justice in situations of service recovery. More specifically, it investigates distributive justice evaluations based on social comparisons. The authors present three research propositions about comparisons between consumers regarding compensation received after complaining about a service and their effects on the evaluation of distributive justice, taking into account the perceived similarity between consumers and the time elapsed between the complaint handling and the comparison.
Pablo Fernando Pessoa de Freitas and Catarina Cecília Odelius discuss in their paper “Scale of results in research groups”, the first study composing the second section of this edition, the innovative quality in developing a scale for verifying results in Brazilian ID (Registro Geral - RG). The scale aggregates qualitative Brazilian ID results and those associated with productivity. It presents evidence of validity and allows researching results in a more simpler and extensive manner. Besides, it provides: 1. a comparison between Brazilian ID results from different fields; 2. a correlation between different variables and ID’s results, in order to identify their capability of explanation and to support the definition of public policies; and 3. an investigation of relations between Proximal Research Results, Distal Results of External Repercussion, and Tangible Research Results.
Julianna Gripp Spinelli de Sá, Ana Heloisa da Costa Lemos, and Flavia de Souza Costa Neves Cavazotte present the paper “Making a career in a male-dominated field: the meaning of work for women employed in the financial markets”. The study extends the literature on gender issues and labor relations, in addition to analyzing the achievements and challenges inherent in the professional choices of women in the contemporary world. The research was conducted by the use of in-depth interviews with 16 women at different ages and several family structures, who work on asset managers, investment brokers, and investment banks. The analysis identified that for these professionals meaning attribution occurs through the mechanisms of self-esteem, self-efficacy, purpose, and belongingness, which are viable due to the success they conquered in a very competitive work environment.
“Informal learning at work context: a meta-study of Brazilian scientific production”, by Tiele Silveira Carrasco and Francielle Molon da Silva, is a meta-study that analyzes a set of 36 studies published in business journals on informal learning with no initial time delimitation until 2016. The results obtained indicated a slow increase on publications about informal learning since 2010. It can be inferred that studies aiming specifically at informal learning still occupy a small backward space highlighted by the investigation of how learning processes take place, mostly using qualitative studies, in a clear attempt to comprehending such phenomenon.
Beginning the third section, “Strategic Finances”, Kleverson Dáliton Silva Moreira, Juliana Rodrigues Oliveira, Vinicius Silva Pereira and Fernanda Maciel Peixoto present “Ownership structure and internationalization: agency problems and delisting in Brazil”. This study aims to analyze determinants related with the delisting of Brazilian companies through the analysis of the problems of agencies coming from structures of property/control and the internationalization of organizations. It was evidenced that the concentration of ownership may raise the agency costs of companies, as well as those organizations that internationalize in a non-patrimonial model that have lower risk and financial constraints, which make it possible to maintain the registry in the capital market.
Finally, the last paper of this edition, “Contribution of services to economic growth: Kaldor’s fifth law?”, by Adilson Giovanini and Marcelo Arend questions whether there is a Kaldor’s fifth law and tests whether the size of the intermediate services sector contributes to the growth of the industrial sector. The causality test shows that there is a bidirectional causal relationship between the growth of the service sector and the industrial density and between the growth of the service sector and the Economic Complexity Index. The evidence does not reject the possibility of the existence of the new law suggested in the paper.
Enjoy the reading,
Silvio Popadiuk
Editor-in-chief
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jul-Aug 2017
