Testing the statistical significance of sector & regional diversification

The question as to whether it is better to diversify a real estate portfolio within a property type across the regions or within a region across the property types is one of continuing interest for academics and practitioners alike. The current study, however, is somewhat different from the usual sector/regional analysis taking account of the fact that holdings in the UK real estate market are heavily concentrated in a single region, London. As a result this study is designed to investigate whether a real estate fund manager can obtain a statistically significant improvement in risk/return performance from extending out of a London based portfolio into firstly the rest of the South East of England and then into the remainder of the UK, or whether the manger would be better off staying within London and diversifying across the various property types. The results indicating that staying within London and diversifying across the various property types may offer performance comparable with regional diversification, although this conclusion largely depends on the time period and the fund manager’s ability to diversify efficiently.

Practicing sustainability in PFI project management

This paper investigates the relationship of the project management in Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and sustainability. A live PFI project is selected as a case study, where contract review and monitoring on project management are carried out to evaluate the sustainability of project management. The PFI procurement shows great advantages in increased contractual responsibilities of the contractor in sustainable construction, and also in practicing sustainability in project management. Six main sustainable attributes of the project management are selected to evaluate the sustainability of project management in the PFI project. The project management process in the case study is closely monitored in order to verify how the PFI project promotes sustainability in practice. The project management in the different stages of the PFI project, including tendering, design, construction and operation, contributes to the six sustainable attributes in different ways. The project management in PFI project paid more attention in sustainable development during its whole process. As the private sector is responsible to the whole life of the building project, the project manager has to consider the long-term benefits during the management process. The government should take advantages of PFI project management in practicing sustainability therefore to promote sustainable development of the national infrastructure services.

The use of risk registers by project managers

The construction industry is widely recognised as being inherent with risk and uncertainty. This necessitates the need for effective project risk management to achieve the project objectives of time, cost and quality. A popular tool employed in projects to aid in the management of risk is a risk register. This tool documents the project risks and is often employed by the Project Manager (PM) to manage the associated risks on a project. This research aims to ascertain how widely risk registers are used by Project Managers as part of their risk management practices. To achieve this aim entailed interviewing ten PMs, to discuss their use of the risk register as a risk management tool. The results from these interviews indicated the prevalent use of this document and recognised its effectiveness in the management of project risks. The findings identified the front end and feasibility phases of a project as crucial stages for using risk registers, noting it as a vital ingredient in the risk response planning of the decision making process. Moreover, the composition of the risk register was also understood, with an insight into how PMs produce and develop this tool also ascertained. In conclusion, this research signifies the extensive use of the risk register by PMs. A majority of PMs were of the view that risk registers constitute an essential component of their project risk management practices. This suggests a need for further research on the extent to which risk registers actually help PMs to control the risks in a construction project, particularly residual risks, and how this can be improved to minimize deviations from expected outcomes.

The performance of football club managers: skill or luck?

This paper evaluates the extent to which the performance of English Premier League football club managers can be attributed to skill or luck when measured separately from the characteristics of the team. We first use a specification that models managerial skill as a fixed effect and we examine the relationship between the number of points earned in league matches and the club’s wage bill, transfer spending, and the extent to which they were hit by absent players through injuries, suspensions or unavailability. We next implement a bootstrapping approach to generate a simulated distribution of average points that could have taken place after the impact of the manager has been removed. The findings suggest that there are a considerable number of highly skilled managers but also several who perform below expectations. The paper proceeds to illustrate how the approach adopted could be used to determine the optimal time for a club to part company with its manager. We are able to identify in advance several managers who the analysis suggests could have been fired earlier and others whose sackings were hard to justify based on their performances.

Facilities management carbon footprints: an audit of critical elements of management and reporting

Concern for the environmental impact of organizations’ activities has led to the recognition and demand for organizations to manage and report on their carbon footprint. However, there is no limit as to the areas of carbon footprints required in such annual environmental reports. To deliver improvements in the quality of carbon footprint management and reporting, there is a need to identify the main elements of carbon footprint strategy that can be endorsed, supported and encouraged by facility managers. The study investigates carbon footprint elements managed and reported upon by facility manager in the UK. Drawing on a questionnaire survey of 256 facility managers in the UK, the key elements of carbon footprints identified in carbon footprint reports are examined. The findings indicate that the main elements are building energy consumption, waste disposal and water consumption. Business travel in terms of using public transport, air travel and company cars are also recognized as important targets and objectives for the carbon footprint strategy of several FM (facilities management) organizations.

Does managerial turnover affect football club share prices?

This paper analyses the 53 managerial sackings and resignations from 16 stock exchange listed English football clubs during the nine seasons between 2000/01 and 2008/09. The results demonstrate that, on average, a managerial sacking results in a post-announcement day market-adjusted share price rise of 0.3%, whilst a resignation leads to a drop in share price of 1% that continues for a trading month thereafter, cumulating in a negative abnormal return of over 8% from a trading day before the event. These findings are intuitive, and suggest that sacking a poorly performing manager may be welcomed by the markets as a possible route to better future match performance, while losing a capable manager through resignation, who typically progresses to a superior job, will result in a drop in a club’s share price. The paper also reveals that while the impact of managerial departures on stock price volatilities is less clear-cut, speculation in the newspapers is rife in the build-up to such an event.

BIM: innovation in design management, influence and challenges of implementation

The construction industry is widely being criticised as a fragmented industry. There are mounting calls for the industry to change. The espoused change calls for collaboration as well as embracing innovation in the process of design, construction and across the supply chain. Innovation and the application of emerging technologies are seen as enablers for integrating the processes ‘integrating the team’ such as building information modelling (BIM). A questionnaire survey was conducted to ascertain change in construction with regard to design management, innovation and the application of BIM as cutting edge pathways for collaboration. The respondents to the survey were from an array of designations across the construction industry such as construction managers, designers, engineers, design coordinators, design managers, architects, architectural technologists and surveyors. There was a general agreement by most respondents that the design team was responsible for design management in their organisation. There is a perception that the design manager and the client are the catalyst for advancing innovation. The current state of industry in terms of incorporating BIM technologies is posing a challenge as well as providing an opportunity for accomplishment. BIM technologies provide a new paradigm shift in the way buildings are designed, constructed and maintained. This paradigm shift calls for rethinking the curriculum for educating building professionals, collectively.

Issues and benefits of using 3D Interfaces: visual and verbal tasks

Spatial memory is important for locating objects in hierarchical data structures, such as desktop folders. There are, however, some contradictions in literature concerning the effectiveness of 3D user interfaces when compared to their 2D counterparts. This paper uses a task-based approach in order to investigate the effectiveness of adding a third dimension to specific user tasks, i.e. the impact of depth on navigation in a 3D file manager. Results highlight issues and benefits of using 3D interfaces for visual and verbal tasks, and introduces the possible existence of a correlation between aptitude scores achieved on the Guilford- Zimmerman Orientation Survey and Electroencephalography- measured brainwave activity as participants search for targets of variable perceptual salience in 2D and 3D environments.

The relationship between entrepreneurial marketing and the characteristics of Thai hotels and their managers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore empirically whether there are meaningful relationships between key entrepreneurial marketing (EM) variables and the demographic characteristics of the organization and its manager. Design/methodology/approach – The data were gathered from a sample of 369 hotels from all regions of Thailand through the use of a postal survey. Several multiple regression models were used to test the relationships in the study. Interaction terms were added to some models to test the moderating effects of major demographic variables on various EM attributes. Findings – The study shows which types of hotels and which types of managers were associated with EM characteristics. The results indicate that demographic characteristics, such as age, size, location, experience, and gender, significantly explain sets of entrepreneurial marketing variables. It was found, for instance, that both a young hotel and a large hotel are positively associated with entrepreneurial marketing, while owner management is positively associated with market orientation and negatively associated with growth aspirations but has no significant relationship with entrepreneurial orientation. Originality/value – The paper provides a comprehensive overview of selected relationships between key EM dimensions in the existing literature. It is suggested that future research involves a more in-depth exploration of some of the relationships found in this study.

Organisational politics: reconciling leadership's rational-emotional paradox

Purpose – Effective leadership action requires managers to harness power that is intrinsically political. This paper aims to study and characterise the political nature of a manager's behaviour when taking leadership action. Design/methodology/approach – The methodological approach is qualitative and examines three organisations over a three-year period when these entities experienced a major product failure. The paper analyses the actual managerial behaviour of managers and provides insight into the factors that most strongly influence the effectiveness of managers when taking leadership action. Findings – Political behaviour when taking leadership action can be conceptualised in terms of rationality and emotionality. In so doing, it can be clarified how behaviour must be modified to ensure that leadership action is consistently effective. Research limitations/implications – A case study of three multinational engineering companies engaged in the design, development and manufacturing of turbomachinery provides the platform for the research. The concepts presented in the paper will require validating in other organisations of different demographic profiles. Practical implications – The concepts presented and the implications discussed provide insight into the political nature of managerial behaviour when taking leadership action. The paper highlights the practical steps individual managers can embrace to ensure that their behaviour is appropriate to context, even under the most traumatic situations. Thus, the paper provides managers with a model that facilitates effective leadership action. Originality/value – This paper provides insight into how managers behaved in circumstances that mattered to them. Through immersion in events at the time they took place, the authors captured situations in which managers were under real pressure and, in so doing, avoided the bias inherent when interviewing a manager about past events. As such, the paper concludes that the political behaviour in which managers engage when taking leadership action is rooted in the reality of the adversity that the most capable managers have both experienced and overcome. This detailed study reports behaviour in a situation where managers' business and future prospects were in jeopardy. This paper identifies why some managers were able to use the experience positively, helping them to adopt politically intrinsic behaviour to facilitate effective leadership action.

Corporate governance: quo vadis?

Purpose – This paper aims to examine current research trends into corporate governance and to propose a different dynamic, humanistic approach based on individual purpose, values and psychology. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews selected literature to analyse the assumptions behind research into corporate governance and uses a multi-disciplinary body of literature to present a different theoretical approach based at the level of the individual rather than the organisation. Findings – The paper shows how the current recommendations of the corporate governance research models could backfire and lead to individual actions that are destructive when implemented in practice. This claim is based on identifying the hidden assumptions behind the principal-agent model in corporate governance, such as the Hobbesian view and the Homo Economicus approach. It argues against the axiomatic view that shareholders are the owners of the company, and it questions the way in which managers are assessed based either on the corporate share price (the shareholder view) or on a confusing set of measures which include more stakeholders (the stakeholder view), and shows how such a yardstick can be demotivating and put the corporation in danger. The paper proposes a humanistic, psychological approach that uses the individual manager as a unit of analysis instead of the corporation and illustrates how such an approach can help to build better governance. Research limitations/implications – The paper's limited scope can only outline a conceptual framework, but does not enter into detailed operationalisation. Practical implications – The paper illustrates the challenges in applying the proposed framework into practice. Originality/value – The paper calls for the use of an alternative unit of analysis, the manager, and for a dynamic and humanistic approach which encompasses the entirety of a person's cognition, including emotional and spiritual values, and which is as of yet usually not to be found in the corporate governance literature.

Insiders, outsiders, and the role of local enforcement in forest management: an example from Tanzania

In low-income countries, both nearby local villagers, “insiders”, and non-locals, “outsiders”, extract products from protected forests even though their actions are illegal. Forest managers typically combine enforcement and livelihood projects offered to nearby communities to reduce this illegal activity, but with limited budgets cannot deter all extraction. We develop a game theoretic model of a forest manager's decision interacting with the extraction decisions of insiders and outsiders. Our analysis suggests that, depending on the relative ecological damage caused by each group, budget-constrained forest managers may reduce total forest degradation by legalizing “insider” extraction in return for local villagers' involvement in enforcement activities against outsiders.

Interactive learning in UK construction practice: examining the role of BIM process standards

From a construction innovation systems perspective, firms acquire knowledge from suppliers, clients, universities and institutional environment. Building information modelling (BIM) involves these firms using new process standards. To understand the implications on interactive learning using BIM process standards, a case study is conducted with the UK operations of a multinational construction firm. Data is drawn from: a) two workshops involving the firm and a wider industry group, b) observations of practice in the BIM core team and in three ongoing projects, c) 12 semi-structured interviews; and d) secondary publications. The firm uses a set of BIM process standards (IFC, PAS 1192, Uniclass, COBie) in its construction activities. It is also involved in a pilot to implement the COBie standard, supported by technical and management standards for BIM, such as Uniclass and PAS1192. Analyses suggest that such BIM process standards unconsciously shapes the firm's internal and external interactive learning processes. Internally standards allow engineers to learn from each through visualising 3D information and talking around designs with operatives to address problems during construction. Externally, the firm participates in trial and pilot projects involving other construction firms, government agencies, universities and suppliers to learn about the standard and access knowledge to solve its specific design problems. Through its BIM manager, the firm provides feedback to standards developers and information technology suppliers. The research contributes by articulating how BIM process standards unconsciously change interactive learning processes in construction practice. Further research could investigate these findings in the wider UK construction innovation system.

A five-dimensional model of attributes: some precursors of executive coach selection

The purpose of this study was to specify a set of attributes, identified as important precursors to coach selection. Executive coaching has grown exponentially, but there have been few studies as to the efficacy of coaching, including the factors that influence a manager's choice of coach. This study sought to identify these factors. The 45-item, online survey produced 267 useable responses. Results of the principal component analysis suggested a five-factor solution, with women showing a statistically significant preference over men for coaches who have the Ability to Develop Critical Thinking and Action, the Ability to Forge the Coaching Partnership and Coach Experience and Qualifications. The impact of coachee age was not significant in selecting executive coaches. The findings show a statistically significant relationship between coach attributes and the intention to continue with coaching. The implications of these findings for the selection of coaches, and for the coaching profession are discussed.

Human resource allocation management in multiple projects using sociometric techniques

This article describes a new application of key psychological concepts in the area of Sociometry for the selection of workers within organizations in which projects are developed. The project manager can use a new procedure to determine which individuals should be chosen from a given pool of resources and how to combine them into one or several simultaneous groups/projects in order to assure the highest possible overall work efficiency from the standpoint of social interaction. The optimization process was carried out by means of matrix calculations performed using a computer or even manually, and based on a number of new ratios generated ad-hoc and composed on the basis of indices frequently used in Sociometry.