Editorial

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/cjas.1306
• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Date: 01 March 2015

Editorial

At CJAS we try to address issues that concern the

management community. We publish research that at-

tempts to answer research questions that advance manage-

ment knowledge and eventually raise the quality of

management practice. In an earlier editorial, I talked about

the value theory of business that both guides what we

publish and helps us make sense of what we publish.

Value creation, value assignment, value exchange, value

optimization, value allocation, and value enhancement are

all functions that enable business to create wealth. The

more they come together, the more wealth they create. It

is leadership and management that merge these functions

together to enhance value and wealth. Wealth creation re-

quires ongoing attention in order for it to remain sustain-

able. To that end and to inform management theory,

CJAS publishes research on production and operations

management, marketing management, human resources

management, f‌inancial management, strategic management,

management science, management information systems,

and so forth. Management theory in turn provides the

framework to management practice. Knowledge and skills

combine to make practice competent.

Research on management development has identif‌ied

personal, interpersonal, group, and organizational skills as

important ingredients of managerial competence. These are

independent skills. They have to come together to make

management practice eff‌icient. This is where knowledge

makes a difference. But knowledge is multifaceted. There

is formal knowledge generated through research such as

what we publish in CJAS and codif‌ied in our text books;

there is knowledge that comes from our individual and

collective experience; there is knowledge of the context –

geographic, social, cultural, political, and economic; and

knowledge of enabling technology. Again, these bodies of

knowledge are independent of each other but essential for

effective management practice. One has to bring them to-

gether as usable knowledge exists only in the nexus of co-

herence. This is why we need management theory. It

provides the integrative force to bring about the fusion of

this knowledge. The four bodies of knowledge fuse into an

actionable format setting the process in motion toward skill

coherence. In essence, knowledge makes management prac-

tice effective, skills make it eff‌icient, and together they cre-

ate competence. Different schools of management thought

provide the paradigmatic envelopes to house managerial

competence. What is of even greater interest is that Business

Schools leverage their own brands to label the competence

toward competitive advantage.

CJAS for its part, participates in all of these en-

deavors. We publish research that strengthens the knowl-

edge component in all functional areas of business. We

also publish research on all aspects of management skills

that convert knowledge to competence. But competency

development is a collective enterprise. Success depends

on how well the producers of knowledge, the arbiters of

knowledge, and the users of knowledge come together to

enhance the value of the profession and its usefulness to

the larger community.

In this issue, our contribution toward that effort

includes research that shows that the benef‌its of a positive

outlook do not readily translate into superior performance

evaluation. When research challenges conventional wis-

dom, the resulting knowledge benef‌its the profession.

Another paper tracks the differential results of managerial

conservatism on the persistence of accrual components,

thus contributing to forecasting eff‌iciency among analysts.

A third paper explores the ever popular topic of executive

compensation and points out that while f‌irm-level factors

determine the cash component of CEO compensation,

time-level factors and industry-level factors contribute var-

iously to the determination of the equity component. This

has implications for future research on the determination

process of CEO compensation. The fourth focuses on the

effects of depletion on self-control and uses three indepen-

dent experiments to demonstrate ways of facilitating self-

control after depletion. The last paper focuses on the im-

pact of diversif‌ication on f‌irm performance at a macro

level. It argues that as diversity increases, so does f‌irm

performance, but only up to a point, beyond which it be-

gins to decrease, following an inverted U pattern. This oc-

curs regardless of the size of the f‌irm. The study is located

in Spain and is likely to elicit some empirical interest in

other parts of Europe. All these papers contribute to a

comprehensive understanding of management, while still

providing the requisite variety you have come to expect

from CJAS.

Until next time,

Vishwanath Baba

Editor-in-Chief

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences

Revue canadienne des sciences de l’administration

32: 1 (2015)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/CJAS.1306

Can J Adm Sci

32(1), 1 (2015)Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1