 Managers’ dispositions toward formal contracts: A cross-country examinationAbraham Stefanidis, Moshe Banai, William Newburry, Stav Fainshmidt, Ulf Henning Richter, Ursula Schinzel, Yin Kong, Ahmet Erkus, Svetlana Shakirova, Mehmet Ferhat Ozbek, Herbert Goelzner, Ana Shetach and Unsal Sigri Journal of Business Research, 2023, vol. 168, issue C Abstract: This study integrates institutional and dispositional theories to develop a multilevel model predicting that managers’ endorsement of formal contracts increases with the quality of formal institutions. This effect is contingent upon managerial dispositions of ethical idealism and interpersonal trust, which provide a morally driven override of uncertainty and a substitute source of certainty in business practices, respectively. We test our arguments on hand-collected data from 3,652 manager-negotiators in 16 countries. We find that managers endorse formal contracts when they are embedded in contexts with high quality contract enforcement institutions, but this effect diminishes substantially among ethically idealistic managers. These results suggest that an understanding of managers’ reliance on formal contracts requires multilevel theory informed by how managerial dispositions interact with the formal institutional context. Keywords: Ethics; Formal contracts; Institutional quality; Legal institutions; Multilevel modeling; Trust (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:168:y:2023:i:c:s0148296323005908 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2023.114231 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.