Building Supportive, Inclusive Workplaces Where Neurodivergent Thinkers Thrive: Approaches in Managing Diversity, Inclusion, and Building Entrepreneurship in the Workplace

Companies with differently-abled employees outperform their competitors, averaging 28% higher revenue plus higher shareholder returns (Hyland & Connolly, 2018). However, individuals with intellectual and developmental differences have an 85% unemployment rate (Moss, 2019). The disconnect between talent and opportunity is due to job misalignment and neurodiverse individuals’ unique needs (Armstrong, 2010). Self Determination Theory (SDT) shows how individuals who have more control over their work environment and interactions enjoy more significant states of well-being (Deci and Ryan, 2000). Intrapreneurs work in a team and project-based environment, which mimics the entrepreneur’s experience and leads to greater well-being (Shir, Nikolaev & Wincent, 2019). Building successful neurodivergent intrapreneurs requires instruction in thinking awareness, coaching, and teambuilding methods. A hybrid academic and workplace collaboration creates an innovative, self-directed problem-solving approach that benefits the individual and the organization. This approach appears through collaborations with Landmark College and Ernst & Young (EY), SAP software, and DXC Technology – global neurodiverse individuals’ employers.

After Managerial Capitalism

Corporations maximize shareholder returns—or so goes the conventional wisdom. It was not always so. In the middle decades of the last century, lawmakers, business leaders, and journalists agreed that the nation's largest and most powerful corporations had obligations to a raft of stakeholders that included (in addition to shareholders) employees, customers, and the localities in which they had set up shop. Some historians have labeled this consensus “corporate liberalism”; contemporaries called it “social responsibility.” Still others, including, most notably, Alfred D. Chandler Jr., regarded these corporate obligations as emblematic of a new stage in economic development—“managerial capitalism”—whose origins could be traced back to the railroad, the country's first “big business.” This consensus had durable consequences, as Kenneth J. Lipartito and others demonstrated in Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience (2012), a multiauthor survey of shifting assumptions regarding corporate governance in the United States from the colonial era to the present.

Welfare in Islamic Ethics

Islamic ethics provides alternatives to “shareholder primacy”—the view that managers should maximise shareholder returns subject to the law. Concern for societal welfare has remained under discussion throughout the history of mankind. Theories, philosophies, policies, legislations, and what not formulates time and again to make this world a happier place to live. Still, there is a search for even better models to organise market forces to deliver in terms of welfare of society. In the corporate world, a good deal of scholarship has been devoted to articulating and justifying the responsibilities and the role of business enterprises and their managers in relation to society. This chapter aims to discuss a framework for the welfare of society being extended by key stakeholders at contemporary workplaces ensuring happiness and prosperity for all.

Probability of mergers and acquisitions deal failure

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the probability of deal success/failure in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) transactions is influenced by a range of deal, firm and country-specific characteristics which tend to affect acquirers’ shareholder returns. The specific hypotheses under investigation relate to the method of payment (cash versus stock), target status (listed versus non-listed), diversification (domestic versus cross-border and industry-wide) and acquirers’ prior bidding experience. Additionally, the authors also investigate whether announced deals reflect an expectation about likelihood of deal completion. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyse the probability of deal success/failure in M&As by combining event study and probit regression-based methods. The authors use the standard event study methodology to calculate acquirers’ abnormal returns for up to 10 days before and after the announcement date. In the probit model, the dependent variable is the probability of deal i being failure depending on four sets of explanatory variables: method of payment, target status, diversification and acquirer bidding experience, along with a set of control variables. Findings The findings from event study confirm that market reaction is indifferent to whether announced deals are likely to be successfully completed or not, consistent with the efficient markets hypothesis. However, the results from cross-sectional, cross-country regressions confirm that the aforementioned deal characteristics, as well as certain firm and country level attributes do influence the likelihood of whether an announced deal is subsequently completed or terminated. Originality/value In examining whether the specific characteristics affecting the likelihood that M&A transactions, once announced, will ultimately succeed or fail, it seems natural to ask whether the market reaction at the time of deal announcement reflects an expectation regarding deal completion. This could be associated with specific deal or firm-level characteristics influencing shareholder returns or risk, and represents a unique contribution of this study, over and above the use of a global sample of M&A data. The empirical analysis investigates these issues by using an extensive, global sample of 46,758 M&A transactions from 180 countries and 80 industries, which took place between the years 1977 and 2012.