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pdf - Nyenrode Business Universiteit

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96 CHAPTER 4. OPPORTUNISM MITIGATION EFFECTIVENESS<br />

to the business unit manager who answers the questions in the survey and fills out the<br />

questionnaire.<br />

The observations include data from production business units (17%), service BUs (56%),<br />

financial services (16%), and BUs operating in the not-for-profit sector (18%) 5 . Similarly<br />

diverse responses to the variance of sectors at the BU level were provided on the question<br />

about the respondents firm’s sector. Table 4.1 summarizes the background information on<br />

the respondents’ business units and the firm to which each business unit belongs.<br />

BU size<br />

Firm size<br />

Table 4.1: Summary Statistics on Sample<br />

Panel A - size<br />

N Mean<br />

Std. dev.<br />

of mean<br />

Min. Max.<br />

FTE 325 220 439 10 5.000<br />

Revenue (mio EURO) 292 196 840 1 1.000<br />

FTE 321 14.730 41.771 31 470.123<br />

Revenue (mio EURO) 301 7.775 43.240 4 600.000<br />

Panel B - sector<br />

BU sector Production 54 Firm sector Production 71<br />

Services 181 Services 170<br />

Financial 52 Financial 62<br />

Not-for-profit 57 Not-for-profit 64<br />

4.3.2 The Questionnaire(*)<br />

The survey instrument was specifically designed for this research, following the Tailored<br />

Design Method (Dillman 2000), where applicable to the specific research setting 6 . The<br />

survey instrument relies heavily on previously used and validated questions. Some of those<br />

measures are well established (e.g., the measure for information asymmetry is largely based<br />

on Dunk (1993)). Other questions were specifically constructed for this survey. For example,<br />

the measures for the dependent variable that measures the use of RPE are purposedeveloped.<br />

5 These percentages sum to 107% because some business units operate in more than one sector. Multiple<br />

answers to the related question are considered valid.<br />

6 The Tailored Design Method is specifically designed for mail and internet surveys. Many of the<br />

guidelines provided by Dillman (2000) are applicable to the survey design, but others specifically apply to<br />

mailed surveys instead of face-to-face survey interviews.

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