Top Executives and Accounting Wrongdoing (2025)

Moritz Schneider

Conducting four separate studies, this dissertation investigates the associations between chief executive officer (CEO) and chief financial officer (CFO) antecedents of accounting wrongdoing. First, Manuscript 1 employs five distinct machine learning algorithms on publicly listed firm years in the United States of America (U.S.) and provides evidence of the predictive value of isolated CEO characteristics and their combination with established raw financial items (FIN) on accounting wrongdoing. In particular, it demonstrates the importance of a CEO’s network size, age, and duality and suggests non-linear associations with accounting wrongdoing. Interestingly, the results imply that CEOs of a higher age who do not serve as chairman of the board and high network CEOs of high inventory firms show a larger likelihood of accounting wrongdoing. Second, Manuscript 2 systematically reviews 64 articles on CFOs’ accounting wrongdoing antecedents, discusses CEO and CFO similarities, and provides future research avenues. First and foremost, the study highlights that studies predominantly investigate CFO antecedents of isolated fraud dimensions, especially rationalization. Although CEO and CFO antecedents appear necessary for accounting wrongdoing, CFOs demonstrate more substantial incentives, similar opportunities, similar or stronger rationalization, and a slightly wider capacity for accounting wrongdoing than CEOs. Moreover, the type of accounting wrongdoing committed by CFOs and CEOs varies with context-related factors. Third, Manuscript 3 examines the associations among U.S. publicly listed CFOs’ individualism and uncertainty avoidance levels, derived from their country of origin, and their firms’ accounting wrongdoing likelihood. Interestingly, the study only suggests significantly negative associations between a CFO’s individualism and accounting wrongdoing. The CEO’s individualism seems to enhance this relationship. However, Manuscript 3 cannot find similar results for the CFO’s and CEO’s uncertainty avoidance dimension. Lastly, Manuscript 4 draws on publicly listed U.S. CFOs and CEOs and investigates their absolute power, the relative power gap, and distinct relative power constellations related to accounting wrongdoing. The results suggest that a CFO’s power is significantly positively associated with accounting wrongdoing, unlike the CEO’s power. Moreover, an increasing CEO-CFO power gap, a low power gap, and a high power gap are negatively, positively, and negatively related to accounting wrongdoing. These studies suggest that CEOs’ and CFOs’ backgrounds are essential antecedents for accounting wrongdoing. This necessitates future scholars to research both actors and their relationship to understand and detect accounting wrongdoing.

Exploring Human Resource Management as Promoter of Corporate Sustainability Considering Corporate and Country-Specific Boundary Conditions (2025)

Alexandra Elisabeth Ballnat

The dynamics of action-based entrepreneurship education and the development of an entrepreneurial mind-set (2025)

Nicolas van de Sandt

Individual Resources in a Global Work Environment (2025)

Sina Alessa Kraus

Where do I belong? Freelancers, between “insiderness” and “outsiderness” (2025)

Thomas Gigant

In recent decades, non-standard working relationships have seen a significant rise, with independent contractors, commonly referred to as ‘freelancers', being particularly prevalent (Katz & Krueger, 2019). Freelancers are self-employed individuals who work independently, often on a project basis, without long-term commitments to a particular employer (Burke, 2015). They market their skills and expertise to multiple clients (Kazi et al., 2014; Burke & Cowling, 2015). Freelancing has become so prevalent for several reasons. On an individual side, many people choose freelancing for the autonomy, flexibility and freedom it offers, driven by a desire for selfactualisation and to avoid hierarchical subordination (Shevchuk et al., 2019; Fleming, 2017; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010; Norbäck & Styhre, 2019). On the organisational level, freelancers are a preferred workforce due to their specific skills and organisational aptitude, as well as their ability to provide the required technical and creative expertise (Storey et al., 2005; Barley & Kunda, 2004; Burke, 2015). In addition to these characteristics, there is a growing emphasis on matching labour input to business demand (Purcell & Purcell, 1998; Guest, 2004; Weil, 2014). Contracting freelancers can therefore be a strategic decision to achieve these goals. However, this shift towards freelancing is not without challenges on both sides (Burke, 2015). On the one hand, freelancers frequently face job insecurity, financial instability, and threats to their professional and personal identity (Rowlands & Handy, 2012; Norbäck & Styhre, 2019; Caza et al., 2022); on the other hand, these relationships can lead to tensions if organisations are not familiar with the management of freelancers (Storey et al., 2005; van den Born & van Witteloostuijn, 2013). As a result, it is not surprising that the particularities of freelance work, combined with the opportunities and challenges this type of working relationship offers, have attracted much attention. Nevertheless, important gaps remain. Firstly, previous research has mostly focussed on lower-skilled and lower-paid freelancers and has not examined freelancing in all its diversity. In addition, previous studies have mainly focused on what freelancers can do for the organisation and have paid less attention to their experiences, although this could provide a tremendous deal of insight. It is therefore important to understand the life experiences of freelancers. Such an understanding can provide valuable insights into how to navigate non-standard working relationships. This knowledge can benefit a wide range of stakeholders, such as organisations, managers, employees, freelancers and policy makers. In other words, these insights can play a pivotal role in developing strategies and policies that enable both freelancers and organisations to thrive in an increasingly dynamic landscape. This dissertation aims to answer several questions to better understand freelancers and capture their life experiences. To understand who they are, I will first examine where they belong: Are freelancers insiders (like employees) or outsiders (like entrepreneurs)? Then I will examine where they develop their sense of belonging (or “insiderness”) and what the antecedents and outcomes of such a sense of belonging are. Finally, as we will see that freelancers experience tensions between insider and outsider characteristics, I will explore how they experience and manage these tensions and what impact they have on their lives in general and their careers in particular. This dissertation comprises three studies (reported in Chapters 3 to 5) that aim to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of freelancers’ life experiences, particularly focussing on their sense of belonging. Chapter 3, through qualitative interviews, investigates whether freelancers perceive themselves as insiders within their client organisations. In this chapter, I reveal that they consistently view themselves as outsiders but can develop an insider status within their client teams, thereby managing both statuses simultaneously through sustainable strategies. Chapter 4 establishes the concept of team-based perceived insider status (perceived insider status at the team level) and explores its antecedents and outcomes through a quantitative study of a diverse pool of freelancers. It shows that freelancers who feel like insiders in their project teams experience enhanced work engagement. Team support, social cohesion, and trust are critical in fostering this team-based perception of insider status. Chapter 5 examines the tensions freelancers experience between their inherent insider and outsider characteristics. It moves the discussion forward, moving from considering them as hybrids to a more dynamic view of those who experience and need to employ approaches to manage these paradoxical tensions. By exploring the life experiences of freelancers through a paradoxical theory lens (e.g., Schad et al., 2016; Putnam et al., 2016), I establish that some approaches lead to an unsustainable freelancing experience (selection), while other approaches (paradoxical thinking and third-space), when combined, not only make the freelancing experience sustainable but also facilitate entrepreneurial experimentation, leading to a potential career as a fully-fledged entrepreneur. This dissertation thus contributes to the literature on freelancers, but also enriches the discourse on various theoretical frameworks such as perceived insider status, psychological contract, paradox theory, and the career literature.

New Ways of Working & Human Resource Management (2025)

Katharina Salmen

Entrepreneurship research and contextualization (2025)

Sönke Mestwerdt

The call for contextualized research in entrepreneurship is becoming ever louder among scholars. The main argument put forward is that the phenomenon of entrepreneurship is much more heterogeneous and diverse than most studies reflect. Although researchers already emphasized the importance of contextualized studies on entrepreneurship in the early 2000s, less has been done for ‘effective’ contextualization than many assume. So far, most studies that have looked at the role of context in entrepreneurship have analyzed only a few particular context factors in isolation, while other contextual dimensions have been almost completely neglected. Hereby, one of the most analyzed factors is individual institutional factors and their influence on entrepreneurial activity, especially in Western contexts. This dissertation seeks to address this shortcoming and examines contextual dimensions that have been under-researched to date in order to raise awareness that context goes beyond the ‘common’ understanding. More specifically, the three manuscripts as part of this cumulative dissertation explore the influence of under-researched contexts and contextual variables, such as time, institutional void contexts, and the active role of the researcher in contextualizing mainly Western-based knowledge built on the assumption of a homogenous understanding of entrepreneurship as a growth-aspiring activity. The findings of this research show that the under-researched dimensions of context examined in this dissertation have strong explanatory power for how and why entrepreneurship unfolds differently in different contexts. Therefore, this dissertation contributes to literature by reflecting and suggesting that it is essential to move beyond the current understanding of contextualization in entrepreneurship literature.

Social Sustainability in Global Supply Chains (2024)

Marlene M. Hohn

Organizational Adoption of AI (2024)

Maximilian Tigges

The Temporality of Practices, Markets and Value (2024)

Nicole Bulawa