Big Is Bad: Stereotypes About Organizational Size, Profit-Seeking, and Corporate Ethicality

Individuals tend to hold a dim view of for-profit corporations, believing that profit-seeking comes at the expense of ethicality. In the present research, we show that this belief is not universal; rather, people associate ethicality with an organization's size. Across nine experiments (N = 4,796), people stereotyped large companies as less ethical than small companies. This size-ethicality stereotype emerged spontaneously (Study 1), implicitly (Study 2), and across industries (Study 3). Moreover, we find this stereotype can be partly explained by perceptions of profit-seeking behavior (Supplementary Studies A and B), and that people construe profit-seeking and its relationship to ethicality differently when considering large and small companies (Study 4). People attribute greater profit-maximizing motives (relative to profit-satisficing motives) to large companies, and these attributions shape their subsequent judgments of ethicality (Study 5; Supplementary Studies C and D).

Pharmaceutical Organizational Size and Phase 3 Clinical Trial Completion Times

BACKGROUND

The pharmaceutical industry has continued to experience a large number of mergers, often involving the very largest companies. Behind many of these mergers has been the desire to achieve scale efficiencies and improved performance in both commercial and research and development (R&D) activities.

METHODS

This research draws upon ClinicalTrials.gov data about commercially sponsored phase 3 clinical trials started and completed between 2008 and 2013. The research uses the bidirectional stepwise Akaike information criterion for model selection, adding a second-order term to the model where second-order terms were significant.

RESULTS

First, and least surprising, the study therapeutic area has a major impact on study completion times. Second, the protocol design itself, as well as the clinical study execution plan, can have important consequences on study completion times. Several study execution variables are also critical to understanding completion times. While the size of clinical trial organization is not associated with more rapid completion times, the amount of organizational experience that an organization has in a particular therapeutic area does have a demonstrable impact. The models are able to supply the specific number of incremental completion days associated with each significant variable.

CONCLUSIONS

Recent years have witnessed increasingly larger pharmaceutical R&D organizations, as many companies have worked to achieve the scale benefits of organizational size for R&D as well as commercial activity. Larger pharmaceutical companies may still achieve scale benefits. Faster phase 3 study completion times is not one of them.

Police suicide in small departments: a comparative analysis

The majority of police suicide research has focused on larger police departments. Very little research has been done within small departments. The present study compared suicide rates between small and larger police departments. Two Hundred ninty-eight departments were drawn from the U.S. Public Safety Officer Benefits database totaling 119,624 officers. Annual suicide rates were calculated per 100,000 for each of four category (by size of department) and p-values from Chi-square tests were employed to assess differences in rates across categories. The annual suicide rate varied significantly across departments. Smaller police departments had a significantly higher suicide rate than large departments. Possible reasons include lack of availability for mental health assistance, increased workload and danger and community visibility.