Digital Commons Network^™

Behavioral Characteristics Of White-Collar Crime And The Pre-Employment Hiring Process, Connie O'Brien

Business Administration Dissertations

Organizations use pre-employment tests to identify individuals characterized as having a propensity (likelihood) to commit theft with the intent to limit at-risk hires, thereby reducing the risk of fraud. Pre-employment tests were originally designed to identify a broad range of deviant behaviors such as previous violations of laws, and violations of social norms and organizational policies (O'Bannon et al., 1989), not as predictive indicators of deviant behavior and theft. In addition, the test most commonly used to identify high fraud risk applicants, the integrity test, has limited support as a valid predictor of theft (MacLane & Walmsley, 2010; Ones et …

Downside-Upside Duality: The Role Of Ambidexterity In Enterprise Risk Management, Emanuel V. Lauria Jr

Business Administration Dissertations

Enterprise risk management (ERM) is a widely studied management control process, representing an important advancement from the traditional methods by which firms control the risks they face. This study steps back from attempts to quantify the relationship between ERM and firm performance. Instead, it explores how non-financial institutions with significant time and resource commitments to ERM configure those resources to effectuate a downside-upside duality as ERM is adopted, using for the first time in ERM research the theoretical lens of ambidexterity as a dynamic capability. This duality is the simultaneous engagement in mitigating existing and emerging risks while pursuing new …

The Role Of Industry Structure On Customer Value In Robotic Surgery, Berkley Baker

Business Administration Dissertations

Spending on robot surgery is expected to increase by $17 billion in the next 6 years. This new surgical treatment has challenged hospitals with higher costs and varying performance. Healthcare executives struggle balancing the adoption of medical innovations with managing healthcare costs. This dilemma can be further complicated by industry structures relative to capital-intensive medical innovations. This research explores the interaction between industry structure and customer value. Specifically, how can hospitals apply an understanding of supplier industry structure and customer value to improve the value of a robotic surgery program (RSP)? This industry study represents an exhaustive longitudinal review of …

How Are Electric Utilities Responding To The Impact Of Renewables? Exploring An Integrative Approach To Ambidextrous Business Behavior, Robert T. Casey Jr

Business Administration Dissertations

In the U.S., clean energy goals and the move towards a clean energy economy are causing the electric power sector to add emerging and innovative renewable energy resources into their generation mix. Electric utilities (EU) face a monumental challenge to create, deliver, and capture value from emerging and disruptive technologies. This study seeks to address the impact of solar photovoltaics on the EU market by investigating the role of business model changes within the domain of urban and rural U.S. electric utility organizations. By integrating the evolving EU business model with the Competing Values Framework (CVF), a new lens is …

Organizational Learning Through Marketing Analytics In Health Care, Sherry D. Hartnett

Business Administration Dissertations

There is widespread recognition of the importance of organizational learning to organizational performance and innovation. Recent research suggests that the use of analytics can play a critical role in enhancing organizational learning. However, the relationship between marketing analytics and organizational learning has not yet been well studied. More specifically, research is needed to help understand how analytics, marketing analytics in particular, facilitate organizational learning to develop a systematic, theoretical explanation of the relationship between organizational learning and marketing analytics. This phenomenon is studied in the very rich context of the health care industry. This research uses a case study to …

Interorganizational Learning Through Exploration And Exploitation Under Conditions Of Goal Divergence In Private-Public Partnerships: A Case Study, Wallace T.F Taylor

Business Administration Dissertations

In a time when interdependence in business becomes more prevalent and necessary to maintain and sustain competitive advantage, understanding the mechanisms by which businesses relate and collaboratively adapt become central to collaborative growth and mutual success. Learning becomes central to the adaptive process. Interorganizational learning is an often challenging result of collaborative efforts. The more different the organizations are from one another, the more challenging the adaptive process and interorganizational learning. This writing addresses some of the complexities involved in collaborative learning of organizations with divergent goals through the lens of exploration exploitation phenomena. It further addresses how interorganizational learning …

Dynamic And Improvisational Capabilities In Small Defense Contractor Firms: An Investigation Into The Role Of It Enabled Business Processes, Gabriel Beltran

Business Administration Dissertations

In turbulent environments where the competitive landscape is shifting and uncertain, the dynamic capabilities by which firm manager’s, integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences becomes the source of sustained competitive advantage. As they attempt to reconfigure their organizational competencies, firms are turning to Information Technology (IT) resources as an enabling resource. While the importance of dynamic capabilities has been widely recognized, in today’s fast paced and ever changing business landscape, the need for improvisational capabilities has also been underscored. Whereas dynamic capabilities refer to the ability to respond to change through “planned” reconfiguration in moderately turbulent times, improvisational …

Achieving Contextual Ambidexterity Through The Implementation Of High Performance Work Systems (Hpws), Alexandro F. Armour

Business Administration Dissertations

Small information technology and management consulting businesses face increasingly contradictory strategic choices as they develop products and services for the marketplace. Building contextual ambidexterity is essential to the survival of small businesses as they seek to attain a desired balance of alignment and adaptability. Human Resource Management practices facilitate the development of ambidexterity within individuals thereby facilitating ambidexterity of the organization as a whole. Studies suggest that in order for an organization to be ambidextrous, its human resource management function also needs to ambidextrous. High-performance work systems are human resource practices designed to enhance the ability, motivation, and opportunity of …

It-Enabled Service Innovation—A Field Study Of Agile Approaches To Value Co-Creation, Fabiola Corvera-Stimeling

Business Administration Dissertations

Service organizations need to respond rapidly to both changes in the market and customer expectations. One way of accomplishing this is through service innovation enacted to achieve competitive advantage. This study applies a service-dominant logic (SDL) lens to describe how a service organization may achieve service innovation through value co-creation that is facilitated by agile distributed methods. Literature on value co-creation is somewhat limited; although a few studies have provided guidance on what is needed to achieve value co-creation, no study has yet presented how this might be achieved. Therefore, using a single-site case study in the context of a …

Managing The Connections: A Case Study Of Managerial Interventions And Contextual Ambidexterity, Richard F. Read

Business Administration Dissertations

Business organizations rely on exploitation and efficiency to provide short-term results and on exploration and innovation for their future viability. The ability to simultaneously exploit and explore has been termed organizational ambidexterity. Front-line managers who are able to encourage both exploitation and exploration from their employees should therefore be quite successful, but this is not an easy task. Managerial interventions seek to align the employees’ interests with the manager’s interests and therefore can be perceived as more controlling than enabling, thereby negatively impacting ambidexterity. This case study uses agency theory as a theoretical lens to understand managerial interventions that could …

Effect Of Customer Heterogeneity On Online Pricing: Just Noticeable Differences In A Competitive Service Industry, Saloni Vastani

Business Administration Dissertations

Online sales for both products and services are on the rise globally and are projected to increase by 10% annually to $370 billion by 2017 (Lomas 2013). Price is a key management lever for firm performance (McKinsey 2002) and key determinant of purchasing decision for a consumer (Bishop 1984, Doyle 1984, Sawyer and Dickson 1984, Schechter 1984). However, customers do not remember exact price but have a band of prices that are acceptable (Monroe 1973) (Olson 1976)(Monroe 1969).

This research uses Just Noticeable Difference (JND) theory as the theoretical lens to study online pricing thresholds in a retail service industry. …