Digital Commons Network^™

The Evolution Of A Collaborative Network: Understanding Partnerships In A Policy Mandated Collaboration Through Social Network Analysis, Pallavi Singh

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Federal funding agencies that administer financial support in the form of program grants to non-profit organizations (NPOs) that provide child and family services increasingly require NPOs to formalize inter-organizational partnerships in order to receive this vital source of funding. That is, by mandate NPOs must participate in inter-organizational collaboration networks to receive these essential federal funds. Therefore, there is a need to understand the collaboration behavior of NPOs in a policy-mandated environment. This study considers collaboration behavior as information sharing and advice-seeking between the organizations who are part of a collaboration network as a result of a policy mandate.

Drawing …

Customer Perspectives On Sales Strategies: A Relational Approach, Juliana Catherine White

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Relationship marketing strategies have long been known to affect salespeople and the customers they serve. However, there is still much to learn about the mechanisms that drive such buyer-seller relationships. This research examines how a salesperson’s behavior, relational orientation, and individual disposition dynamically interact to influence customers in the business to business marketing environment. Data collected from the customers’ point of view reveal several unique salesperson competencies and strategies that affect the buyer-seller relationship. The final dataset (n = 206) included customers’ observations about their salesperson and perceptions of relationship quality. The key findings suggest that the perceived quality of …

A Study On The Direct And Moderating Effects Of Leader Facilitated Workplace Learning And Leader-Member Exchange On Employee Engagement, Candi S. Mcelheny

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Employee engagement (EE) is a problem across all industries and is especially troublesome in the nursing profession. However the existing literature, both within and outside nursing professional publications, does not offer explicit solutions for combatting the current EE dilemma. The primary purpose of this study was to test a researcher-developed causal model linking Leader Facilitated Workplace Learning (LFWL), Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), and EE. LFWL, a new construct, was proposed as an antecedent for LMX and EE. Furthermore, LFWL was posited to have a moderating effect on the LMX and EE relationship. The model was tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). …

Investigating Elearning Continuance Through Expectation Disconfirmation Theory, Susana Reyes Lee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study set out to investigate the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) eLearning participation and completion phenomenon of learners and to explore motivation of CPD eLearning intentions and completions. This study focused on why learners choose CPD eLearning and why they continue in CPD eLearning. Based on the Expectations Disconfirmation theory (EDT) and the DeLone and McLean Information Systems Success Model (1992), a survey was developed and then sent to a cross-section of registered CPD eLearners from the first responder community. After the data was collected 217 responses were analyzed with SPSS correlational techniques and through PROCESS which is a modeling …

A Comparison Of Causal Inference Methods And Their Application In Big Data Analytics, Xuan Wang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

With the rise of Big Data analytics, the new field of causal inference (Pearl, 2009) has received more attention in business research fields such as Accounting (Lawrence, Minutti-Meza, & Zhang, 2011) and Marketing (Manganaris, Bhasin, Reid, & Hermiz Keith, 2010). Traditional statistics focuses on correlation which may lead to misleading conclusions because the estimates can be severely biased even when data sets are large. The objective of causal inference is to obtain estimates from observational data that are unbiased and can thus be interpreted as causal. This study provides a systematic comparison of the performance of four causal inference methods …

The Relationship Between Audit Quality And Competition At The Intersection Of The Large And Small Audit Firm Markets, Jeanne-Claire Alyse White

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This paper examines the relationship between audit quality and several measures of spatial competition. Spatial competition is measured as the smallest absolute difference in audit fee market shares from an audit firm and its closest competitor. In this paper, spatial competition measures are referred to as competitive distances, and they are calculated within the large audit market (Big 4 only), within the small audit market (non-Big 4 only), and between the large and small audit markets. Audit market competition and its effect on audit quality has been an ongoing debate. On one side of the argument, competition may negatively impact …