Business Commons^™

Intuition In Employee Selection: Examining The Conditions For Accurate Intuitive Hiring Decisions, Vinod Vincent

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

In complex organizational environments, managers often rely on intuition to make decisions. Research has found intuition to be helpful when the task is complex; the decision maker is a domain expert; and when the decision environment has a high level of uncertainty, complexity, time pressure, insufficient data, and more than one reasonable solution. However, in employee selection, which is a decision environment that typically has the aforementioned characteristics that are conducive for intuition, scholars discount the usefulness of intuition in favor of more objective, analytical selection methods such as specific aptitude (e.g. sales ability) tests. A reason for the lack …

Recognizing And Exploiting New Opportunities In Times Of Chaos And Unintended Impacts, Ryan Matthews

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Select entrepreneurs are successful for a reason. They have been able to use their alertness and prior knowledge, among other skill sets, to identify and exploit new opportunities. However, when new opportunities are identified outside of their area of expertise, will they choose to pursue these opportunities, or stick to the behaviors that are most comfortable? While several studies have been conducted looking at the characteristics of the entrepreneur, or the experiences faced by the entrepreneur, there is a gap in the current literature when combining these two elements. The current literature lacks an understanding as to how the environment …

Capital Structure In The Family Firm: Exploring The Relationship Between Financial Sources And Family Dynamics, Diego G. Velez

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

How a company structures its capital greatly affects its strategic options and its strategic decisions according to contemporary thinking. However, while there is ample literature on how publicly held companies’ capital should be structured, less is known about private companies. Additionally, one or more members of a single family typically own the majority of private companies, and unlike public companies, family dynamics influence these firms’ non-financial and financial goals and strategic decisions. This overlap of family dynamics into the business arena complicates conventional approaches or at least makes conventional approaches more difficult to apply.

This dissertation focuses on privately held, …

Setting The Stage For Individual Ambidexterity In Organizations: The Effects Of Context And Individual Regulatory Mode On Explorative And Exploitative Behavior, Fernando Garcia

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

In response to changing customer demands and increasing competition, companies must balance the need to exploit their current capabilities with the need to explore new capabilities to sustain long-term success. Balancing this duality is at the core of the ambidexterity concept. While ambidexterity research mostly has focused at the firm level of analysis, recent literature indicates the need to analyze the concept at the individual level to increase our understanding of where ambidexterity takes place and how it emerges from context. Understanding the dynamics of the ambidexterity phenomenon at its most basic level will provide organizations with knowledge on how …

The Relationships Between Entrepreneurs' Gender, Attitudes Toward Seeking Assistance From Entrepreneurship Centers, Utilization Of Centers, And Entrepreneurial Success, Scott C. Manley

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Despite the proliferation of entrepreneurship centers, little is known about the reasons entrepreneurs appear reluctant to utilize their services. Although women are more likely than men to seek help in most settings, some research appears to suggest that this tendency may not apply to entrepreneurs. This is interesting given the financial underperformance of female-owned firms and research showing that entrepreneurship centers are effective and thereby lead to economic development. To better understand these issues, I propose and test a new conceptual framework of entrepreneurial help seeking that considers how entrepreneurs vary in their attitudes towards seeking professional help. In addition, …

Measuring Family Business Performance: A Holistic, Idiosyncratic Approach, Ralph I. Williams Jr

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

For any type of organization, performance represents the measure of outcomes, goals, and aspirations vital to various organization stakeholders; thus performance is an important research variable (Seijts, Latham, Tasa, & Latham, 2004, Simon, 1964). Family businesses are different from non-family businesses in that the family subsystem and the business subsystem overlap and interact to form the family business system. The desired outcomes, goals, and aspirations of each family business are a product of its particular family and business sub-systems. Thus, in family business, especially privately owned entities, performance is of particular interest since families can set their goals in their …

When Being More Different And Less Visible Leads To Commitment And Justice For All, Lisa Farmer

Doctor of Business Administration Dissertations

Little empirical research is available that counters the viewpoint that both demographically dissimilar individuals and telecommuters have low-levels of commitment, in addition to the role of procedural justice in this context. Using a multi-company sample of 201 respondents employed by U.S. firms each with more than 100 employees; the results indicate significant support for high-levels of demographic dissimilarity associated with low-levels of affective commitment towards one’s organization. Contrary to the hypotheses, high-intensity telecommuting was found to be more strongly related to affective commitment, especially when procedural justice was high. Non-significant results were found for telecommuting intensity as a moderator of …