Business Commons^™

Statistical Applications To The Management Of Intensive Care And Step-Down Units, Yawo Mamoua Kobara

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis proposes three contributing manuscripts related to patient flow management, server decision-making, and ventilation time in the intensive care and step-down units system.

First, a Markov decision process (MDP) model with a Monte Carlo simulation was performed to compare two patient flow policies: prioritizing premature step-down and prioritizing rejection of patients when the intensive care unit is congested. The optimal decisions were obtained under the two strategies. The simulation results based on these optimal decisions show that a premature step-down strategy contributes to higher congestion downstream. Counter-intuitively, premature step-down should be discouraged, and patient rejection or divergence actions should …

Perspectives On Firm Strategies In The Non-Market Environment, Vittal Kartik Rao

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The non-market environment, which includes “the rules of the game” that govern economic interactions in the market, plays a central role in the ability of firms to create economic value and to sustain competitive advantage. This dissertation focuses on firms’ interactions with different elements of the non-market environment and is comprised of three essays.

Essay 1 examines the conditions under which firms reach agreements with environmental activists in regulatory agency proceedings to mutually settle disputes. The chapter argues that actions of firms will be dictated by the features of the regulatory decision-making process and the heterogeneity in the attributes of …

Three Essays On Corporate Sustainability Language, Nahyun Kim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation explores how public firms employ language in their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports to lengthen the horizons of their strategic decisions. The three essays included in my dissertation introduce and investigate the pursuit of temporal equilibrium in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis. Specifically, I compare the emphasis placed on the short versus long- future in the annual sustainability reports of public firms and derive three explanations for the increased emphasis of long-termism.

In Essay 1 (Chapter 2), I describe how firms seek and find temporal equilibrium after the Financial Crisis. Using topic modeling, I linguistically and …

Antecedents And Consequences Of Hospitals’ Responses To Institutions: Three Contemporary Essays Concerning Ontario Reforms, Gabriel J. A. Huppé

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation contributes new insights on the antecedents and consequences of hospitals’ responses to institutions. It consists in three essays that collectively explore why and how hospitals balance their technical requirement of providing high-quality and affordable healthcare with an evolving constellation of institutional demands. The collective findings provide a contemporary perspective on the reconditioning of decoupling as a multi-form process, and a nuanced conception of factors affecting the institutionalization and deinstitutionalization of practices within hospitals.

Extending research on institutional leadership, Essay 1 examines hospitals’ approaches to an external mandate for energy conservation and climate mitigation. Through a qualitative investigation, it …

Lean Supply Management In The Canadian Agri-Food Sector, Fernando Naranjo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines a novel conceptualization and operationalization of the lean supply management (LSM) construct and investigates its practical relevance for the Canadian agri-food sector. The thesis consists of three integrated essays, intended to advance the LSM scholarly theorization and managerial understanding. The first essay offers a systematic literature review to gain a better comprehension of the current state of research on LSM regarding its definition, practices, and frameworks, as well as context and contingencies related to its implementation. The second essay offers a conceptual development of the LSM construct presenting a new definition and a new contextual contingent model …

Organizing And Sustainable Development Between The Local And Global: The Case Of A Tibetan Enterprise, Haitao Yu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I investigate how place and space guide organizations towards sustainable development. The current paradigm for business organizing seeks economic efficiency, whereas a sustainable development paradigm requires businesses to accommodate the ecological, social, and economic principles between the local and global. Yet, as organizations are increasingly globalizing and virtualizing, they are becoming increasingly placeless. The loss of local connection to place is one of the primary reasons sustainable development is so elusive.

I am motivated to understand better organizations' role between the local and global on sustainable development. To answer the question, I collected qualitative data through conducting …

Entrepreneurial Action By Métis And First Nations Entrepreneurs In Saskatchewan: Similarities And Differences With Established Notions Of Entrepreneurial Action, Ketan Goswami

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Entrepreneurial actions, i.e., activities like hiring, marketing, financing, hustling (even bribing!), etc., requisite for building small businesses are less studied than antecedent opportunity recognition processes. The two most common form of contexts in which entrepreneurial actions are studied are opportunity-driven (Silicon-Valley type) and necessity-driven (poverty contexts). While there is a fair amount of research on community-based and band-driven Indigenous entrepreneurship, less is known about entrepreneurial actions by individual self-employed Métis and First Nations entrepreneurs in Canada/ Turtle Island. Métis and First Nations entrepreneurs face a differential set of obstacles in their pursuit for economic self-determination compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts. …

Examination Of Institutional Investment In The United States Of America From 1999 To 2018, Martin R. Lefebvre

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the evolution of spatial preference of institutional investors located in the United States of America for the time period of 1999 to 2018 using a mix of exploratory data analysis techniques and more sophisticated space-time and machine learning techniques such as ESRI Space-Time cube and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling. This thesis concludes that despite having the appearance of a footloose industry due to almost negligible fixed costs, institutional investors are attracted to highly dynamic urban centres and on the 20 year time horizon, appear surprisingly sticky in their location preference. This is consistent with the belief …

Optimal Policies On Managing Drug Supply And Patient Access To Drugs, Hongmei Sun

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Health care decision-makers face several uncertainties regarding pharmaceutical products. For new and expensive drugs, the performance outside of clinical trials could be uncertain. For old and low-profit pharmaceutical products, the supply could be uncertain, causing drug shortages. In three essays, I study mitigating strategies to deal with different types of uncertainties associated with pharmaceutical products.

In the first essay, I compare two types of pharmaceutical reimbursement contracts to mitigate the uncertainties associated with new and expensive drugs. I construct a game-theoretic model to analyze the interactions between a pharmaceutical manufacturer and a payer. The payer’s reimbursement of a drug is …

A Study Of Job Satisfaction And Turnover Intention Among Acute Care Nurses Working In Rural And Urban Settings, Yasin Yasin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In Canada, a close look at the nursing workforce shows a decline due to limited supply and increasing demand resulting in a looming shortage in the near future. Retaining nurses’ is a key strategy to overcome the shortage by limiting nurses’ turnover. Nurses’ job dissatisfaction is the most significant predictor of turnover intention and is associated with undesired outcomes such as nurses’ absenteeism, burnout, low service quality, and patient dissatisfaction. The differences in factors affecting job satisfaction between rural and urban nurses have not been fully studied. This study aimed to identify the differences and similarities in the extrinsic and …

The Experiential Learning Connections Between University And Community: Recent Ontario Experience, Emmanuel Asafo-Adjei

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Experiential Learning (EL), including a range of pedagogical approaches such as co-ops and community service learning, connect the university and its external community. Universities are considering such approaches to meet a number of needs and priorities both on and off-campus. As it unfolds rapidly at the present time, EL becomes the connection between the university and the community beyond its gates, both locally and more extensively. However, university-community or so-called town-gown (TG) connections traditionally focus on research and/or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This thesis focuses on the teaching and learning connections, especially in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences …

Investment Motives And Non-Traditional Foreign Direct Investment, Jianhua Zhu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the characteristics and performance of non-traditional investment motives, with a secondary focus on small-employment subsidiaries. It also investigates how firms re-evaluate and change their organizational control after an industry-wide consumer confidence crisis.

Essay 1 (Chapter 2) examines the characteristics and performance of subsidiaries according to different investment purposes, with a special emphasis on non-traditional investment motives. The key characteristics examined in Essay 1 include the size of an affiliate, the ownership mode, expatriate control, and performance. It finds that FDI with a support function differs substantially from a typical manufacturing facility. Meanwhile, there is a huge difference …

Industry Self-Regulation And Government: A Study Of A Hybrid Regulatory Model To Realize The Circular Economy, Hadi Chapardar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Government often imposes social and environmental regulation on business to protect public interests. Alternatively, firms may collectively and voluntarily take on social and environmental responsibilities, which is frequently known as “industry self-regulation (ISR).” However, in the context of this qualitative study, neither of these two alternatives proved efficient.

I study the management of the Municipal Hazardous or Special Waste (MHSW) programs in Ontario, in which post-consumer household materials such as residual paint and dry cell batteries were collected and managed. According to the concept of the circular economy, preventing and/or re-entering waste into the product stream is key to solving …

Antecedents And Consequences Of Share Distribution In Equity Joint Ventures: A Pricing-Error Approach And Empirical Evidence, Liang Liang Wang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Equity joint ventures (EJVs) have been a widely used and extensively studied governance structure for inter-firm cooperation. To date, the literature has largely overlooked share distribution between EJV partners although it is critical to the organization and operation of EJVs. Only recently has a pricing-error rule of share distribution been proposed; it argues that partners should align the equity split with the relative size of the error committed in pricing assets into the EJV. As the first conceptual guideline on share distribution in EJVs, this rule has yet to be empirically verified. Furthermore, no study has sought to identify and …

The Rise Of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Coordination And Growth Within Cryptocurrencies, Ying-Ying Hsieh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The rise of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is driving a paradigm shift in organization design. Their underlying blockchain technology enables a novel form of organizing, which I call the “decentralized autonomous organization” (DAO). This study explores how tasks are coordinated within DAOs that provide decentralized and open payment systems that do not rely on centralized intermediaries (e.g., banks).

Guided by a Bitcoin pilot case study followed by a three-stage research design that uses both qualitative and quantitative data, this inductive study examines twenty DAOs in the cryptocurrency industry to address the following question: How are DAOs coordinated to enable growth? …

Contemporary Perspectives On The Internationalization Of Firms, Maximilian Stallkamp

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation contributes new insights to research on the internationalization of firms. Whereas prior research has focused mostly on the country as the main locational unit of analysis, I examine internationalization from both subnational and (supranational) regional perspectives. Moreover, I investigate the impact of digitalization on internationalization, by studying how ‘digital’ firms expand internationally.

Essay 1 examines how the initial subnational location choices of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in a host country (China) affect their subsequent investments in the same country. I argue that subnational locations with dense agglomerations of MNEs from the same home country can provide firms with co-ethnic …

Mindfulness And Individual Error Orientation In High Reliability Organizations, Ellen Choi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mindfulness is a concept drawn from the contemplative traditions that refers to present-moment, non-judgmental awareness. Exactly how applicable mindfulness is in the workplace requires further empirical validation, particularly on outcomes immediately relevant to organizations. This study contributes to literature examining the effects of mindfulness in organizational settings by considering the effects of an 8-week workplace mindfulness training program in a high-reliability organization (hospital) on individual error orientation, an individual’s propensity to learn from error, worry about error, or hide error. This study adds to the current state of knowledge by providing further insight into why one holds a particular error …

Institutional Voids, Investment Purposes, And Foreign Subsidiaries Of Multinational Enterprises, Yamlaksira S. Getachew

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is motivated by two sets of research questions: (a) Whether, how, and when host-country market and institutional conditions have implications for the performance of foreign subsidiaries? And (b) Whether, how, and when investment purposes/motives for which foreign subsidiaries are established relate to the extent to which the subsidiaries/their parents overcome the hazards of or capitalize on the opportunities from operating in locations of high institutional voids?

The first essay examines how the decision to enter African markets relates to the exit probability of MNE subsidiaries. Using a longitudinal, paired-sample design of Japanese foreign subsidiaries operating in …

Building An Ecology Of Routines: The Central Role Of The Broker, Jeannette A. Eberhard

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Making progress on stubborn social problems, such as street level prostitution, requires local actors to work together in new ways across organizational boundaries. Organizational routines – defined as repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions carried out by multiple actors – are considered one of the primary means through which organizations accomplish the work they do. In my thesis, I argue that an important way to tackle stubborn social problems is through brokering, across organizational boundaries, to build and coordinate an ecology of routines. To better understand this process, I explore the following questions: How is the role of broker established? …

Achieving Operational Integrity: A Case Study Of A Long-Term Care Operation, Maryam Memar Zadeh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of operational integrity (OI), defined here as the congruence between planned operational tasks and their execution by employees. I seek to answer the question of “how is OI achieved in human-reliant operational systems” on the premise that if the operational tasks are not executed as planned, the desired outcomes (e.g., service quality) are less likely to be realized resulting in the exposure of an organization to operational risks. To date, the literature pertaining to OI relies heavily on the notion of reliability particularly in manufacturing settings characterized by machine-based production systems. While few studies offer …

Improving The Education Of Leaders: An Exploratory Case Study In An Undergraduate Business Leadership Course Focused On Gender, Kanina Blanchard

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This exploratory case study is conducted in an undergraduate leadership course at a business school in Ontario. The research develops an understanding of how former students value and are influenced by leadership education that teaches a breadth of knowledges (instrumental, hermeneutic and emancipatory) and focuses on participants’ perspectives of how gender and inequality continue to impact the practice of leadership in Canada. By using document analysis and semi-structured interviews, findings emerge which provide insights into how changes in curricula and pedagogy may better prepare students of leadership to navigate the ethical and social complexities in today’s workplace.

Social Barriers To Entry: Liquefied Natural Gas Import Terminals In The Us From 2000 To 2013, Chethan D. Srikant

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Management scholars recognize the uncertainties and challenges during the market entry process that can impede operational startup. However, very little empirical research exists to fully understand these challenges and explain firm responses. Even less attention has been paid to the threats from non-market actors and the countering strategies employed by firms. Hence, this thesis explores firm reactions to community contestation, as a form of social barrier to entry that can prevent the firm from exploiting market opportunities. Specifically, I consider the strategic implications of firms’ rhetorical responses to community contestation during the market entry process.

For this thesis, U.S. liquefied …

The Causes And Consequences Of Corporate Short-Termism, Mark R. Desjardine

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Corporate short-termism is one of the most significant concerns facing companies and society today. It demands that companies maximize profits in the short term regardless of the long-term consequences. Corporate short-termism can destroy long-run wealth generation, fuel job lay-offs, impede innovation, and neglect society’s social and environmental interests. Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, declares that short-termism, “lies at the heart of many of today’s problems.”

In spite of the potential harm it may cause, corporate short-termism is one of least understood topics in management research. Anecdotal evidence suggests that financial market pressures fuel corporate short-termism, but little research has explored …

Values Of Hospital Chief Executive Officers In Ontario, Alexander Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Value-based health systems, where the fundamental goal of the system is to maximize patient value, have been suggested as a means to improve health service delivery. However, our understanding of various stakeholder values in Ontario is limited. This study collected interview responses from 26 Ontario hospital Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in an attempt to understand their personal values, alignment with health-system values, and use of values to drive decision-making. Results suggest that Ontario hospital CEOs have two value sets; a set of core values (i.e. integrity, compassion, empathy) that are established at a young age and are largely non-negotiable, and …

Social Networking Sites And Personnel Selection: An Initial Validity Assessment, Travis J. Schneider

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this dissertation was to add to the literature on the use of social networking sites (SNSs) for personnel selection. The first goal was to evaluate whether SNSs have the potential to be used as a valid source of information for selection. Specific SNS Indicator scales were created to test whether they have better validity evidence than the more traditionally-used Global SNS Rating. In a study of 141 undergraduate students at a large Canadian university, the Specific SNS Indicators demonstrated fairly weak evidence of interrater reliability, but some evidence of structural validity, and construct validity (convergent and discriminant). …

The Impact Of Sarbanes-Oxley Changes And Board Independence Power On Selected Governance Practices At The Board Level, Karin L. Schnarr

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and related stock listing requirements now require boards of publicly traded companies to have a majority of outside, independent directors to provide a counterbalance to the power of management on the board. SOX also mandated the existence of three board committees, audit, nominating, and compensation which had to be comprised solely of independent directors.

Using a sample of 335 firms and 3,675 observations from the S&P 500 from 1999 to 2009, I use panel Poisson regressions in pre-SOX (1999-2003) and post-SOX (2004-2009) periods to test the effect of SOX structural changes at the board and committee …

Supplier Social Engagement, Reciprocity Of Social Practices And Performance In Supply Chains, Asad Shafiq

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the last two decades, social and environmental issues in supply chains have attracted increased scrutiny and debate. Moreover, managers are realizing that irresponsible behavior by their supply chain partners is negatively projected to their firm, with the potential for causing adverse publicity, reputational damage, and costly legal obligations. In my dissertation, I focus on supplier engagement efforts of firms aimed at encouraging suppliers to behave in a socially responsible manner. More formally, the research question addressed in this study is: How can firms engage their overseas suppliers to behave in a socially responsible manner?

I propose that supplier engagement …

Three Essays On Sustainable Operations Management, Sara Hajmohammad

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation consists of three essays on sustainable operations management. The unifying theme in this work is the focus on sustainability-related risks originating from an organization’s internal operations or its supply chain, operational-level initiatives for managing such risks, and the determinants and subsequent outcomes of those initiatives.

The first essay focuses on safety and environmental risks and looks into the role of a safety-oriented culture in effectively managing them. Building on the safety culture literature and organizational support theory, a conceptual model is developed suggesting that a safety-oriented culture enhances an organization’s financial performance and sets the stage for successful …

Stability And Change In The Strategic Decisions Of Multinational Enterprise, Majid Eghbali-Zarch

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates some of the antecedents and consequences of stability and change in multinational enterprises (MNEs). It focuses on the strategic level decisions of MNEs in their international activities. Essay 1 studies the role of the development and deployment of decision rules, as an organizational capability, since they may lead to consistency and stability in MNEs’ international strategies. By focusing on recurring and high-stakes strategic resource allocation decisions, the study disentangles the time and space dimensions of the deployment of capabilities. The findings indicate a positive effect on performance for MNEs’ spatial consistency across subsidiaries for expatriation (as a …

Learning During The Transition Period: How Identifying Executives As Designate Ceos Affects Their Learning, Rida Mitri Elias

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

CEO succession is an important event in organizations. Around 80% of succession events are relay successions, where a CEO successor is identified a few years before the actual succession event takes place. The success of relay succession compared to horse race and outside successions has been credited to the learning that an heir apparent acquires during the transition period. However, to my knowledge, none of the CEO succession research examines the learning process of heirs apparent.

This study attempts to fill this gap through empirical qualitative research. Using a combination of learning and sensemaking perspectives, this study builds premises proposing …