Business Commons^™

Coordinating Over Time: The Micro-Processes Of Integrating Creativity And Control In A Dramatic Television Production, Esther R. Maier

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The pressures of continuous innovation in response to shorter product lifecycles and changing customer tastes or requirements create a constant challenge for firms expected to deliver predictable growth. Yet, the creativity needed for new product development projects often emerges in unpredictable and non-linear ways. Projects such as software development, new drug exploration, and filmmaking are knowledge-intensive undertakings where creativity is not confined to the conceptual stage of the project, but required for its duration. Different groups are often involved at different stages of the project and their creative contributions need to be conjunctive. Consequently, formal controls are required to coordinate …

Co-Ownership And Environmental Performance, Robert R. Raffety

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In August 2011, ConocoPhillips was blamed for an oil spill off of China’s coast in the Bohai Sea. ConocoPhillips, the minority operating partner of a 51%-49% joint-venture (JV) with the China National Overseas Oil Corporation (CNOOC), immediately notified the Chinese government about the spill, but clean-up operations were delayed for weeks. In defending their efforts, ConocoPhillips explained that their joint-venture partner prevented them from containing the spill in a timely manner. This incident, and especially the division of interest and blame among the two partners, highlights the difficulty of coordinating collective action for environmental objectives within JVs.

This dissertation examines …

The Role Of Self-Brand Overlap In Consumer Evaluations Of Brand Portfolio Management Decisions, Kendra A. Hart

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Branding research has begun to explore how loved brands are included in consumers’ self-concepts. Such self-brand overlap can enable consumers to react to brand-relevant situations as though they were self-relevant. Synthesizing theories of self-other overlap and perspective taking, self-enhancement and self-protection, as well as brand portfolios, I articulate how self-serving biased cognitions can influence consumer attitudes and behaviours toward entire brand portfolios via the consumer’s self-brand overlap with a single portfolio member.

Study 1 was designed to investigate how self-serving biases can positively affect consumer evaluations of multi-brand portfolios of which the consumer’s focal brand is a member. Potential reasons …