Business Commons^™

Materialism And The Self, Kathleen Shirley Micken

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Materialism has been called the most significant macro development in modern consumer behavior. Despite its importance, research about the construct is rather new. Two scales have been developed to measure materialism, one proposed by Belk, the other by Richins and Dawson.

The purpose of this dissertation is threefold. First, it extends the materialism research program by investigating the relationship between materialism and one's self concept. Hypotheses which drive the research posit that people who are more materialistic have lower self-esteem, are less likely to be self-actualized, are extrinsically rather than intrinsically motivated, and are likely to be high self-monitors. The …

Organizational Culture: How Changes Impact Attitudes Toward Job Satisfaction, R. M. Browder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the study was to examine how a shift in elements of organizational culture impacted attitudes toward job satisfaction in a medium-sized, consumer-owned electric utility over a period of 13 years. The unit of analysis was a municipal utility distributing electrical energy to approximately 27,000 customers. Data collection included the Science Research Associate Employee Inventory, a review of the organization's documents, and a subjective Job Satisfaction Questionnaire. A one-tailed z-test was performed to test whether or not the proportion of employees answering favorable in one survey was greater than the proportion answering favorable in the other survey. It …

A Preliminary Study Of A Job Analytic Inventory Derived From A Behavioral Consistency Method For Assessing Intrinsic Motivation, William John Banis

Theses and Dissertations in Urban Services - Urban Management

The research question for this study asked if the Job Specifications Inventory (JSI) had acceptable internal reliability and an ability to differentiate among occupational groups. The JSI was designed to have subject matter experts rate the importance of skill, content, context, relationship and work focus requirements of jobs or occupations. The JSI used a taxonomy of 268 behavioral elements derived from the content analyses of satisfying achievements reported by a large, diverse clientele. A clinical-type behavioral consistency method was used to extract performance dimensions from clients' achievements to build the taxonomy. The achievement-based taxonomy was seen as potentially enhancing productivity …

Diffusion Of Total Quality Management: An Organizational Self-Production Perspective, Baizhong Zhao

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

American industries are in the process of a quality revolution. Most companies are busy implementing Total Quality Management (TQM) programs. However, the experience of both Japanese and American companies indicates that successful TQM implementation depends on an understanding of implementation processes, which itself relies on an understanding of organizational self-organizing, for it is through this process that TQM gets diffused and becomes a core component of an organization's culture. Self-organizing is a so-called process-oriented approach, based on theory from cybernetics (Ashby, 1962; Steier & Smith, 1985; von Foerster, 1960), dissipative structure theory (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984), and chaos theory (Gleick, …