Business Commons^™

How Tempered Radicals Pursue Ideological Change Within Their Organization, Saleh M. Bajaba

Doctoral Dissertations

Organizations that are adaptive, diverse, and socially responsible are often built by employees who are able to implement change “under the radar” of those in the organization who would ordinarily fight significant change. These “tempered radicals” are insider activists who serve as the catalyst for incremental constructive changes which, over time, build better organizations. Unfortunately, little is known about what motivates tempered radicals to enact changes within their organizations. In order to better understand the motives of these internal change agents, I develop a measure of tempered radical motives (TRM). In Study 1, I develop a measure of TRM by …

Understanding The Effects Of Regulatory Focus On Proactive Behavior, Brian P. Waterwall

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the past decade, motivation research has focused on what motivates employees to engage in behaviors that fall outside of ones' job/task requirements and bring about meaningful change in the organization's environment, proactive behaviors (Bateman & Crant, 1993; Crant, 2000). Recently, regulatory focus theory has received considerable research attention because of its potential to explain additional variance in behavior beyond other motivational constructs. Regulatory focus theory suggests that during goal striving, people will display behaviors associated with their current motivational state. Drawing from prior research examining motivation and behavior, I propose and test a model that examines the effects of …

Using Latent Class Cluster Analysis To Identify And Profile Organizational Subclimates: An Exploratory Investigation Using Safety Climate As An Exemplar, Amy Frost Stevenson

Doctoral Dissertations

Organizational climate refers to the shared meaning organizational members attach to the events, policies, practices, and procedures they experience as well as to the behaviors they see being rewarded, supported, and expected (Schneider, Ehrhart, & Macey, 2011). Climate scholars have most frequently used referent-shift consensus and dispersion composition models (Chan, 1998) to conceptualize and measure organizational climate. Based on these models, climate emergence has been characterized by low variance or high consensus of individual-level climate perceptions (Chan, 1998; Ehrhart, Schneider, & Macey, 2013; Hazy & Ashley, 2011; Kuenzi & Schminke, 2009) within formally defined organizational groups (e.g., work teams).

Climate …

Evaluating Indicators Of Job Performance: Distributions And Types Of Analyses, Richard J. Chambers Ii

Doctoral Dissertations

Distributions of job performance indicators have historically been assumed to be normally distributed (Aguinis & O'Boyle, 2014; Schmidt & Hunter, 1983; Tiffin, 1947). Generally, any evidence to the contrary has been attributed to errors in the measurement of job performance (Murphy, 2008). A few researchers have been skeptical of this assumption (Micceri, 1989; Murphy, 1999; Saal, Downey, & Lahey, 1980); yet, only recently has research demonstrated that in certain specific situations job performance is exponentially distributed (Aguinis, O'Boyle, Gonzalez-Mulé, & Joo, 2016; O'Boyle & Aguinis, 2012). To date there have been few recommendations in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology literature about how …

Cultural Context's Influence On The Relationships Between Leadership Personality And Subordinate Perceptions, Victoria J. Smoak

Doctoral Dissertations

Fascination with leadership and the pursuit of its understanding have been common across disciplines throughout history (Bass & Stogdill, 1990). Studying leadership in an organization provides value in understanding its relation to outcomes such as employee attitudes (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, & Bommer, 1996), individual performance (Tierney, Farmer, & Graen, 1999) and organizational performance (Day & Lord, 1988; Sully de Luque, Washburn, Waldman, & House, 2008). Leadership is suggested to be the underlying human factor key to organizational effectiveness (Hogan & Kaiser, 2005). In spite of the vast body of literature, much remains to be understood, especially understanding context (McCall & Hollenbeck, …

Bright Or Dark, Or Virtues And Vices? A Reexamination Of The Big Five And Job Performance, Christopher M. Castille

Doctoral Dissertations

Personality research in industrial/organizational psychology has been dominated by the description of personality traits and outcomes as either bright or dark. Unfortunately, research has shown that bright traits have dark outcomes and vice versa, suggesting that a paradox is plaguing the literature. To resolve this paradox, I propose that a different heuristic stemming from positive psychology be utilized: virtues and vices. Virtues refer to exercises of human excellence while vices refer to actions of human failure. Drawing on the virtue ethics concept of the Aristotelian mean, dark traits are viewed as extreme or elevated levels of bright personality traits, allowing …

Arbitrage Risk, Investor Sentiment And Maximum Daily Returns, Kenneth A. Tah

Doctoral Dissertations

We test the cross-sectional relation between daily maximum return (MAX) and return in the following month for stocks with high and low idiosyncratic volatility. We use portfolio level analysis and firm-level cross-sectional regression to find that the negative and significant relation between MAX and expected stock return (known as the "MAX effect") is a non-January phenomenon observed predominantly on a sample of stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility. We find that the effect of investor sentiment on the MAX effect depends on arbitrage risk. Our findings suggest that arbitrageurs find it difficult to correct the mispricing of stocks with extreme positive …

Individual Adaptability As A Predictor Of Job Performance, Stephanie L. Murphy

Doctoral Dissertations

In the new global economy, organizations frequently have to adjust to meet challenging demands of customers, competitors, or regulatory agencies. These adjustments at the organizational level often cascade down to employees, and they may face changes in their job responsibilities and how work is performed. I-ADAPT theory suggests that individual adaptability (IA) is an individual difference variable that includes both personality and cognitive aspects and has both trait- and state-like properties. As a result, IA may be an acceptable alternative for traditional, stable selection tests for operating within unstable environments. The present paper examined the relationship of individual adaptability, cognitive …

Job Analysis: Measuring Accuracy And Capturing Multiple Perspectives, Deann H. Arnold

Doctoral Dissertations

Organizations rely on job analysis to provide information about the work performed and requirements needed for a position. The use of inaccurate information may have negative outcomes, such as the misallocation of human resources or inefficient training programs. Many job analysis techniques rely on averaging responses, which may oversimplify the results. Preserving idiosyncratic variance, which reflects differences in the ways in which respondents experience and evaluate the job, may increase job analysis accuracy. To assess overall accuracy, the job analysis data in the present study was examined utilizing a practical model of accuracy (Prien, Prien, & Wooten, 2003). To detect …

Anchoring Bias, Idiosyncratic Volatility And The Cross-Section Of Stock Returns, Cedric Tresor Luma Mbanga

Doctoral Dissertations

Ang, Hodrick, Xing and Zhang (2006) document an anomaly in the cross-section of stock returns. They show that high idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) firms earn lower returns in the following month. Specifically, they find after sorting stocks in quintile portfolios based on the previous month's IVOL that a zero-investment portfolio long the most volatile quintile of stocks and short the least yields about -1% during the subsequent month. The evidence reported in Ang, Hodrick, Xing and Zhang (2006) is primarily puzzling because traditional asset pricing theories suggest that (i) only systematic risk should be priced, (ii) to the extent that markets …

May I Help You? How Stereotypes And Innuendoes Influence Service Encounters, Lauren Michelle Brewer

Doctoral Dissertations

"You only get one chance to make a good first impression." The dissertation focuses on marketing agents; among the most visible is the "service provider." Previous research establishes the important role of cognitive social schemata in determining the way consumers react to different types of marketing agents, including service providers. In the literature review, a classification schema is developed for service provider stereotypes derived from theory using social stereotypes. The development of the Service Provider Perception Framework (SPPF) creates a classification for the individual service provider along two main dimensions: competence and affect.

In services design (particularly situations involving a …

Sales Performance And Intuition – The Role Of Gut Feelings, David Locander

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation extends the dual theory of salesperson information processing by examining the relationship between salespersons' emotional intelligence (EI) and their preference for and use of decision-making styles (intuition and/or deliberation) in the selling process. This dissertation contains two studies, Study 1 employs a descriptive research design and Study 2 uses experimental manipulations to investigate the role that intuition and deliberation play within the sales process. Data for both studies come from a sample derived from a national online panel of business to business salespeople.

Study 1, using a survey approach, assesses two competing models and one post hoc model …

Two Essays On Insider Trading And Option Grants Around The Filing Of Influential Patents, Liu Pan

Doctoral Dissertations

Research documents that insiders, who have access to private information, appear to trade with profits before major corporate events like mergers, bankruptcy, dividend announcements, and future cash flow news (see, e.g., Seyhun, 1990; Seyhun and Bradley, 1997; John and Lang, 1991; Jiang and Zaman, 2010). Another recent stream of studies find that the size and quality of a firm's patent portfolio are positively related to the firm's future stock returns (Hirshleifer, Hsu, and Li, 2012; Pandit, Wasley, and Zach, 2011). However, there is little systematic evidence on whether insiders act opportunistically when they possess private information about the firm's patent …

Two Essays On Insider Trading And Option Grants Around The Filing Of Influential Patents, Liu Pan

Doctoral Dissertations

Research documents that insiders, who have access to private information, appear to trade with profits before major corporate events like mergers, bankruptcy, dividend announcements, and future cash flow news (see, e.g., Seyhun, 1990; Seyhun and Bradley, 1997; John and Lang, 1991; Jiang and Zaman, 2010). Another recent stream of studies find that the size and quality of a firm's patent portfolio are positively related to the firm's future stock returns (Hirshleifer, Hsu, and Li, 2012; Pandit, Wasley, and Zach, 2011). However, there is little systematic evidence on whether insiders act opportunistically when they possess private information about the firm's patent …

Two Essays On Ceo Inside Debt Compensation, Nilakshi Borah

Doctoral Dissertations

In the first chapter, I examine the effect CEO inside debt holdings on firm cash holdings, as measured by the ratio of cash and marketable securities to net assets using a sample of EXECUCOMP firms over the period of 2006 to 2008. Following prior literature on CEO inside debt holdings (Cassell et al., 2012), I use the following two measures as proxies for CEO inside debt compensation: (1) the CEO to firm debt/equity ratio, which is calculated as the CEO's debt/equity ratio scaled by the firm's debt to equity ratio and 2) an indicator variable equal to one when the …

Escapist Environments, Restorative Experiences, And Consumer Self-Regulation, G. David Shows

Doctoral Dissertations

The study of atmospherics recognizes shoppers engage in consumption for more than its utilitarian function. The concept of the recreational shopper recognizes the value-producing process of the consumption experience. This research furthers the understanding of consumption by delving into the value-enhancing process of escaping during the experience, as well as measuring the mediating effects of fascination and authenticity. In this study, a test of an individual's self-regulating behavior and the moderating effects on the consumption experience help determine if predetermination affects an escape experience.

Pictured scenes of restaurants were pretested for their ability to produce fascination and represent and authentic …

The Effects Of Procedural Injustice, Rebecca B. Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to test for the existence of procedural injustice (PIJ) in the audit environment and its effect on junior auditor's reporting of time and level of skeptical action. This dissertation theorizes that the conflicting forces between junior auditors' ethical beliefs, formal firm policies forbidding the underreporting of chargeable time (URT), and implicit encouragement from managers to engage in URT result in a unique aspect of the audit environment, PIJ, because entry-level auditors perceive these conflicting beliefs and messages as unfair. In this study, PIJ is defined as the inverse of procedural justice, which is the …

Emotional Labor And Authentic Leadership, John E. Buckner V

Doctoral Dissertations

Organizational research has begun to once again focus on the importance of emotions in the workplace. In particular, the concept of emotional labor, the management of emotions at work to influence clients and customers, has recently received much attention. While research has addressed the impact of emotional labor on both employees and clients or customers, research has not examined emotional labor within the context of leadership.

Authentic leadership, an emerging construct in the study of leadership, is proposed to relate to emotional labor. Leaders' authentic behavior has been shown to positively impact followers, such as increasing trust in their leader …

Two Essays On Managerial Incentives, Hui Liang

Doctoral Dissertations

Jensen and Meckling (1976) and Jensen (1986) argue that the separation of ownership and control may generate agency problems between managers and shareholders. The equity-based compensation, by tying managerial wealth to firm long-run stock performance, can incentivize managers to be more receptive to undertaking value-increasing financial policies and to improving firm performance therefore can be used as an effective tool to achieve consonance between managers actions and shareholders interest. Over the last two decades, the increased prevalence of equity-based compensation in the form of stock and options, is partially due to an increased acceptance of the alignment effect of equity-based …

Application Of Protection Motivation Theory To Study The Factors That Influence Disaster Recovery Planning: An Empirical Investigation, Shalini Wunnava

Doctoral Dissertations

In today's information intensive and networked world, Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) is a critical and significant activity. However, DRP does not always receive the attention it deserves. Therefore, it is critical to examine the factors that influence the undertaking of disaster recovery planning. A model on disaster recovery planning was developed using the theoretical lens of Protection Motivation Theory (PMT). Drawing from PMT literature and using the information technology disaster recovery planning (ITDRP) construct developed by Shropshire and Kadlec (2009), a research model was developed in which perceived severity, perceived vulnerability, intrinsic rewards, extrinsic rewards, fear, response efficacy, self-efficacy, and …

An Empirical Investigation Of The Fairtax As An Alternative To The Federal Personal Income, Corporate Income, Estate And Gift, And Payroll Taxes, Yingxu Kuang

Doctoral Dissertations

Dissatisfaction with the current federal tax system is fostering serious interest in a national retail sales tax. Specifically, the FairTax Plan intends to replace most of the federal taxes with a national retail sales tax and is gaining momentum in Congress because of its purported progressive features. The FairTax is promoted as being progressive but there is considerable opposition to this claim.

Using the most recent 2005 Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) data and estimating lifetime income from a Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) panel tracked over 1968-2005, the distribution impacts of the FairTax Plan are examined, as well as …

Antecedents Of Entrepreneurial Orientation: A Contingency Approach, Laurent Stephane Josien

Doctoral Dissertations

This research was created in order to offer a better understanding of the entrepreneurial orientation construct. Based on the literature review several antecedents of the entrepreneurial orientation construct were identified: risk, achievement, innovation, locus of control, self-esteem, opportunity, autonomy, proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness. Relying on the contingency theory developed by Burns and Stalker (1961), it was decided to use the Carland's trichotomy of entrepreneurs as a moderator variable between the antecedents and the entrepreneurial orientation construct. As a result, three main areas of research were identified. The first area deals with determining which dimensions are underpinning the entrepreneurial orientation construct, …

Strategic Alliances By Financial Services Firms, Hua Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

The importance of strategic alliances in the financial services industry is increasing; however, research focusing on strategic alliances is limited. In this dissertation, I intend to enhance the existing literature by examining the effect of strategic alliances on the value of financial services firms and the level of cooperation between partner firms involved in strategic alliances. The specific objectives of the dissertation are to examine the market reaction to strategic alliance announcements, to examine the preand post-announcement long-run abnormal stock performance and operating performance for the participants of strategic alliances, and to examine joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions after …

The Determinants Of Executive Compensation In The Commercial Banking Industry, David A. Romer

Doctoral Dissertations

The primary purpose of this study is to examine the viability of two basic theories of compensation to explain executive compensation in the banking industry. The two executive compensation motivation theories are sales/sales growth maximization and profit/shareholder wealth maximization. Overall, strong support is found for both theories. This research also seeks to significantly expand, compared to previous research, the number of banks investigated. This study succeeds, with over a four-fold increase in the number of banks analyzed, including over 330 banks not previously used in the literature. This investigation is further motivated by the paucity of banking studies on compensation …

Three Essays On Banking And Corporate Finance, Fang Zhao

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three essays on banking and corporate finance. The first essay studies the relationship between interest-rate derivative usage and bank lending. Using recent data that cover a full business cycle, this paper documents a direct relationship between interest-rate derivative usage by U.S. banks and growth in their commercial and industrial (C&I) loan portfolios. This positive association holds for interest-rate options contracts, forward contracts, and futures contracts. This result is consistent with the implication of Diamond's model (1984) that predicts that a bank's use of derivatives permits better management of systematic risk exposure, thereby lowering the cost …

Modeling And Simulation Of Value -At -Risk In The Financial Market Area, Xiangyin Zheng

Doctoral Dissertations

Value-at-Risk (VaR) is a statistical approach to measure market risk. It is widely used by banks, securities firms, commodity and energy merchants, and other trading organizations. The main focus of this research is measuring and analyzing market risk by modeling and simulation of Value-at-Risk for portfolios in the financial market area. The objectives are (1) predicting possible future loss for a financial portfolio from VaR measurement, and (2) identifying how the distributions of the risk factors affect the distribution of the portfolio. Results from (1) and (2) provide valuable information for portfolio optimization and risk management.

The model systems chosen …

The Sales Managers' Implicit Personality Theory And Leadership Variables, Gordon Gunn Mosley

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship of sales managers' implicit personality theory and various leadership variables provided to salespeople by their sales managers. Several bodies of literature were reviewed for this study from the educational psychology, management, leadership, and marketing/sales disciplines. More specifically, this study addressed the following research questions: (1) What effect does sales managers' implicit personality theory have on the nature of the feedback they provide to their salespeople? (2) What effect does sales managers' implicit personality theory have of the transformational leadership they provide to their salespeople? (3) What effect does sales managers' …

An Exploratory Study Of The Influence Of Life Management Strategies On Job Satisfaction And Job Performance In A Personal Selling Context, Dheeraj Sharma

Doctoral Dissertations

Extant literature on goal oriented behaviors suggests that individual goal orientation is an important determinant of a salesperson's job satisfaction and job performance. However, the present conceptualization of goal orientation suffers from flawed paradigmatic structure. There are two major disparate paradigms of goal orientation in the extant literature. The first paradigm views goal orientation as a stable personality trait and the second paradigm views it as contextually driven phenomenon. The present study proffers a new approach of conceptualizing individual goal orientation, by introducing the meta-model of Life Management Strategies (Baltes and Baltes, 1998; Freund and Baltes, 1998) in the personal …

An Empirical Investigation Of A Model Of Environmentally Concerned Consumer Behavior And Its Determinants: The Moderating Role Of Market Mavenship And Product Involvement, Kishwar A. Joonas

Doctoral Dissertations

Extant literature offers incomplete explanations of environmentally concerned consumer behavior (ECCB), based on subsets of determinants. In this study, I have presented an integrated model of ECCB, and examined the main effects of three key psychological determinants (environmentally concerned beliefs and attitudes, personal norm, and perceived consumer effectiveness) and two key socio-cultural determinants (injunctive norm and collectivist orientation), on four dimensions of ECCB, namely purchase behavior, search for information, conserving behavior, and supporting intent. The study also examined the interactional effects of market mavenship and involvement on these direct linkages.

I conducted a national online survey among members of environmental …

Can Fundamental Value Predict Stock Returns? An Empirical Assessment Of The Feltham -Ohlson Model, Colin Anthony Pillay

Doctoral Dissertations

In valuation research, two modeling approaches that have become prominent are those based on the Residual Income Model (RIM) and those based on the G. Feltham-James A. Ohlson framework. Ohlson (1995) develops a valuation model which links a firm's fundamental value to the book value of equity, earnings and other relevant information. Feltham and Ohlson (1995) extend the Ohlson (1995) model to incorporate growth and conservative accounting.

This study provides an evaluation of the Feltham-Ohlson (1995) model assuming market inefficiency. Analyst forecast data are obtained from the international I/B/E/S files. Financial information and share prices are obtained from the Compustat …