Business Commons^™

The Relationship Between Hope And Self-Directed Learning In The Workplace, Vicki Martin Dieffenderfer

Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigated the relationship between self-directed learning and hope in the workplace. Participants completed two self-directed learning instruments, the Survey of Adult Learning Traits (SALT) (Hogg, 2008) and the Learner Self-directedness in the Workplace Scale (LSWS) (De Bruin & De Bruin, 2011), along with two hope scales, the Hope Trait Scale (Snyder et al., 1991) and the author-generated Workplace Learning Hope Scale. Correlation, ANOVA, and multiple regressions were used to test the relationship and differences between self-directed learning and hope, specifically within the domain of workplace learning. All instruments utilized in this study displayed sound internal consistency reliability. The …

Local Foods Purchasing In The Farmers' Market Channel: Value-Attitude-Behavior Theory, Christopher Thomas Sneed

Doctoral Dissertations

From farmers’ market booths to kitchen tables, demand for locally-produced foods has increased significantly over the last decade. Yet, despite increasing popularity of local foods, theoretically-based research of this topic has just begun.

This study fills this gap in literature and broadens the current research base by utilizing Value-Attitude-Behavior Theory to explore local foods purchasing in the farmers’ market channel. The impact of four values (food novelty, food safety, civic engagement, and environmental concern) on consumers’ attitudes regarding farmers’ market design perceptions, farmers’ market social perceptions, and local foods quality perceptions are examined. In turn, the impact of these attitudes …

Do Non-Audit Fees Impair Auditor Independence? Using Goodwill Accounting To Help Reconcile The Debate, Jonathan Edward Shipman

Doctoral Dissertations

Prior literature’s inability to document an empirical relation between non-audit service fees and compromised auditor independence contradicts the significant and long-standing concerns expressed by regulators and the investing community. The purpose of this paper is to reconcile the lack of findings in prior research with regulators’ and investors’ concerns about non-audit services. Using a new measure – goodwill impairments – that alleviates many of the potential limitations that could have prevented prior research from documenting evidence to support the proposed relation between non-audit services and auditor independence, I find that the level of non-audit fees of a client is negatively …

A Study Of Espoused Corporate Cultural Factors And Their Relationship With Business Success, Tonya Denise Brown

Doctoral Dissertations

Reshoring of manufacturing companies is vital to the United States’ economy. Although one may assume that all of the business reshored will be large companies, statistics show that small businesses comprise the largest share of the U.S. economy. Small businesses make up 99.7% employer firms. Yet, 80% of entrepreneurs and small businesses who start will fail within the first 18 months.

This study defines the key success variables of the espoused culture for selected Fortune 500 companies that could be used by entrepreneurs and small businesses to emulate their continued successes. The method to define the key success variables was …

Hospital Competitive Strategies And Performance Outcomes, Wei Wu

Doctoral Dissertations

Hospitals are under increasing pressure to improve performance and healthcare outcomes. The existing literature does not point to a clear conclusion on whether competition can help address the performance challenges of hospitals which lead to improvements in clinical outcomes. Prior research on the effects of hospital competitive strategies usually focuses on one strategy or one type of outcome at a time. As such, there is a dearth of systematical studies on different hospital competitive strategies and their consequent performance outcomes.

The main objective of this dissertation is to examine several hospital competitive strategies and quantitatively validate the implications of each …

Exploring The Consequences Of Shopper-Facing Technologies: Their Effect On Shopper Experiences And Shopping Outcomes, Brian Ijams Spaid

Doctoral Dissertations

Just as technology has influenced nearly every facet of the modern consumer’s life, it is also significantly changing how those consumers shop and how it influences their purchase decisions. Understanding how technology impacts these shoppers within the retail environment is crucial for retail managers who are expected to deploy and manage these sources of continuous change.

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the phenomenon of shoppers experiencing technology in the retail environment. Specifically, our primary goal is to understand how shopper-facing technologies impact shoppers’ experiences and behaviors and subsequently affect outcome variables that matter to retailers. To that …

The Roles Boards Play In Ceo Succession Planning, Yi Li Rivolta

Doctoral Dissertations

A lack of CEO succession planning increases business risk as disruption is more likely during a CEO transition. One difficulty of examining the importance of CEO succession planning is that the planning process is difficult to observe and evaluate. The main purposes of this dissertation are two-fold. First is to investigate whether CEO succession planning matters by comparing disruption costs in firms with planned departure and those with unexpected CEO departures due to death and illness. The second purpose is to investigate whether inside or outside directors improve organizational resiliency using the context of sudden CEO departures when CEO succession …

The Importance Of Executive Effort, Lee Edward Biggerstaff

Doctoral Dissertations

Agency theory stipulates that managerial effort is important to shareholders and costly for managers to provide. Executives may provide sub-optimal levels of effort because shareholders cannot easily observe the day-to-day actions of managers and therefore have difficulties properly monitoring the effort provided by firm management. Researchers also face the challenge of measuring executive effort. In this dissertation, I use an observable measure of leisure consumption to proxy for the effort provided by executives to study the impact of executive effort on firm outcomes.

In the first essay, I focus on Chief Executive Officers (“CEOs”) and the impact of their effort …

Deferred Tax Assets And Credit Risk, Scott David White

Doctoral Dissertations

This paper examines the impact of deferred tax assets on firm creditworthiness. Specifically, I investigate whether the proportion of a firm’s total assets that are composed of deferred tax assets is associated with Standard & Poor’s credit ratings. The benefits associated with deferred tax assets are primarily realized through deductions from future taxable income. If declines in financial performance lead to a subsequent default, deferred tax assets may provide no value to creditors seeking recovery of their investment. I document a significant negative association between deferred tax assets and credit ratings. The evidence is consistent with credit market participants incorporating …

Online Store Atmospherics: Development Of A Gender-Neutral Measure, Wanmo Koo

Doctoral Dissertations

The study was designed to explore store atmospheric cues currently employed by online retailers. The specific research goals were to establish a comprehensive taxonomy of online store atmospheric cues; and to develop a gender-neutral measurement of online store atmospheric cues identified through qualitative and quantitative approaches.

The study generated an initial item pool via literature review and a focus group interview, and personal interviews were conducted to identify possible online store atmospheric cues and classify items into the identified online store atmospheric cues. A pretest (n = 192) was conducted to initially purify items, and the main study (n = …

State Space Modelling Of Dynamic Choice Behavior With Habit Persistence, Kang Bok Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present a new approach to capturing dependence across time in dynamic choice data. To achieve this, I develop a state space dynamic choice model and a novel algorithm to fit the data. Instead of capturing dependence in outcomes through lagged response variables, referred to as state dependence, I introduce a lagged utility term through the latent state equation. The lagged utility term captures habit persistence, which has not been explored directly in earlier models (Heckman, 1981b). The autoregressive nature of the lagged utility provides a significantly richer summary of prior utility than a lagged outcome variable. …

Measuring Academic Leadership Effectiveness Of Hospitality And Tourism Academic Administrators: A Transformation Leadership Framework, James Edward Talbert Iii

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to extend the existing knowledge of academic administrator leadership behaviors that are necessary for effective academic leadership in hospitality and tourism higher education, as viewed through the transformational leadership framework. This study also investigated hospitality and tourism administrators’ previous industry experience, management experience, and management experience in the industry. This dissertation research was guided by three primary objectives. First, this study aimed to develop a model that measures hospitality and tourism academic leadership effectiveness. Second, this dissertation intended to explore the relationship among different leadership styles & leadership effectiveness. Third, this dissertation aspired to …

Organic Food Consumption:Application Of The Means-End Theory, Yun Hee Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

This study is designed to examine the phenomenon of organic food consumption. The overarching goal is to help researchers and marketing practitioners understand how the phenomenon is generated, how organic shoppers experience organic food consumption, and to find significant elements in organic food consumption. Thus, this study examined the phenomenon in two manners. First, a qualitative study was explored to enrich our understanding about the meaning of organic foods and how organic foods are used to achieve organic shoppers’ goals and values. In-depth interviews with fifteen organic shoppers were analyzed by laddering/HVM. The result shows that a means-end hierarchy structure …

Do Clients Avoid ‘Contaminated’ Offices? The Economic Consequences Of Low Quality Audits, Robert Lowell Whited

Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigates whether local audit offices suffer financially following their association with low-quality audits. The announcement of a restatement indicates that the contracting auditor failed to detect and correct a material misstatement. Therefore, I predict that office reputation suffers following restatements of previously audited financial information. As the frequency of restatement announcements increases, the perceived pervasiveness of systematic audit failures (‘contamination’) within the office will increase accordingly. I document that contaminated offices (Big 4 and non-Big 4) suffer a decline in market share relative to their peers. Furthermore, when examining auditor retention decisions at the individual client level, I …

Agency Theory And Stewardship Theory Integrated, Expanded, And Bounded By Context: An Empirical Investigation Of Structure, Behavior, And Performance Within Family Firms, Kristen Joie Madison

Doctoral Dissertations

Studies abound investigating whether agency or stewardship theory is more applicable within family firms. Both theories predict enhanced firm performance, but starkly contrast in behavioral assumptions and structural prescriptions. Agency theory assumes an economic model of man; agent behavior is based on self-interest and may conflict with the principal’s interest. Governance structures that control and monitor agents are prescribed to thwart opportunistic behavior and better align the goals of the principal and agent. Stewardship theory assumes a humanistic model of man; steward behavior is based on serving others and therefore will align with the principal’s interest. Governance structures that empower …

Interaction Privacy: A Study Of Threats And Consequences, Carol Lee Esmark

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of the dissertation is to explore interaction privacy, a person’s ability to control the amount of access others have to the self during relational encounters in attempts to achieve ideal levels. According to marketing research, a positive shopping experience is becoming all the more important (Achrol & Kotler, 2012; Deighton et al., 2012), which could be enhanced with adequate levels of shopper privacy. Using reactance theory (Brehm 1966) as guidance, the model examines privacy encroachments through visual and physical dimensions which lead to threats that cause an individual to realize control has been lost and …

Indefinite Knapsack Separable Quadratic Programming: Methods And Applications, Jaehwan Jeong

Doctoral Dissertations

Quadratic programming (QP) has received significant consideration due to an extensive list of applications. Although polynomial time algorithms for the convex case have been developed, the solution of large scale QPs is challenging due to the computer memory and speed limitations. Moreover, if the QP is nonconvex or includes integer variables, the problem is NP-hard. Therefore, no known algorithm can solve such QPs efficiently. Alternatively, row-aggregation and diagonalization techniques have been developed to solve QP by a sub-problem, knapsack separable QP (KSQP), which has a separable objective function and is constrained by a single knapsack linear constraint and box constraints. …

Politically Connected Analysts, Michael B. Mcdonald

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines politically-connected equity analysts, i.e., analysts that make large political donations. I find that these big donor analysts make more accurate earnings forecasts than other small donor and non-donor analysts, and the accuracy of these forecasts decreases after a big donor analyst ceases his donations. These analysts become more accurate after they become large political donors, suggesting their enhanced performance derives from an advantage gained via their political activity. These results are stronger when (i) the analyst works or lives in the state represented by the benefiting politician, and (ii) the benefiting politician serves on a Congressional committee …

The Effects Of Group Personality Composition On Project Team Performance: Operationalizations And Outcomes, Mark Collins

Doctoral Dissertations

Teams are used to achieve organizational goals and objectives, and their success has led to a broad increase in their use in businesses, non-profits and NGO’s. Extant research suggests that group personality composition is related to team performance (Barry and Stewart, 1996; Halfhill, Nielsen, Sundstrom, and Weilbaecher, 2005; Peeters, Rutte, Tuijl, and Reymen, 2006; Bell, 2007). Project teams are frequently used in the business world and undertake a wide variety of tasks (Hackman, 1990). This paper investigates the relationship between the group personality composition of project teams and team performance. The study context is project teams involved in a semester-long …

Client Responses To Non-Compliant Audits: An Analysis Of Clients Targeted By Pcaob Inspection, Quinn Thomas Swanquist

Doctoral Dissertations

PCAOB inspectors are afforded privileged insight into the quality of audits selected for inspection. Using inspection reports from 2005-2012, I create a unique sample of audits that were inspected by the PCAOB (i.e., all of an auditor’s clients were selected for inspection). By tracing inspection findings to specific engagements, I directly identify compliant and non-compliant audits. I examine the contributing factors of ‘audit quality’ and provide evidence that higher audit fees and greater human capital are positively related to compliant PCAOB inspections. When PCAOB findings can be linked to a specific engagement, I also find that, on average, the client …