Business Commons^™

International Challenges And Opportunities For Start-Up Expatriates, Lana Carnes, Faridah Awang

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

An employee’s earning potential is a direct function of his or her skills, capabilities, and experience – and international experience is one of the most effective ways for people to increase their value.

Business Students' Personal Branding: An Empirical Investigation, Lee Allison, Philip J. Boutin, Kevin J. Cumiskey

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Personal branding is the process by which an individual actively tries to manage others’ impression of their skills, abilities and experiences (Johnson, 2017). It is the marketing of oneself to society (Lair, Sullivan, & Cheney, 2005; Peters, 1997; Shepherd, 2005). While the current job market is touted as being the best in years, employment opportunities for business aspirants in the U.S. economy changed little from 2017 to 2016 when comparing a United States Department of Labor annual report (“United States Department of Labor,” 2018). This suggests that new business graduates continue to face the harsh reality of a challenging environment …

Ceo Political Ideology And Mergers And Acquisitions Decisions, Ahmed M. Elnahas, Kim Dongnyoung

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

We examine the relation between CEOs political ideology and their firms' investment decisions, particularly their M&A decisions. Employing individual financial contributions data for the period from 1993 to 2006, we find that firm's investment decisions vary with CEO's political ideology. Our evidence indicates that Republican CEOs are less likely to engage in M&A activities. When they do undertake acquisitions, they are more likely to use cash as the method of payment, and their targets are more likely to be public firms and to be from the same industry. Further, Republican CEOs tend to avoid high information asymmetry acquisitions that involve …

A Holistic Education Approach For Assessing Business Programs, Lana W. Carnes, Faridah Awang, Qian Xiao

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Providing business students with a holistic education is essential for developing professionals who are equally proficient in their use of hard and soft skills and capable of applying various concepts from different disciplines to create innovative solutions. To understand if students are learning the content that a holistic business education is intended to deliver, a case study of business program assessment was conducted. Specifically, this research is focused on an assessment of business students from a comprehensive regional institution of higher education to determine if the business program has incorporated appropriate assessment strategies in order to meet the expectations of …

Organizational Conflict Navigation: Building A Comprehensive Conflict Management Course, Beth Polin

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Conflict situations are unfortunately a naturally occurring phenomenon in the workplace. Whether it is an employee not voicing concerns because of fear of retaliation, team members not trusting one another, or companies negotiating terms of an agreement, conflict situations are ubiquitous. Because no organization is immune to conflict, employees must enter the workplace equipped with the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to appropriately navigate such situations. Companies recognize this need and call for graduates to possess this unique set of soft skills (e.g. Buhl, nd), as much efficiency can be lost when employees are focused on conflict and not its …

The Debate About Using Social Media To Screen Job Applicants, Marcel Robles

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

A simple web search of a person’s name on Social Media could point to multiple social media sites within minutes, and a variety of details can be found about someone, including photos and information about marital status, children, race, age, gender, religion, political affiliation, hobbies, and more (Davison, Hamilton, & Bing, 2012).

Many people may be posting personal information on social media sites with the intended audience of friends in mind, but often there is another audience that is not being considered, such as potential employers (Stoughton, Thompson, & Meade, 2013). As an inexpensive alternative to traditional background checks, many …

Online Students Demographics And Motivations To Enroll In Class, Weiling Zhuang, Viviane Billings

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Distance education traces its origins to mid-19th century Europe and the United States. With the development of infrastructure and technology, universities began to offer distance education via the internet to reach the prospective students, facilitate the learning process and accommodate their needs. With an increase in popularity and demand, the enrollment for online classes has been strong for the past ten years. According to Allen and Seaman (2013), there were 572,000 more online students in fall 2011 than in fall 2010 for a new total of 6.7 million students taking at least one online course. Another recent study conducted by …

Building Sales People: Recommendations For The Development Of A Professional Sales Mentorship Program, Karen Hood Hopkins, Christopher D. Hopkins

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Companies will constantly need people to sell something for them. As Grant Cardone, author of Sell or Be Sold: How to Get Your Way in Business and in Life, puts it, "Great salespeople are literally the engine of every economy in the world." This is evident as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that over 13.6 million Americans are in sales and related occupations.

Looking at specific industries; the real estate sector is projected to grow faster than any other sales sector over the next decade, according to the Department of Labor. With a 14 percent growth rate expected, this …

Evaluation Of It Ethical Scenarios: A Multidimensional Analysis, Kristen L. King, Julia C. Graham

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Computer use is ubiquitous in today’s society. Many users work with computers in their personal and professional lives every day. As this usage continues to increase, misuse of computing resources causes harm to more and more individuals, businesses and society. This misuse and computer crimes have been problems for organizations for at least 20 years now (Panettieri, 1995; Straub and Nance, 1990). Ethical dilemmas have been used as a research technique to study business ethics for years and more recently, this research method has been extended to the field of Information Technology (Kreie and Cronan, 1998; Straub and Nance, 1990). …

Exploring The Utility Of Mindfulness And Self-Regulation Assignments For Business Students, Michael T. Roberson

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

There are a number of personal habits, disciplines, and activities that are associated with success for both college students and business professionals. Goal-setting, concentration and focus, and the ability to delay gratification have long been known to be key factors. More recent research has shown that mindfulness, self-assessment, and self-regulation are also important to success. However, today’s world poses serious, new challenges to the student or professional who wishes to think and learn effectively and to achieve his/her goals.

Previously, a Learning Academy was created to lead volunteer students through a series of self-assessments, worksheet exercises, personal reflections, and group …

Improving Student Effort On A Learning Outcome Assessment: Benchmarks, Options, And Results, Michael T. Roberson, Thomas Erekson

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Mission-driven accreditation standards were established by AACSB in 2003 and updated in 2013, and these standards required accredited business and accounting programs to establish and assess student learning outcomes. This approach was a major change for AACSB accreditation, so beginning in 2003 universities were given a few years to design and implement their Assurance of Learning (AoL) programs. The result has been an array of measures to assess student learning outcomes. All too often, however, the AoL programs were stand-alone efforts to comply with the standards for assessment and were not linked to meaningful continuous improvement processes.

Assessing basic business …

Competency Development In University Business Students: A Multiperspective Analysis, Karlee A. Tanel, Michael T. Roberson

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

University business schools work to produce graduates who are knowledgeable in each of the business disciplines (e.g., accounting, management) as well as subject matter related to their chosen major or concentration area. B-schools also seek to develop some of the key professional competencies that are needed by individuals working in business. There are other competencies that may be important in business but are either impossible or impractical to develop in a university environment, and graduates must develop those competencies after beginning their business careers.

We investigated three research questions relating to the importance, trainability, and development of 22 professional competencies …

Environmental Scanning And Global Marketing Strategy: A Multitheoretical Normative Conceptual Framework, Philip J. Boutin Jr.

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This research paper involves the development of a normative conceptual framework of global or international marketing strategy for academic researchers and practitioners that is informed by multiple literature streams and theoretical foundations, including environmental scanning, the strategy fit paradigm (environment-strategy coalignment), industrial organization theory, the resource-based view, and perceived environmental uncertainty.

Managing A Large Scale Project: Using Strengthsfinder In The Website Redesign, Laura Edwards, Cristina Tofan

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

After doing a library-wide StrengthsFinder assessment that highlighted the strengths of its individuals, EKU Libraries decided to put this strategy into practice by applying it to one of the most complex projects in the life of an academic library: the website redesign. This decentralized approach allowed project managers to align strengths-based teams with phases of the redesign that would most benefit from that team’s unique strengths.

Manager In The Making: Learning To Manage People, Projects, And Time, Laura Edwards, Cristina Tofan

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In addition to keeping their own professional skills up to date, new managers need to learn quickly how to think strategically, delegate, and successfully supervise and lead their staff. In most cases, these skills are learned on the job, without prior training or with limited mentoring. We will draw on what we learned from the literature and from our own experience to illustrate the skills that we feel contribute the most to the making of a great manager and, ultimately, an effective leader.

A Structural Model Of Managing E-Commerce Transaction Quality And Perceived Online Transaction Value, Qian Xiao

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Conceptualizing e-service quality and understanding its performance implications have become an important research topic given the fast development of internet technologies and various business models of e-commerce by means of expanding online marketplaces. There are two common online platforms for e-commerce portals: Corporate companies’ own Web sites (e.g., Walmart.com and Dell.com) that offer the online purchase option as an alternative to the traditional retailing stores; and the third-party (T-P) Web sites (e.g., eBay.com and Amazon.com) that provide the online platforms to facilitate the transactions between buyers and sellers. This paper focuses on the e-commerce platforms that mainly function as third-party …

Commercial Crime Insurance For Coverage Of Employee Fraud, Ed Fenton, Siwei Gao

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Businesses face a myriad of risks from both within and outside the organization. Potential losses may arise from property damage due to weather, flooding, or fire, encompassing buildings, fixtures, and equipment. Liability concerns are present when a third party sustains injury while on the premises, or when another entity believes the business caused some sort of monetary damage to its operations. Additional risks include theft of business assets, whether those assets are in the physical form, such as inventory and equipment, or in the intangible form like proprietary production processes and secret recipes. Insurance coverage may be acquired to mitigate …

Managing E-Commerce Platform Quality And Its Performance Implication: Multiple-Group Structural Model Comparison, Qian Xiao

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This study develops a comprehensive e-service quality measure of e-commerce platforms as intermediaries which considers both the functionality of the website itself, and the performance assessment of independent sellers. The study further investigates the joint impacts of both the attributes of e-commerce platforms and the performance of independent sellers on users' online shopping experience - perceived online transaction value and the ensuing satisfaction. Finally, the study examines the effects of e-service quality on the outcome variables across two major e-commerce platforms as intermediaries, eBay and Amazon. The multiple-group structural model analysis provides important insights to understanding differing impacts of different …

Promote Interculturalism, Leadership Communication, And Professionalism In Your Students: Success With A Corporate Communication Certificate, Lana W. Carnes, M. M. Robles, F. Awang

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Business educators share a common interest in encouraging their students to improve intercultural, leadership communication, and professionalism skills to enable and promote increased fulfillment, character development, and advancement toward graduation, in addition to improving student employability after graduation. While career success depends on the standards and knowledge of character and behavioral traits, much more than on technical knowledge, these attributes define the qualities desired across various professions (Barnhart, 2013) in these three areas. For example, Holmes (2015) found that the values and communication rules of discourse systems may be different from that which is expected in the international workplace.

A …

The Relationship Between Academic Research And Instructional Quality, M. M. Robles

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Elite universities often receive massive grants from the Federal and State Governments due to their immense amounts of research in various fields. This research helps further the efforts of academics and contributes many positive features to different realms of research. Large research grants foster even larger enrollment numbers because the size and reputation of the University grows with each new publication and contribution made by faculty.

As research expectations for university faculty increase, the competitiveness of faculty positions also increases. Faculty members are expected to produce research and are often hired for their prior research productivity (Prince, Felder, & Brent, …

A Structural Model Of Managing E-Commerce Transaction Quality And Perceived Online Transaction Value, Qian Xiao

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

A significant amount of online transactions have occurred through the widespread usage of e-commerce portals as intermediaries. These e-commerce portals such as www.ebay.com and www.amazon.com, manage the online exchange network, and facilitate the peer-to-peer business transactions. Researchers have developed different measures of e-commerce platform quality and explored its relationships to the user experience and firm performance. Built on the literature of online transaction quality, this study develops a conceptual framework that illustrates how the e-commerce platform quality and the transaction handling process will shape users’ perceived transaction value and the resulting experience evaluation.

Libanswers: A Solution For Eresource Ticketing And Workflow Management, Kelly Smith

EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship

A case study that explores using Springshare's LibAnswers customer relations management software to support electronic resource ticket tracking and workflow management in libraries.