Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons^™

Delta Air Lines Strategic Audit, Victoria Diersen, Rebecca Koppelman, Nicholas Lauver, Aaryan Naik, Drake Vorderstrasse

Honors Theses

This case study focuses on Delta Air Lines, a prominent company in the airline industry. We conducted a strategic audit utilizing theories and principles central to strategic management to complete the case study. Our research used publicly available information that included the company’s website, SEC filings, news articles, and industry analysis. The goal of this case study is to collect and analyze data, apply strategic management concepts to a contemporary organization, and evaluate the firm’s potential for competitive advantage.

We looked at many factors for Delta Air Lines, including firm analysis, industry analysis, external analysis, internal analysis, performance analysis, competitive …

Lockheed Martin Strategic Audit, Trevor Deboer, Gunnar Lombard, Sam Nelson, Tj Taylor, Paul Wynegar

Honors Theses

Abstract

This case study explores Lockheed Martin, a global leader in defense contracting. Our team performed a strategic audit using the theories of strategic management. Our research was pulled from various sources, including Lockheed Martin’s website, SEC filings, related news articles, and relevant industry analysis. The goals of this case study revolved around collecting data and performing analysis to evaluate Lockheed Martin’s potential for competitive advantage in the airplane and parts manufacturing industry.

Some of the various analyses performed on Lockheed Martin include firm analysis, industry analysis, internal analysis, external analysis, competitive dynamics, business-level strategy, corporate-level strategy, and exploring their …

Time And Change: A Meta-Analysis Of Temporal Decisions In Longitudinal Studies, Helen Hailin Zhao, Abbie J. Shipp, Kameron Carter, Erik Gonzalez-Mulé, Erica Xu

Management Faculty Publications

Longitudinal research has grown in popularity in the field of management and organizations. However, the literature has neglected to consider the important ways in which researchers' temporal decisions can influence observed change in longitudinal studies. Researchers must make a set of temporal decisions to capture change, such as the temporal precision of the hypothesized form of change, the selection of a sample that is expected to exhibit the change, the choice of variables to be measured repeatedly, the frequency of measurements, and the time interval between measurements. However, these decisions typically are based on "educated guesses," which makes their effects …

Staff Matters: Are There Risks To Using Ai In Our Practice?, Jodi Schafer Sphr, Shrm-Scp

The Journal of the Michigan Dental Association

As your practice adopts AI for hiring processes, it brings efficiency but also potential pitfalls. The increasing use of AI, such as ChatGPT, streamlines tasks like resume screening, but caution is essential. Recent executive orders emphasize safety assessments and civil rights in AI. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission focuses on transparency and consent in recruitment AI use. Legal compliance is vital to prevent discrimination; criteria like education and experience must be applied consistently. Additionally, employee monitoring AI requires careful implementation, ensuring transparency and human oversight. While AI offers benefits, its workplace integration demands careful consideration, testing, and ongoing evaluation.

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Pendekatan Design Science: Metode Penelitian Alternatif Bagi Mahasiswa Magister Manajemen, Mone Stepanus

Jurnal Manajemen dan Usahawan Indonesia

The obligation of graduate students, including Master of Management (MM) students, to publish in academic journal need to be approached wisely. Thus far, research conducted by MM students for their theses has been perceived as lacking practical contribution. This issue is also felt in business and management research in general. However, MM students are expected, in fact, to become profesionals who can offer solution to real problems faced by their organizations. The design science method could be an alternative for MM students to conduct research that is both close to practical application and still offers theoretical contribution.

This article aims …

Ozgene: To Advance Humanity – Inspire Curiosity, Maarit Patrick, Mike Dixon

Huntsman School of Business Teaching Scholarship Series

The case introduces the students to Ozgene, an Australian firm that experienced a dramatic reduction in lead time of their products because of implementation of Lean principles. The case can be used in undergraduate or graduate courses in operations management or supply chain management as an introduction to Lean principles. The case also encourages students to consider the challenges that make-to-order differ from those of make-to-stock and explore production design principles.

Building Strength Through Collaboration: What Faith Community Nurses Need To Know, Marcia A. Potter

International Journal of Faith Community Nursing

This article is a practical guide and viewpoint narrative that offers definitions, justifications for, process steps, and a how-to checklist for Faith Community Nurses considering collaboration between multiple agencies outside of their own. The author offers simple guidelines and how-to advice on securing success, avoiding risks, and preventing costly misunderstandings between cooperating agencies when combining resources.

Stronger Together: Building Nonprofit Resilience Through A Network With A Shared Mission And Organizational Humility, Haley M. Woznyj, Oscar J. Stewart, Tammy E. Beck

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

Nonprofit organizations increasingly face surprising and disruptive shocks, beyond financial setbacks, that challenge an organization's operations, long-term survival, and success. To continue to execute their mission, nonprofits must be resilient. Despite the importance of resilience in nonprofits, more research is needed to understand the factors that build organizational resilience and how leaders can help promote resilience. We conducted a qualitative case study, consisting of 23 interviews with organizational members and key partners, fieldwork, and archival information, of a documented resilient nonprofit organization. Our findings suggest that leaders can enhance resilience by gaining access to resources through collaboration, which is in …

Virtual Currencies And Intrapreneurial Coordination, Martin Sibileau

Journal of New Finance

Managers of conglomerates or companies with multiple business units are, like central planners in socialist countries, unable to perform economic calculation. These units exchange goods and services internally based on transfer prices, not market prices, and it is hard to ascertain the value contributed by management, which is often hired and rewarded based on political considerations. Innovation is also often unwelcome, as it may challenge privileges of executive management. Until 2016, conglomerates lacked the technology to benefit from economic calculation. In this paper, I propose that a blockchain platform supporting an internal virtual currency enables economic calculation inside conglomerates, unlocking …

When Identities Collide: Organizational And Professional Identity Conflict And Employee Outcomes, Kathryn Ostermeier, Peter Anzolitto, Danielle Cooper, Julie Hancock

Management Department Faculty Journal Articles

Purpose

While many workers have both professional and organizational identities, which can have conflicting expectations, little is known about this specific and common form of identity conflict. The purpose of this research is to develop and test a measure of organizational and professional identity conflict (OPIC), which the authors define as a psychological conflict that individuals experience between who they feel they are supposed to be in their organization and who they feel they are supposed to be in their profession. The authors theorize that this identity conflict will lead to emotional exhaustion and psychological distress, further leading to turnover …

Managing Goal Heterogeneity In Strategic Initiatives, Erim Ergene, Steven Floyd, Seray Ergene

Management Department Faculty Journal Articles

Strategic initiatives are temporary group undertakings designed to renew organizational capabilities and are crucial to organizational performance. Despite the inherent goal heterogeneity stemming from individual, departmental, organizational, and initiative levels, research conceptualizes goals as unitary within the team. Our objective is to explore ways to manage goal heterogeneity for the successful development of strategic initiatives within the intraorganizational context. We argue that organizational controls and decision comprehensiveness can be effective in mitigating the negative effects of heterogeneity. This will help facilitate a group of individuals in behaving as a team and being committed to the agreed-upon task at hand. We …

An Investigation On The Role Of Positive Psychological Constructs On Educational Outcomes In Business Schools, Eileen Kwesiga, Katharina Spraul, Baniyelme D. Zoogah

Management Department Faculty Journal Articles

Business schools are increasingly interested in empowering students to be more competent and driven for social changes through service learning. However, studies examining the role of positive traits and cross-cultural differences of service-learning education are limited. As a result, we leveraged positive psychology reasoning to explore the relationship between positive behavior as indicated by compassion, ethical leadership, perceived supervisory support and service-learning benefits for students (N = 272; n = 59 teams) in the United States of America (U.S.) and Germany. We used hierarchical linear modeling (2-Level model) to find main effects of relational compassion, ethical leadership, perceived supervisory support, …

Optimization And Information Problems In Operations, Puping Jiang

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The main purpose of this dissertation is to study the optimization problems and the value of information in various commercial settings, especially in the emerging platform economy.

Chapter 1, “Data-Driven Asset Selling”. Motivated by online asset selling marketplace business (e.g., used cars and real estate), we formulate a data-driven asset selling dynamic pricing framework which utilizes platforms’ access to customers’ online behavioral data. With mild assumptions on the demand model, careful characterization of the problem structure shows that the model admits some ideal properties that facilitate our regret analysis under our dynamic programming setting. Instead of studying the policy performance …

The Application Of Dynamic Models In Operations Management, Yunzhe Qiu

Olin Business School Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dynamic program is a principal method for analyzing stochastic optimization problems. This dissertation studies three operations management problems that arise in the dynamic environment. The principal motivation behind these comes from the applicability in three areas: the agricultural supply chain, the container shipping industry, and supply chain financing. In the first chapter, we consider the hog production industry, where the hog raising farm should decide the selling strategy among several selling options. The farm also faces the uncertain yield of different weights of hogs and spot price volatility from other interactive markets. In the second chapter, we formulate a …

Online Food Delivery Platforn Use By Restaurants, Jessica Felix Martinez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

During the COVID-19, many restaurants were forced to adopt online food delivery platforms such as Door Dash, Uber Eats to serve their clientele. In this dissertation, I examine the following research question: what challenges and benefits did restaurant managers consider to adopt online food delivery platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic? To answer this question, I present three essays. In the first essay, I reviewed the existing academic and practitioner literature on the research context, identified the major players in the food delivery industry, and summarized the challenges that restaurants faced during the pandemic. In the second essay, I identified what …

Challenging Perceptions: Actual Vs Perceived Generational Differences In Workplace Concepts Conducted During Covid 19, Jacob Slide

Honors Projects in Management

With three different generations in the workforce (Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z), it is important for managers to understand what each generation expects in the workplace. This is especially important when managing intergenerational teams. As the only true digital natives enter the workforce, employers must select managers who can manage the conflict that arises from differences, actual or perceived, that often stem from poor communication and a lack of understanding. This study, grounded in Generational Cohort Theory and replicating the Lester et al. study conducted in 2012 with Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials, aims to examine whether participants’ …

The Mediating Influence Of Organizational Trust On The Relationship Between Transformational Leadership And Job Satisfaction In The Virtual Workplace, Angela Daniels

Dissertations

Research has shown how leadership influences job satisfaction and organizational trust in the virtual workplace. With an increasing number of organizations shifting to these work environments, it is essential to study the effect of leadership on virtual workers. Prior studies suggest that leadership behaviors significantly impact job satisfaction (Hacker et al., 2019), and leadership plays a crucial role in inspiring employees to achieve the goals and objectives of the organization in a virtual workplace (Miller, 2020). Specifically, transformational leadership behaviors that shape the mindset and actions of employees are significant (Abelha et al., 2018). This study proposed a mediation model …

Human Centered Projects And Survivorship Bias The Perceived Success Of Project Outcomes?, Tom Wise

Beyond the Project Horizon: Journal of the Center for Project Management Innovation

Due to the bias that process design demands, we forget the example given by failed projects. The tendency to focus on success was first noted during WWII and named Survivorship Bias. This means that as project professionals, we tend to look at projects that completed successfully to identify desirable patterns for repeatability in process and practice. This leads project professionals to seek out patterns based on successful past practice modeled by successful leaders. Project Managers are trained and heavily focused on Scope, Schedule, and Cost. Perhaps the common constraints and practices of project management may be positively impacted by human …

Humanized Management, Fairness Perception And Health Of Merchant Ecosystem: Driving Mechanisms Of The Digital Age, Zeyong Zhuang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In the era of digital transformation, the competition among individual enterprises has evolved into competition of business ecosystems, and the merchants in shopping malls have evolved from atomistic competition to ecological competition. Therefore, merchants must ensure the health of business ecosystems to establish competitive advantages. This study uses the survey data of merchants in five shopping malls in Guangzhou to empirically test the mechanism of the effect of humanized management on the health of business ecosystems in the context of digital transformation.

The empirical results show that: 1. Humanized management of shopping malls helps to build trust and loyalty, promote …

Exploring Diversity And Depth Of Knowledge, Metacognition, And Individual Ambidexterity, Deddi Tedjakumara

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Recent data show that the average lifespan of a company listed in the Standard and Poor's 500 (S&P 500) Index has declined from 32 years in 1965 to 21 years in 2020 (Clark, 2021), and it is estimated that 75% of the companies listed in the S&P 500 today will disappear from the list by 2027 (Hillenbrand, 2019). Organizational theory holds that for a company to be sustainable, it must strike a balance between exploring new possibilities and exploiting old certainties (March, 1991). The ability to manage the tension between exploration and exploitation is important at both organizational and individual …

Better To Be Loved By Some? Firm Flaunting As An Impression Management Strategy, A. Erin Bass, Michael D. Pfarrer, Ivana Milosevic, Varkey K. Titus Jr.

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

Firms can use a range of proactive impression management behaviors to reduce the impact of a negative event on firmoutcomes. When a negative event is unpredictable, we theorize that firms can engage in ostentatious behaviors that display the firm’s affluence and robust resource base. We term these behaviors “flaunting,” and we present a twopart model that investigates how flaunting can reduce the impact of an unpredictable negative event on firm outcomes and why it is effective at doing so. In part one, we theorize how flaunting can generate net positive stakeholder group evaluations by enhancing distinctiveness among stakeholder groups. In …

Gender-Based Impacts Of Covid-19 In Sub- Saharan Africa, Helen Onyeaka, Phemelo Tamasiga, Ifeanyi Michael Mazi, Hope Akegbe, John K. Osiri

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

The lasting educational and economic impacts of COVID-19 have disproportionally disadvantaged girls on the fringes of society, extending beyond the period of imposed lockdowns. This study delves deeper into the education, socio-economic, and gender-specific effects of the COVID-19 pandemic within the context of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The research illuminates how the pandemic has influenced economic activities and the roles of teachers, parents, and students in the educational process. Furthermore, the paper examines the efficacy of distance learning across diverse media in SSA. The findings suggest that children from rural settings might have limited resources to adapt and continue their education …

Landscaping Wellness At Work: A Participatory Model For Worker-Centered Health, Anya Helena Piotrowski

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

This study contributes to a body of scholarship that demonstrates the benefits and need of employee-driven and defined wellness at work processes. This participatory action research study brought together a team of employees within a remote-work, start-up organization to define and design a process for implementing wellness at work for their organization. Through a participatory process that allowed outcomes to emerge from the group, employees identified opportunities to foster embodied wellness in their organization in three core areas: organizational, personal, and cross-boundary initiatives. Through a reflective collaboration, employees generated ideas and developed a plan to address employee-identified priorities that will …

Experiencing Workplace Inclusion: Critical Incidents That Create A Sense Of Inclusion For Professional Staff In Higher Education, Katherine Penn Lampley

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

Professional staff make up the majority of employees at colleges and universities in the United States but are rarely the focus of research in higher education. As a result, little is known about how these employees experience the workplace, creating a challenge for educational institutions working to attract, develop, and retain this essential resource. Employees who feel included in the workplace have higher performance levels and are more likely to remain with their organizations, but workplace inclusion is a complex and undertheorized psychological phenomenon. This exploratory study provides insight into the psychological experience of inclusion by examining the experiences, interactions, …

Analyzing Business-Focused Social Networks In Hiring: The Influence Of A Job Candidate's Network On A Recruiter's Hiring Recommendation, Hannah V. Kibby

<strong> Theses and Dissertations </strong>

Social media has altered the ways in which people interact. Business-focused social media profiles, such as those on LinkedIn, can act as a proxy for a traditional resume. However, these websites differ from a traditional resume in that information presented is sometimes informal, personal, and irrelevant to the member’s career. Furthermore, HR employees are able to view a job candidate’s social network. This research investigates the influence of a recruiter’s knowledge of an applicant’s professional network on the recruiter’s perception of the applicant’s trustworthiness and hence their willingness to take risk in the hiring relationship. A review of the literature …

Effective Medical Waste Management For Sustainable Green Healthcare, Sang M. Lee, Donhee Lee

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

This study examines the importance of medical waste management activities for developing a sustainable green healthcare environment. This study applied a multiple methodological approach as follows. A thorough review of the literature was performed to delineate the factors that have been explored for reducing medical waste; hospital staff who handle medical waste were surveyed to obtain their opinions on these factors; the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was applied to determine the priorities among the identified key factors; and experts’ opinions were consulted to assess the actual applicability of the results derived by the AHP. The study identified the following factors …

How An Abusive Supervision Climate Impacts Business-To-Business (B2b) Sales Performance, And The Roles Of Leader–Members Interdependence And Team Psychological Safety, Matthew J. Daniel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sales supervisors can tremendously influence the sales teams they manage, and their behaviors can influence a team’s engagement and sales performance. Because of the supervisor’s influential role, their behavior, positive or negative, can ripple throughout the organization. As a result, a supervisor who role models abusive behavior within their organization also promotes a climate of abuse and incivility that can contribute to a toxic workplace. Abusive supervision (AS) is a significant problem in many business-to-business (B2B) sales organizations that negatively impacts the financial welfare and subjective well-being of organizations and their employees. This quantitative correlational study aimed to examine how …

The Role Of Leaders' Motivation, Entrepreneurial Leadership, And Organisational Agility In Social Enterprise Sustainability, Brian Karno Jan, Mira Maulida

The South East Asian Journal of Management

Research Aims: Expand the insights for social enterprises (SEs) to sustain their economic and social performance, considering the impact of leader’s motivation, entrepreneurial leadership, organisational agility, and competitive advantage.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The dataset was obtained from a survey of 102 SE strategic leaders in Indonesia, which was processed using PLS and SEM to test the hypothesis.

Research Findings: Motivation has a positive effect on entrepreneurial leadership but not on organisational agility. Entrepreneurial leadership has tridirectionally relationships with organisational agility, competitive advantage, and social firm performance. Organisational agility has bidirectional relationships with competitive advantage and economic firm performance, whereas competitive advantage only …

Analysis Of The Relationship Between Practices And Performance Of Green Supply Chain Management In Indonesian Micro, Small, And Medium Enterprises (Msmes), Dinda Halimah Siregar, Fajar Ayu Pinagara

The South East Asian Journal of Management

Research Aims: This study discusses the practice of green supply chain management (GSCM) on environmental performance and operational costs in micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia's food and beverage industry. Especially to examine the existence of ecocentricity and supply chain traceability that moderates GSCM practices with environmental performance and operational costs.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The judgement sampling method was used in this study, and 85 respondents contributed. Research questionnaires were distributed online, and data were analysed using Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM).

Research Findings: The results of this study indicate that GSCM practices have a significant relationship to environmental …