Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods Commons^™

Amazon.Com, Inc Strategic Audit, Ningzhi Luo

Honors Theses

Amazon.com, Inc (Amazon) was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 as an online marketplace for books but later expanded to e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. This large variety of products and innovations has contributed to Amazon as one of the most influential economic and cultural forces in the world (Eugene Kim, 2018). This study would specifically focus on the e-commerce area and analyze Amazon's position in this market from an external and internal perspective by using three models: Porter's Five Forces, PESTEL, and the SWOT model. The report would identify Amazon's competitive advantages and the challenges it …

Analysis Of The Challenges In The Planning And Implementation Of Lean Construction, Sultan Alsabi

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Science and Technology at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science by Sultan Alsabi on December 1, 2020.

More Than Just A Tie: The Role Of Content And Context In Firm Alliance Networks, Holly Loncarich

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Researchers often rely on social network theory to understand both the structural antecedents and outcomes of strategic alliances. However, many alliance studies only emphasize the existence of a tie and rarely theorize further about their efficacy. This failure to consider the role and variation of content in alliance ties (e.g. resource commitment, trust, information exchange) may hinder the application of various network theories at the interorganizational level. Further, interorganizational network studies have largely neglected the role of the external environment, or context, in interfirm collaboration and often fail to consider how the external environment shapes firm network actions and outcomes. …

A Darker Shade Of Gray: An Empirical Examination Of Gray Swans In The Supply Chain, Tony N.K. Lynch

Theses and Dissertations

The complexity and interconnectedness of markets creates risks in the global supply chain and may lead to various types of disruptions. Prior research in the supply chain management literature has focused on some aspect of disruption and firm performance. However, the effect of Gray Swans on various aspects of firms’ operational or financial performance is an under-research area. Understanding why managers often underestimate and overlook Gray Swans contributes to ongoing conversation of risk in the global supply chain. Gray Swans are defined as low probability risk events that if/when they occur can have a severe or catastrophic impact on a …

Crisis, Crisis, Read All About It! Investigating The Direct And Joint Effects Of Crisis Response Strategies, Crisis History And Strategic Actions On The Tone Of Media Coverage, Habiba Nefisa Alambo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Crisis management research has focused on how crisis stricken firms protect their reputation by communicating appropriate messages to evaluators and employing strategic actions that favorably shape public opinion about the stricken firm. Developing conversations have addressed how a firm’s crisis history may impact current crisis management efforts. However, little is known about how these factors jointly and directly influence what is said about a crisis stricken firm and subsequently impact evaluators’ perceptions.

Primarily guided by the tenets of attribution and situational crisis communication theories, I studied the interactive and main effects of crisis response strategies (accommodative, reframing and defensive), crisis …

Effects Of Employee Personality On The Relationships Between Experienced Incivility, Emotional Exhaustion, And Perpetrated Incivility, Jennifer L. Welbourne, Gerardo A. Miranda, Ashwini Gangadharan

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Workplace incivility refers to low-intensity negative behaviors that violate workplace norms of respect. Incivility is known to be a type of stressor in the workplace, with recent research drawing attention to how it may differentially affect employees with varying personality traits. Drawing from a stressor–strain theoretical framework, we examined the moderating effects of four of the Big Five personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion) on the relationship between individuals’ experienced incivility and their subsequent emotional exhaustion and perpetrated incivility toward others in the organization. Results from a 2-wave survey of 252 working adults indicate that personality traits moderated the …

The Impact Of Intellectual Capital Configuration On Diversification In Banking Industry: Evidence From Indonesia, Rangga Yusuf Aiyubi, Dony Abdul Chalid

The South East Asian Journal of Management

Research Aims: This study aims to examine the impact of Intellectual Capital configuration on business diversification in Indonesian banking Industry Design/methodology/approach: This reseach employ panel data regression analysis, using data of 88 commercial banks in Indonesia druing the year of 2014 to 2019. Research Findings: The results of this study shows that Human Capital Efficiency and Structural Capital Efficiency affects the strategy of income diversification. While Capital Employed Efficiency affects the strategy of asset diversification. The results Theoretical Contribution/Originality: Previous research more focus on the effect of diversification on performance. Researche on how the internal capital of an organization affects …

The Influence Of Japanese Work Cultures On Malaysian Foodservice Employees' Work Stress And Their Turnover Intention, Mohd Fairuz Mustaffa Kamal, Mohd Salehuddin Mohd Zahari, Mohd Hafiz Hanafiah, Nurul Wahidah Mohammad Ariffin

The South East Asian Journal of Management

Research Aims - This study investigates the influence of Japanese work cultures on Malaysian foodservice employees’ work stress and their turnover intention. Design/methodology/approach - A total of 381 respondents participated in this study, and the research data was validated prior to the empirical assessment. Research Findings - The results of this study signify that the Japanese work culture amplifies workers disorientation, stress and turnover intention. Besides, thru hierarchical regression, workplace stress was found to mediate the relationship between Japanese work culture and employee turnover intention. Theoretical Contribution/Originality - The study reveals the conflicts between the South East Asian employees and …

Building A Theoretical Research Model For Trust Development: The Case Of Mobile Financial Services In Myanmar, Phyo Min Tun

The South East Asian Journal of Management

Research Aims - This research study focuses on the factors affecting customer trust in mobile financial services (MFS) in Myanmar by developing a research model that incorporates six different factors: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, social pressure, enabling conditions, service quality, and satisfaction. Design/Methodology/Approach - Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were employed to analyse the data. Subsequently, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was utilised to examine hypotheses. An analysis was performed on the survey data collected from 250 mobile phone users who are likely to use or currently using MFS in Myanmar. Research Findings - The …

Determining Criteria For Supplier Selection In The Indonesian Oil And Gas Industry, Nur Habibah, Ratih Dyah Kusumastuti

The South East Asian Journal of Management

Research Aims - This research aims to identify the main criteria of supplier selection in the oil and gas industry in Indonesia and their causal relationships by using the DEMATEL method. Methodology - Based on the literature review and discussions with experts, ten supplier selection criteria were identified and used as the basis of questionnaire development. The questionnaire was distributed to 57 respondents representing supply chain management and other divisions in eight oil and gas companies in Indonesia, with 51 valid responses. The data was analyzed using the DEMATEL method. Research Findings - The results show that product price is …

Night-Market Traders Are They Entrepreneurial Or Just Making Ends Meet?, Azwardi Md Isa, Noor Azura Azman, Nur Syazwani Aisyah Ahmad Sukri

The South East Asian Journal of Management

Research Aims - Night-market is a popular type of micro-business in Southeast Asia. The purpose of this research is to examine night markets from the perspective of business development, a perspective that has received limited attention from the literature. Design/methodology/approach - A total of 300 questionnaires were distributed amongst nightmarket business owners in a selected venue around Penang. Data were analyzed using SEM-PLS to measure the variables proposed in the study. Research Findings - The results of this study showed that commitment and business experience is significantly related to business development while government assistance yields no relationship. The age of …

Do Export Activities Improve Small Firm Performance? Evidence From Indonesia, Mohamad Dian Revindo, Christopher Gan, Aditya Alta

The South East Asian Journal of Management

Research Aims: This study investigates the link between involvement in direct export activities and firm performance, with reference to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Indonesia. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study employed primary data collected from questionnaires administered to 271 exporting SMEs in seven provinces in Jawa-Bali Region. The OLS and GLM regression techniques were employed to estimate the export impact model. Research Findings: The results show that export activities bring the highest performance improvement in product quality, moderate improvement in marketing and networking techniques, total sales, total profit, production technique or technology and worker productivity, and least improvement in domestic sales. …

Contingency Planning Amidst A Pandemic, Natalie C. Belford

KSU Proceedings on Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Proper prior planning prevents pitifully poor performance: The purpose of this research is to address mitigation approaches - disaster recovery, contingency planning, and continuity planning - and their benefits as they relate to university operations during a worldwide pandemic predicated by the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). The most relevant approach pertaining to the University’s needs and its response to the Coronavirus pandemic will be determined and evaluated in detail.

Shipment Sizing For Autonomous Trucks Of Road Freight, Chun-Miin (Jimmy) Chen, Yajun Lu

Faculty Journal Articles

Unprecedented endeavors have been made to take autonomous trucks to the open road. This study aims to provide relevant information on autonomous truck technology and to help logistics managers gain insight into assessing optimal shipment sizes for autonomous trucks. Empirical data of estimated autonomous truck costs is collected to help revise classic, conceptual models of assessing optimal shipment sizes. Numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate the optimal shipment size when varying the autonomous truck technology cost and transportation lead time reduction. Autonomous truck technology can cost as much as 70% of the price of a truck. Logistics managers using classic …

Assessing Topical Homogeneity With Word Embedding And Distance Matrices, Jeffrey M. Stanton, Yisi Sang

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Researchers from many fields have used statistical tools to make sense of large bodies of text. Many tools support quantitative analysis of documents within a corpus, but relatively few studies have examined statistical characteristics of whole corpora. Statistical summaries of whole corpora and comparisons between corpora have potential application in the analysis of topically organized applications such social media platforms. In this study, we created matrix representations of several corpora and examined several statistical tests to make comparisons between pairs of corpora with respect to the topical homogeneity of documents within each corpus. Results of three experiments suggested that a …

Human Flourishing And The Subjective Dimension Of Work, Geoffrey Friesen

Department of Finance: Faculty Publications

This essay considers the Christian understanding of the subjective dimension of human work and the implications for economics, finance, and the modern firm. The biblical account of people profoundly captures the fullness of human nature and the role of work and economy in developing the full person. People’s reality is both individual and collective, encompassing their subjective interior and objective exterior dimensions of reality. This issue is important because economic models affect economic decisions, and these decisions help shape social reality. Current economic and financial models are problematic because they are self-limiting: They close off certain outcomes by assuming they …

Bear River Health Department: Covid-19 Contact Tracing, Mike Dixon, Zach Rusk

Huntsman School of Business Teaching Scholarship Series

This case introduces students to a highly variable process that has uncertain demand and processing times. It describes the contact tracing efforts as a response to positive Covid-19 cases in a rural health district in the state of Utah during the first 9 months of the pandemic of 2020. The case puts students in the shoes of the managing director of a health department trying to decide how to best manage a team of contact tracers who are increasingly unable to timely complete their work that is vital to stopping the spread of the disease.

Tree-Based Algorithm For Stable And Efficient Data Clustering, Hasan Aljabbouli, Abdullah Albizri, Antoine Harfouche

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The K-means algorithm is a well-known and widely used clustering algorithm due to its simplicity and convergence properties. However, one of the drawbacks of the algorithm is its instability. This paper presents improvements to the K-means algorithm using a K-dimensional tree (Kd-tree) data structure. The proposed Kd-tree is utilized as a data structure to enhance the choice of initial centers of the clusters and to reduce the number of the nearest neighbor searches required by the algorithm. The developed framework also includes an efficient center insertion technique leading to an incremental operation that overcomes the instability problem of the K-means …

Investigating Justice And Bullying Among Healthcare Workers, Michele N. Medina-Craven, Kathryn Ostermeier

Management Department Faculty Journal Articles

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between workplace bullying, organizational justice dimensions and intentions to leave. The authors posit that workplace bullying is positively related to intentions to leave, and that this effect is transmitted through lower justice perceptions.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors surveyed 146 healthcare workers, using factor analysis and the Preacher and Hayes (2008) PROCESS macro to test their hypotheses.

Findings

The study results indicate that workplace bullying is positively associated with intentions to leave. This effect is transmitted through lower entity-based distributive justice perceptions.

Research limitations/implications

The study sample was cross-sectional and collected …

Predicting Attrition - A Driver For Creating Value, Realizing Strategy, And Refining Key Hr Processes, Kevin Mendonsa, Maureen Stolberg, Vivek Viswanathan, Scott Crum

SMU Data Science Review

Talent is the most important asset for every organization's success. While attrition (or churn) and turnover can refer to both employees and customers, this paper will focus on employee attrition only. Many organizations accept attrition as an inevitable cost of doing business and do nothing to adopt or implement mitigating strategies to combat it. World class companies on the other hand take deliberate measures to understand, control and mitigate attrition (turnover) at every stage. Unmitigated attrition can have a devastating effect on an organization's bottom line and market value. In addition, the “invisible" costs of low employee morale, reduced employee …

The Effects Of Covid-19 Preoccupation On Business Activity: A Bounded Rationality Perspective, James White

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Using the unique conditions afforded by the global pandemic, we examine Simon’s influential 1947 Bounded-rationality theory with empirical data. We attempt to correlate a shift in attention with a decrease in routine organizational activity. Using a relative measure for interest in COVID-19 topic prevalence from Google Trends and sales activity from a diverse sample of business to business companies. Our results support Simon’s theory. We found a moderate relationship between routine activity and a global shift in attention. Furthermore, the data highlight a possible theoretical threshold necessary for an event to cause divergence.

Three Essays On Ceo Activism, Strategic Choices And Firm Performance, Keshab Acharya

Theses and Dissertations

There is a longstanding societal expectation that business leaders refrain from involving in social and political issues and primarily focus on managing their firms. In recent years, however, there is a growing trend of CEOs taking a stance on controversial sociopolitical issues that are not directly related to their company’s core business. This dissertation consists of three essays focusing on this phenomenon of CEO activism.

In my first essay, given that CEO activism represents a nascent phenomenon, I explore the conceptualization of CEO activism. Additionally, I propose three main motives behind CEO activism: intrinsic, instrumental, and stakeholder-focused. In my second …

Two Sides Of The Same Coin: Essays Investigating The Founder And Backer Dynamics Of Crowdfunding, Ruben Ceballos

Theses and Dissertations

Crowdfunding provides the opportunity for entrepreneurs to acquire capital for their projects by utilizing a platform that allows the masses to provide funds towards the completion of the project. Thus, it can be looked at as two sides of the same coin. On one side you have the entrepreneurs seeking the funds otherwise known as founders, and on the other are those that provide the funds also known as backers. The purpose of this study is to investigate what factors lead to founders successfully attaining their funding, what motivates backers to support the projects, and whether the founders can deliver …

Seeking A Perfect Match: The Effect Of Spousal Capital On Performance Of Family Firms, Xi Yang

Theses and Dissertations

The research about family business has received increasing attention. However, the research that focuses on the effect of owner-managers marriage on family firm performance is scarce. In this study, I argue that the family business manager's spouse can affect firm performance through firm-level and individual-level channels. First, I propose that a family business's firm performance is influenced by owner-managers marriage in terms of spousal human, social, and financial capital based on a family capital topology—a firm-level lens. I build a conceptual model of spousal capital in a family business and develop hypotheses. Further, by integrating the complementary needs theory of …

Busy Directors And The Occurrence Of Corporate Environmental Misconduct, Michael A. Abebe, Carla D. Jones, Keshab Acharya

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The occurrence of corporate misconduct is a significant organizational event that adversely affects not only the firm’s performance but also its relationships with key stakeholders. Corporate directors are pivotal in the prevention and management of organizational misconduct. In this study, we focus on the phenomenon of “overboarded directors” (those serving on three or more corporate boards). Specifically, we propose that busy directors are less likely to be effective in monitoring environmental misconduct given the substantial cognitive overload and a limited sense of alertness associated with multiple directorships. We propose that firms with busy directors are more likely to have environmental …

Essays On Competitive Perishable Food Supply Chain Networks: From The Impacts Of Tariffs And Quotas To Integration Of Quality, Deniz Besik

Doctoral Dissertations

Food, in the form of fresh produce, meat, fish, and/or dairy, is necessary for maintaining life. In this dissertation, I focus on the modeling and analysis of some of the inherent issues in competitive perishable food supply chain networks. I investigate the impacts of trade policies such as tariffs, quotas, and their combination – tariff-rate quotas, as well as the integration of food quality deterioration into food supply chains. The research is especially timely given the prevalence of trade wars and tariffs in todays global political environment. The work is multidisciplinary with constructs from food science integrated into the economics …

Motivating Language And Employee Outcomes: A Multinational Investigation, Cau Ngoc Nguyen, Wei Ning, Albi Alikaj, Quoc Nam Tran

Research, Publications & Creative Work

Purpose – This study aims to examine the impact of managerial use of motivating language on employee absenteeism, turnover intention, job satisfaction and job performance for employees from three nations: India, the USA and Vietnam.

Design/methodology/approach – Data is collected from 614 employees working in India, the USA and Vietnam. A variance-based partial least squares structural equation modeling technique is used to test the hypotheses. In addition, a statistical test is used to examine the statistical differences in the results across the three nations.

Findings – The findings are consistent with the motivating language theory, in that managerial use of …

Unpacking Burt’S Constraint Measure, Martin G. Everett, Stephen P. Borgatti

Management Faculty Publications

Burt (1992) proposed two principal measures of structural holes, effective size and constraint. However, the formulas describing the measures are somewhat opaque and have led to a certain amount of confusion. Borgatti (1997) showed that, for binary data, the effective size formula could be written very simply as degree (ego network size) minus average degree of alters within the ego network. The present paper presents an analogous reformulation of the constraint measure. We also derive minima and maxima for constraint, showing that, for small ego networks, constraint can be larger than one, and for larger ego networks, constraint cannot get …

Metacritiques Of Upper Echelons Theory: Verdicts And Recommendations For Future Research, Brett H. Neely Jr., Jeffrey B. Lovelace, Amanda P. Cowen, Nathan J. Hiller

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

After more than 35 years, Hambrick and Mason’s upper echelons theory (UET) stands as one of the most influential perspectives in management research. However, as the literature and its attendant reviews have become more numerous and specialized, discussion of the fundamental conceptual and methodological critiques leveled against research utilizing the UET perspective has grown fragmented. As such, the first aim of the present review is to identify and synthesize a set of common critiques levied against UET research. In doing so, we unpack important nuance within each critique while establishing a common vocabulary to facilitate greater consistency in how these …

A Review Study Of Functional Autoregressive Models With Application To Energy Forecasting, Ying Chen, Thorsten Koch, Kian Guan Lim, Xiaofei Xu, Nazgul Zakiyeva

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this data‐rich era, it is essential to develop advanced techniques to analyze and understand large amounts of data and extract the underlying information in a flexible way. We provide a review study on the state‐of‐the‐art statistical time series models for univariate and multivariate functional data with serial dependence. In particular, we review functional autoregressive (FAR) models and their variations under different scenarios. The models include the classic FAR model under stationarity; the FARX and pFAR model dealing with multiple exogenous functional variables and large‐scale mixed‐type exogenous variables; the vector FAR model and common functional principal component technique to handle …