Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons^™

An Examination Of Middle Manager Innovation Behaviors And Institutional Factors Impact On Organizational Innovation In The Usa And Mexico, J. Lee Brown Iii

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Several scholars have suggested mid-level management is an important factor that explains strategic outcomes (Wooldridge, Schmidt, & Floyd, 2008), but little research has investigated how this relationship actually works in multiple institutional environments. The resource-based view of the firm argues that competitive advantage is a function of resource heterogeneity and immobility (Barney, 1991) and the discretionary decisions made by managers about resource creation, development, and allocation (Amit & Shoemaker, 1993). These boundedly-rational managers (Simon, 1957) make these decisions facing an uncertain and complex internal and external environment. Thus, this dissertation extends the current research by developing and testing a new …

A Study Of Risk-Taking Behavior In Investment Banking, Elzotbek Rustambekov

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation examines corporate risk-taking behavior by investment banks in the United States. This study was sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, one of the largest bankruptcy filings in U.S. history. This dissertation examines the specific factors that drove investment banks such as Lehman Brothers to take excessive risks, and how the deregulation of the US financial services industry towards the end of the 1990s contributed to risk-taking behavior.

I use four theoretical perspectives to examine corporate risk-taking behavior among investment banks. These perspectives include: institutional theory, behavioral theory of the firm, knowledge based view (KBV) of the firm, …

A Study Of Failures In The Us Banking Industry, Joseph Trendowski

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

This dissertation studies failures in the U.S. banking industry following the 2008 financial crisis. The dissertation offers an exhaustive review of the organizational failure literature, and changes in the banking industry environment over the past century. It takes three theoretical perspectives - institutional, industrial organization and resource-based view- to analyze failures in the banking industry.

The review and analysis allows me to trace the roots of recent bank failures to external (institutional, competitive) and internal (resource structure, strategy, risk) factors, and propose several hypotheses linking such factors with failures. The hypotheses are tested using a data-set that included all bank …

Three Essays On Strategic Risk Taking, Krista Burrill Lewellyn

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

The three essays that comprise this dissertation collectively explore strategic risk taking. The dissertation is underpinned by the notion that corporate executives take strategic risks not randomly, but based on the expectation that outcomes are more likely to be positive rather than negative. Each essay examines how and why decision makers come to vary in their cognitive evaluation of the acceptability of strategic risk taking.

Essay 1 draws from the approach/inhibition theory of power, to explore how power not only provides the means for CEOs to exert their risk preferences, but actually affects what the risk preferences are. Power is …