Business Commons^™

Job Satisfaction Determinants: A Study Across 48 Nations, Jeanine K. Andreassi, Leanna Lawter, Martin Brockerhoff, Peter Rutigliano

WCBT Faculty Publications

This paper examines the drivers of job satisfaction across four cultural regions—Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America. Using Hofstede’s theory, determinants were used to predict job satisfaction for each region and then compared to determine significant differences. Data was collected from a proprietary industry survey on employee work attitudes. The sample consisted of over 70,000 employees from 4 large multinational organizations. Data was analyzed using regression analysis and comparison testing across models. There are significant relationships between job characteristics and job satisfaction across all regions of the world, with a sense of achievement universally the most important driver. Although …

What Products Can Benefit From African American Advertising Appeals? The Moderating Role Of Product Involvement, Ivonne M. Torres, Cuauhtémoc Luna-Nevarez

WCBT Faculty Publications

With a significant spending power, the African American segment is one of the most lucrative, interesting, and complex targets for national and local advertisers. As this consumer segment continues to grow in importance, marketers need to focus on what types of products could benefit from African American-targeted advertising. Our research studies show African Americans respond to advertising targeted to them and their responses are moderated by ethnic identification and product involvement. Consistent with both theoretical frameworks, distinctiveness theory and ethnic identification theory, we found that identified African Americans prefer African American models especially when advertising low-involvement products.

Smiles As Signals Of Lower Status In Football Players And Fashion Models: Evidence That Smiles Are Associated With Lower Dominance And Lower Prestige, Timothy Ketelaar, Bryan L. Koenig, Daniel Gambacorta, Igor Dolgov, Daniel Hor, Jennifer Zarzoza, Cuauhtémoc Luna-Nevarez, Micki Klungle, Lee Wells

WCBT Faculty Publications

Across four studies, the current paper demonstrates that smiles are associated with lower social status. Moreover, the association between smiles and lower status appears in the psychology of observers and generalizes across two forms of status: prestige and dominance. In the first study, faces of fashion models representing less prestigious apparel brands were found to be more similar to a canonical smile display than the faces of models representing more prestigious apparel brands. In a second study, after being experimentally primed with either high or low prestige fashion narratives, participants in the low prestige condition were more likely to perceive …

Are Subcompact Cars Driving Consumers Towards Sustainable Transport, Enda Mcgovern

WCBT Faculty Publications

Access to private transport is a critical component of the modern industrialized world but it is also recognized as a major source of carbon dioxide emissions, one of the global warming gases contributing to climate change. This paper looks at increased use of subcompact cars as a key component in developing a sustainable transport policy. These cars benefit the environment by emitting reduced levels of carbon emissions due to their smaller engines. This empirical research explores the opinions of Smart car owners in a focus group study. Smart car owners are primarily focused on reducing their costs due to difficult …

Growth Of Women-Owned Businesses: The Effects Of Intangible Resources And Social Competence, Crystal X. Jiang, Monica A. Zimmerman, Chun (Grace) Guo

WCBT Faculty Publications

Previous research suggests that women entrepreneurs face many challenges in starting and growing a business. In this study, we examine the relationship of intangible resources and the growth of women-owned businesses. We focus on four intangible resources: social-, human-, and reputational capital, as well as social competence. Using case studies of women entrepreneurs, we found that a woman entrepreneur’s social-, human-, and reputational capital are related to the growth of her business. We alsofound that social competence moderates the social-, human-, and reputational capital – growth relationship in women entrepreneurs.

‘Going Through The Mist’: Early Career Transitions Of Chinese Millennial Returnees, Emily T. Porschitz, Chun (Grace) Guo, José Alves

WCBT Faculty Publications

Over the past decade management practitioners have sought to understand the career expectations of the Millennial generation - those born between 1979 and 1994 (Myers and Sadaghiani, 2010) - who are rapidly becoming a dominant force in the global economy. As workers from the Baby Boomer generation move towards retirement, organization leaders are becoming more interested in understanding how to attract and retain millennial employees most effectively (Walmsley, 2007). A large body of research is devoted to uncovering the career expectations of millennial workers, so that practitioners can better understand them. Findings suggest Millennial have high expectations regarding career success …

Essays On The Effect Of Excess Compensation And Governance Changes On Firm Value, Mustafa A. Dah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays on the effect of excess compensation and corporate governance changes on the firm’s performance. The first paper utilizes a cost minimization stochastic frontier approach to investigate the efficiency of director total compensation. Our findings suggest that board members are over compensated. We show that, on average, the director actual compensation level is above the efficient compensation level by around 63%. Our results suggest that an increase in director excess compensation decreases the likelihood of CEO turnover, reduces the turnover-performance sensitivity, and increases managerial entrenchment. Thus, the surplus in director compensation is directly associated with …

The Influence Of An Annual Meeting On The Sense Of Community Of Association Members, Their Satisfaction, And Future Intentions, Jee Yeon Hahm

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Over the past decade, many studies have provided some understanding on what influences association members‟ decision to attend a meeting; however, more systematic and theoretical research is necessary. The decision making process of attendees is a complicated human behavior practice. The major contribution of this study is adopting the sense of community (SOC) model from psychology to gain a better understanding of the attendee behavior. By doing so, this study will add a theoretical foundation to the existing research in the meeting industry. Also, this study will contribute to the SOC research in psychology by applying the concept to a …

How Does Jay-Customer Affect Employee Job Stress And Job Satisfaction?, Gawon Kim

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Guest-contact employees interact with various types of customers, and they are often exposed to stressful conditions caused by the deviant, or jay-customers. The purpose of this study is to examine how jay-customer behaviors (customer incivility and customer aggression) affect employees’ job stress, and consequently, job satisfaction. Surveys of 210 participants, currently working as guest-contact employees in the hospitality industry, were analyzed for the study. The results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses show a positive relationship between the experience of customer incivility and employees’ job stress. Additionally, the results indicate a full mediation effect of employees’ job stress on the relationship …

Nutritionally Focused Drive-Thru Menus And The Impact On Consumer Preferences: A Study Of The Restaurant Industry, Meschelle M. Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

More than one-third of the U.S. citizens (over 70 million people) and 16% of children are classified as obese and are at risk of many diseases including heart disease. Research indicates that 65% of Americans over the age of twenty years old are considered overweight. To address this public health issue, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration has proposed new nutritional guidelines for restaurant menus. Thus, the current study investigated the preferences of quick service restaurant (QSR) industry consumers with reference to the newly proposed U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations. This study includes development and redesigning of drive thru …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of The Pga's Professional Gold Management (Pgm) Program, David Lane Smiley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the relationships between knowledge, skills, ability, self-efficacy, and experiential learning and performance expectations and satisfaction. The purpose of this study was threefold. First, the study attempted to understand the motivators for student motivation to recommend the program. Second, the study looked at the contribution of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators for retention and positive word-of-mouth. Further, the research evaluated the relationship of the curriculum in influencing the student’s performance and satisfaction. The study sample consisted of 676 undergraduate students attending one of six PGA Professional Golf management programs in the spring of 2011. The survey instrument was …

A Systematic Method For Discovering Effective Patterns Of Virtual Project Management, Deepak Khazanchi, Ilze Zigurs

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

The effective management of virtual projects within global organizations is an inherently collaborative activity as well as an increasingly critical issue. The concept of patterns provides a useful theoretical framework by which we can study the design of effective practices for the management of virtual projects. However, a number of significant gaps exist in our knowledge of this area and one of the most important is the need for a systematic method for discovering effective patterns. We propose such a systematic method and provide a detailed example of the use of our proposed pattern discovery method.

Unifying Pim Research: Fostering A Connection Between Descriptive Pim Studies And Prescriptive Outcomes, Anne R. Diekama

Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Faculty Publications

Descriptive Personal Information Management (PIM) studies inform us about PIM behavior and their findings should guide the design and development of PIM tools to support the behavior under study. Unfortunately, judging from the literature, descriptive studies do not always provide useful recommendations and PIM tool research is often carried out separately. This paper discusses what appears to be a possible research dichotomy and ways to bring the research back together. Three solutions are suggested: 1) PIM workshops where both types of studies are presented and researchers meet should be important venues for dissemination of results, cross-fertilization between different research areas, …

Cycles Of Electronic Health Records Adaptation By Physicians: How Do The Positive And Negative Experience With The Ehr System Affect Physicians' Ehr Adaptation Process?, Cherie Noteboom, Dhundy Bastola, Sajda Qureshi

Faculty Research & Publications

The integration of EHR in IT infrastructures supporting organizations enable improved access and recording of patient data, enhanced ability to make improved decisions, improved quality and reduced errors in patient care. Despite these benefits, there are mixed results as to the use of EHR. The literature suggests that the reasons for the limited use relate to policy, financial and usability considerations, but it does not provide an understanding of reasons for physicians’ limited interaction and adaptation of EHR.

Following an analysis of qualitative data, collected in a case study at a hospital using interviews, this research explains how physicians interact …

Shaken Not Stirred – The Evolution Of The Cocktail Shaker, James Peter Murphy

Conference papers

The paper 'Shaken not Stirred – The Evolution of the Cocktail Shaker' was presented at the 1st Dublin Gastronomic Symposium which was held at the DIT, College of Arts & Tourism in 2012.

The Role Of Accounting Conservatism In Firms' Financial Decisions, Jimmy Kiat Bee Lee

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper investigates whether financial reporting conservatism is related to firms’ financial flexibility and their access to capital. If conservatism facilitates monitoring and governance by capital providers, they should be more willing to extend financing and increase firms’ access to capital. However, because conservatism leads to systematic understatement of net worth and weakens the appearance of firms’ balance sheet strength, it could also reduce firms’ access to capital. This study tests these two opposing views of the relationship between conservatism and firms’ financial flexibility. Results indicate that firms with greater reporting conservatism exhibit less flexibility in their corporate liquidity management, …

Investor Competition Over Information And The Pricing Of Information Asymmetry, Brian K. Atkins, Jeffrey Ng, Rodrigo Verdi

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Whether the information environment affects the cost of capital is a fundamental question in accounting and finance research. Relying on theories about competition between informed investors as well as the pricing of information asymmetry, we hypothesize a cross-sectional variation in the pricing of information asymmetry that is conditional on competition. We develop and validate empirical proxies for competition using the number and concentration of institutional investor ownership. Using these proxies, we find a lower pricing of information asymmetry when there is more competition. Overall, our results suggest that competition between informed investors has an important effect on how the information …

Repairing Trust With Individuals Vs. Groups, Peter H. Kim, Cecily D. Cooper, Kurt T. Dirks, Donald L. Ferrin

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study incorporates insights from research on group decision-making and trust repair to investigate the differences that arise when alleged transgressors attempt to regain the trust of groups as compared to individuals. Results indicate that repairing trust is generally more difficult with groups than individuals, and both groups and individuals were less trusting when trustees denied culpability (rather than apologized) for a competence-based violation or apologized (rather than denied culpability) for an integrity-based violation. However, the interaction of violation-type and violation-response also ultimately affected the relative difficulty of repairing trust with groups vs. individuals, with the greater harshness of groups …

An Analytical And Empirical Measure Of The Degree Of Conditional Conservatism, Dan Segal, Jeffrey L. Callen

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

There is a profound gap between models of accounting conservatism and the proxies for conditional conservatism currently used by the empirical literature. Not one of the proxies employed by the empirical literature to date obtains from a rigorous definition of conditional conservatism. In contrast, this study defines conditional conservatism in terms of truncated distributions and derives analytically a nonlinear relation between revisions to returns and earnings news for the conservative firm. This nonlinear relation is shown to be mathematically equivalent to two linear relations conditioned on the firm's degree of conservatism. From these relations, we derive a model-based proxy of …

The Effects Of Political Connections On The Level And Value Of Cash Holdings: International Evidence, Yuanto Kusnadi, K.C. John Wei

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In this paper, we examine the role of political connections on corporate liquidity policies and their consequences in an international setting. We find that managers of politically connected firms have a tendency to hoard more cash than their non-connected counterparts. Moreover, presence of political connections reduces the value of cash holdings. Further analysis reveals that our main findings are more pronounced for firms in emerging markets as well as for firms in countries with weak legal protection of investors and high levels of corruption. Overall, our empirical results corroborate previous findings on the agency cost explanation for corporate cash holdings.