Digital Commons Network^™

Aviation Disruptions And Tourism Resilience: Policy Lessons From The Indigo 2025 Crisis For India’S Hospitality Tourism Sector, Ann Mary Varghese, Vijaya Zinnoury

ICHRIE Research Reports

The December 2025 IndiGo flight disruption crisis, characterized by widespread cancellations, delays, and capacity constraints, significantly impacted India’s tourism and hospitality sectors during peak travel periods. This research report examines the cascading effects of aviation instability on tourism demand, hotel occupancy, pricing dynamics, and regional economies. Drawing on secondary data from industry reports, news coverage, and policy analyses, the study identifies systemic vulnerabilities in India’s aviation–tourism nexus. Findings indicate that flight disruptions led to large-scale hotel cancellations, revenue losses, and demand volatility, particularly in destination-dependent regions in India such as Darjeeling, Rajasthan, and Uttarakhand. The report further evaluates industry responses, …

Tourism System Fragility: Evidence From The Middle East War, Ann Mary Varghese, Vijaya Zinnoury

ICHRIE Research Reports

The ongoing Middle East conflict (2026) has triggered one of the most significant global aviation disruptions since the COVID-19 pandemic, with widespread airspace closures, flight cancellations, rerouting, and fuel cost escalation affecting airlines worldwide. This research report examines how conflict-driven aviation instability has impacted tourism demand, hospitality performance, and destination economies.

Drawing on real-time global evidence, the study finds that the closure of critical air corridors across the Middle East, which handle approximately 15% of global air traffic, led to thousands of daily flight cancellations, mass rerouting, and substantial cost increases for airlines. These disruptions propagated across tourism systems, reducing …

Guests Attitude And Purchase Intention Towards Hotel Brand Extension, Daegeun Kim, Eun-Kyong (Cindy) Choi, Tanya Ruetzler, James Taylor

ICHRIE Research Reports

Brand extension is widely used among firms and hotels to launch new products using their parent brand name, making it important for practitioners to understand which factors influence consumers' attitude toward brand extension (ATT). This study investigated the role of consumer brand identity (CBI) in guests' attitude leading to purchase intention (PUR) for hotel vacation rentals. Findings suggest that CBI was a positive antecedent of perceived fit (PF) and tie (PT), which positively influenced ATT. Additionally, parent brand conviction and quality were identified as factors that positively influenced ATT and led to PUR. As the first study on hotel vacation …

Positioning Grand Junction As A Premier Golf Tourism Hub: A Swot Analysis, Tevfik Demirciftci, Eunkyeong Jung

ICHRIE Research Reports

This research report examines how experienced golf travelers perceive Grand Junction (GJ) as a golf tourism destination. Based on in-depth interviews, the study uses a SWOT-based approach to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and risks from the golfer’s perspective. Findings show that GJ is valued for its affordability, natural scenery, variety of courses, and extended playing season, but its potential is hindered by limited coordination among tourism stakeholders. The results suggest that stronger collaboration among golf courses and local businesses could enhance GJ’s appeal as an accessible and distinctive destination for golf tourism

Building The Next Cybersecurity Workforce: A Grades 7–12 Curriculum To Close The Cyber Talent Gap, Mohammed A. Salam, Iqbal Shareef, Rich P. Manprisio

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, cyberattacks pose increasing threats, yet a global shortage of cybersecurity and digital forensics professionals leaves industries vulnerable, similar to having too few law enforcement officers in a densely populated city. The judicial system faces rising digital crimes and fraud cases, further strained by the lack of experts to analyze and extract digital evidence. Despite high demand, millions of positions remain unfilled. This paper identifies the root causes of the cybersecurity workforce shortage and proposes a targeted solution: a curriculum for Grades 7–12 designed to foster cybersecurity awareness and interest. The methodology included a comprehensive …

Fred Luthans, Unl Business Management, Positive Organizational Behavior, Mark Griep, Fred Luthans

UNL ORCA Interview Series

Fred Luthans was awarded the ORCA in 2008. He was born in Clinton, Iowa in 1939. He earned three degrees from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, located only a few miles from Clinton. His bachelor's was in mathematics in 1961, a Master’s of Business Administration in ‘62, PhD in Management and Psychology in 1965. After serving two years as a captain in the Army at West Point, where he taught psychology and leadership, he joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as an Associate Professor of Management. He's had a remarkable career, but I'll only mention three major distinctions. His …

Human-Driven, Autonomous, Or Hybrid? The Optimal Fleet Configurations For Ride-Hailing Platforms, Wenjing Li, Yali Zhang, Jun Sun, Zhaojun Yang

Information Systems Faculty Publications

The growing commercialization of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is reshaping consumer service preferences and prompting ride-hailing platforms to redesign fleet structures that accommodate the coexistence of human-driven vehicles (HVs) and AVs. This article develops a queueing game framework that incorporates vehicle heterogeneity and consumer preference differences to systematically compare three fleet configuration strategies: the pure HV (PHV) strategy (HVs only), the pure AV (PAV) strategy (AVs only), and the hybrid strategy (both HVs and AVs). The analysis highlights how consumer mismatch losses, AV operating costs, and service rates jointly shape equilibrium outcomes. Results show that when consumer mismatch losses are moderate, …

Firms In The Flood: Is Fema Failing Small Businesses?, Lauryn Charles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

When faced with a natural disaster, small businesses remain largely outside the direct reach of federal assistance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates that up to 65% of small businesses close within two years of direct impact by a hazard event. Despite this vulnerability, existing research has focused primarily on infrastructure and household recovery, leaving the small business sector underexamined. This study is the first to link county-level IRS income data, FEMA mitigation grants, and SBA disaster records to empirically evaluate whether federal pre-disaster mitigation spending and community social resilience moderate the relationship between disasters and small business recovery …

The Impact Of Leadership Communication And Organizational Trust On Psychological Safety And Employee Voice In Healthcare Organizations, Crystal D. Smith

M.S. in Leadership

Healthcare organizations operate in increasingly complex environments where effective communication, employee engagement, and patient safety are essential to organizational success. Despite the importance of employee voice, many healthcare professionals hesitate to express concerns, report errors, or share ideas for improvement because of perceived interpersonal and organizational risks. This study examines how leadership communication and organizational trust influence psychological safety and employee voice within healthcare organizations. Using a qualitative literature review, the study synthesizes scholarly research from healthcare leadership, organizational behavior, organizational psychology, healthcare management, and patient safety. The review explores major themes, including psychological safety, leadership communication, organizational trust, employee …

Signal And Substance: Why Methodological Sophistication Fails To Guarantee Inference, Aamir Rashid, Rizwana Rasheed

Publications and Research

Despite increasing analytical sophistication, empirical research in organization studies continues to suffer from fragile inference, uneven theoretical accumulation, and contested credibility. This paper seeks to explain why these problems persist by shifting attention from authors’ methodological choices to the evaluative dynamics of peer review. Adopting a conceptual and theory-analytic approach, the paper theorizes peer review as an inferential gatekeeping system. Drawing on research design, theory evaluation, and philosophy-of-science literatures, this study develops an analytical framework to examine how evaluative routines shape what constitutes empirical rigor during the review process. The analysis identifies five recurring reviewer blind spots: inferential scope inflation, …

Auditor Trust In Artificial Intelligence, Michael L. Decker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

Accounting firms are investing in, and advocating for, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in audit procedures. This dissertation attempts to determine what factors may lead to auditors trusting an AI system. Established models of trust show that traits of the individual user, the system, and the situation all have effects on trust. Prior accounting research also indicates that professional skepticism is an important trait in auditors. This dissertation adds professional skepticism into an established trust model and uses Structural Equation Modeling to investigate auditor trust in audit evidence prepared by an AI system. My results indicate that the most …

Can Ungrading Make Sport Management Education More Practical And Engaging?, Michael A. Odio

The COSMA Journal

In this essay I take on the subject of grades in sport management education. While grades are used as a measure of success across higher education, they are an imperfect measure of achievement and learning and have major limitations in terms of student employability. The ungrading movement brings attention to the ways grades can harm learning by shifting attention away from students’ development, and instructor or peer feedback, and intrinsic motivation, while incentivizing compliance and risk-aversion. These harms directly affect what are arguably some of the most important aspects of sport management education, as when grades are the main incentive, …

Marketing Strategies To Increase Student Enrollment To Generate Revenue, Jermaine R. Mccain

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Declining student enrollment can reduce district revenue and limit a public school’s ability to sustain educational programs, staffing, and overall organizational effectiveness. Public school business leaders who lack effective marketing strategies to increase student enrollment may experience financial instability, limiting their organization’s capacity to maintain long-term operational sustainability. Grounded in consumer choice theory, the purpose of this qualitative pragmatic inquiry was to identify and explore effective marketing strategies public school business leaders use to increase student enrollment to generate district revenue. Participants were six public school business leaders in the southeastern United States. Data were collected through semistructured interviews and …

Leading Through Difference: Core Values, Neuroscience, And The Habits Of Transformative Leaders, Jaime E. Welborn

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Educational leaders are increasingly called to meet the demands of K-12 schools by managing diversity, navigating conflict, and leading change. One's core values, neuroscience, and cultural proficiency of educational practices play a very important role in how they lead organizations and interact with others. This conceptual paper explores the intersection of neuroscience, core values, and associated habits that support effective cross-cultural interactions. Drawing upon frequency count data from documents collected during professional learning activities in school organizations in New York, Missouri, and California from 2018 to 2025, empathy, open-mindedness, and communication emerged as the most frequently reported important core values …

Francis Bacon As Philosopher Of Leadership: The Essays As Manual For Values-Based Leaders, Matthew Sharpe

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This essay presents the case for Francis Bacon as what we would today term a leadership theorist avant la letter, focusing on the development of the character of leaders, faced with all the pressures of their role.  We aim to show Bacon's leadership theory at once anticipates without directly embodying contemporary leadership theories (in part 1): not only presenting a robust moral vision for leadership, as serving the public good (part 2), but differentiating characteristic kinds of “followers,” with their strengths, weaknesses, and characteristic vices, and realistically addressing how to best lead them (Part 3); and providing ten "how …

Learning Values-Based Leadership Through Practice, Jenny Guan

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This essay explores how values-based leadership can be developed through leadership practice in real-world contexts. Drawing on a Servant Leadership book project involving global contributors, it adopts the Values Clarity Model™ as a reflective lens and uses a practice-based approach informed by observation, imitation, and reflection to examine how leadership values are enacted in authentic settings. By analyzing the project in relation to what I learned in the Principles of Business Leadership course at business school, this essay reflects on how leadership values are understood, practiced, and internalized in real-world settings.

This reflection suggests that values-based leadership is not formed …

Beyond The Romance Of Leadership: Shackleton, Self-Inflicted Crisis, And The Values Of Recovery, Carl Lee Tolbert

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Two men answered to the name Ernest Shackleton. One belonged to the ice, where he was pioneering, inspirational, and heroic. The other belonged to dry land, where he was restless, indebted, and unfulfilled (Smith, 2014). The 1914 to 1916 Endurance expedition has become the most celebrated leadership case study of the past century, a status the 2022 discovery of the ship's preserved wreck has only hardened. Public and scholarly sentiment runs overwhelmingly positive. This article reads that sentiment as a late expression of what Meindl and colleagues named the Romance of Leadership, the disposition to attribute outcomes to dramatic individual …

Sustaining Purpose In Organizations: Leadership Insights From The Psalms, Hershey H. Friedman, Xianfang Zeng

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This conceptual paper examines how the Book of Psalms offers an integrative moral framework that enriches contemporary purpose-driven leadership theory. Although modern management scholarship increasingly emphasizes purpose, stakeholder orientation, and meaningful work, it often focuses on strategic articulation rather than the ethical and relational practices that sustain purpose over time. Drawing on selected Psalms as a historically influential corpus of leadership reflection, this study identifies key leadership principles and situates them within established management literature. Purpose-driven leadership rooted in ancient values builds psychologically safe environments. In these spaces, employees view their work as a meaningful calling instead of a simple …

A Person For All Seasons: The Remarkable Leadership Of Mother Cabrini And Why It Matters Today, Emilio F. Iodice

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

The history of organizational management is often written in the bold, sweeping strokes of industrial barons or the calculated maneuvers of political statesmen. Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the most sophisticated examples of global institutional scaling was orchestrated by a woman who stood barely five feet tall, held no formal political title, and suffered from debilitating physical frailty. Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917) did not merely practice charity; she engineered a global revolution of care. Over a twenty-eight-year executive career, she founded sixty-seven schools, orphanages, and hospitals across three continents, thereby transforming the social landscape of …

The Ethical Shadow: A Jungian Inquiry Into The Paradoxes Of Authentic Leadership, S. Eissa Hashemi

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This paper examines the “authenticity paradox” in leadership through the lens of Jungian psychology, moving beyond traditional behavioral frameworks to explore the depth of the leader’s psyche. Drawing on Shaw’s (2023) pillars of authenticity — self, followers, and context — the study investigates how leaders navigate conflicting existential and relational demands. By utilizing the concept of individuation, the paper analyzes the tension between the “unified self” and the “fluid self,” particularly as it relates to Mostafa Malekian’s (2021) five dimensions of self-alignment. The research highlights a “central clash” within the cultural context, where collective archetypes and cultural complexes impose idealized …

The Philosophical Aspect Of Spirituality And Entrepreneurial Leadership In The Indian Knowledge System, Nidhi Kaushal

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Entrepreneurs have an obligation to conserve their literature, art, and culture in any format because it helps to fortify their cultural heritage and memories. In the context of entrepreneurship, a useful and insightful examination of the ancient Indian knowledge framework has proposed the growth of culture-based enterprises, which reflects the magnificent integration of human values with traditional wisdom-based work ethics. The nature of today's modern entrepreneurship is an adjusted specification based on innovative context, which is different from the ancient fundamental policies and practices. This study introduces cultural entrepreneurship and its originality through the traditional and indigenous art and skill …

Moral Identity, Joseph P. Hester

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Foundationally, our communal awareness offers a complexity of meaning, but don’t be deterred, it also provides an avenue for understanding ethics, suggesting a definition of “humanity” as “community.”

The Character Fractal: A Theory Of Virtue Replication In Organizations, Kevin Davis, Scott Kozlak, Matthew M. Orlowsky, David Levy

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

Organizational ethics has long been treated as an individual problem requiring individual solutions: the right traits, the right training, the right people in the right roles. This paper argues that framing is fundamentally insufficient. While character and virtue ultimately reside in persons, character development within organizations emerges through recursive ethical interactions shaped by incentives, narratives, feedback loops, and habituation structures cultivated by systems leaders. It replicates, or fails to, across every scale of human interaction, from the unobserved micro-decision of a single employee to the macro-level architecture of executive leadership. Drawing on Mandelbrot's fractal geometry, Lorenz's chaos theory, Kauffman's complexity …

From Betrayal To Blessing: Leadership Lessons From The Joseph Narrative, Hershey H. Friedman, Nakato Hirakubo

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This paper examines the enduring relevance of the biblical Joseph narrative as a study of human nature and leadership. Key themes include the transformative power of forgiveness and the intricate interplay between family dynamics and divine providence. While Joseph's moral integrity remains a central focus, the narrative also offers a sobering lesson in governance: his consolidation of land and wealth under Pharaoh created the very centralized power structure that eventually enabled the enslavement of his descendants. The narrative demonstrates how emotional vulnerability and tears serve as catalysts for healing, while Judah's transformation from complicity in betrayal to courageous advocacy exemplifies …

The Culture Metaphor: A Simple Guide To Creating Healthier Organizations, Matthew I. Horner, T. Daniel White, Rylan M. Charlton, Daphne Ds Deporres

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

In this paper, culture is conceptualized as a living system where every organizational decision and interpersonal interaction is a source of nourishment. Employing this metaphor, a leader’s visible actions, such as policy and resource decisions, serve as macronutrients, while exchanges between organizational members, such as email correspondence and meeting behavior, act as micronutrients that feed culture. An organization’s cultural health, therefore, depends on a balanced diet in which behaviors align with stated values. Leaders, as chief dietitians, identify and resolve deficiencies to build trust, enhance well-being, and improve performance. Actionable strategies for diagnosing and feeding culture are provided to help …

Ethics: The Connective Tissue Of Human Life, Joseph P. Hester

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

America needs to take a deep breath and reconsider the purposes of democracy, but more, infuse some modicum of commonsense into political decision-making. How many unnecessary wars and homeland killings must we endure and how many lies must we listen to as Trump filibusters his way onto the world’s stage? Seeking lucidity in Trump’s actions may be a stretch and even many of his supporters are asking for explanations, values’ consistency, and Constitutional clarity. I could go on, but this comment sets the tone for this editorial comment.

Summer/Fall 2026

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

No abstract provided.

Drop By Drop: An Experiential Water Waste Exercise, Rachel Dolechek Dba, Gregory Weisenborn

Applied Business Faculty Publications

Implementing a water-use experiential exercise in business courses reinforces student learning outcomes associated with managing both traditional business wastes and those wastes associated with social or environmental impact and responsibility. In this exercise, students are challenged to reflect on their own sustainability attitudes and behaviors by measuring their wasted water. The exercise is adaptable to include other business learning outcomes and is flexible for a variety of high-level sustainability frameworks. It provides an approachable opportunity to discuss social and environmental waste challenges and supports synergy to discuss multiple sustainability metrics associated with the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals, corporate social …

Mental Health Self-Perceptions And Resource Utilization In Undergraduate Students At Binghamton University, Nicole J. Dreznin, Sarah Marcus

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Undergraduate students face increasing rates of mental health challenges, however discrepancies in mental health literacy and utilization of resources may exist across student populations. This study examined the perceptions of mental health in undergraduate students at Binghamton University and if they differed among STEM vs non-STEM, man vs. women, and first-generation vs. continuing generation undergraduate students. A 20-question survey, containing 5 demographic questions and 15 mental health related questions was distributed through Qualtrics to 9 undergraduate classes. The available response choices were based on the Likert scale. A total of 1266 students participated.  Chi square tests of independence were done …

The Institutional Production Of Ethical War Across Modern Conflict, Katerina Udov

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

This paper argues that modern warfare operates through an ethical infrastructure that enables, rather than restrains, the use of violence. Contrary to the common assumption that moral frameworks such as Just War Theory function as safeguards against harm, the historical record shows that ethical language, humanitarian rhetoric, and democratic narratives serve as mechanisms to legitimize intervention, manufacture consent, and naturalize civilian suffering. Through case studies including Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, U.S.-backed coups in Latin America, and French intervention in Mali, the paper traces how political leaders, media institutions, and corporate actors frame war as a moral necessity while pursuing strategic and …