Business Commons^™

Transgender And Gender Non-Conforming (Tgnc) Leaders And Leadership, Galen J. Talis

Libraries

The author presents highlights from a paper accepted at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting. A 12-minute videorecording is also available.
Gender and leadership research has traditionally employed a binary framework, overlooking the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) leaders and forcing leaders of all genders and intersectional identities into a dichotomous frame. This paper reviewed interdisciplinary literature using a robust search strategy in three academic databases and Google Scholar, as well as across eight leadership studies journals. Sixteen sources involving 440 leaders’ experiences were found. The author conducted a thematic analysis to explore how TGNC leaders’ experiences challenge …

An Overview Of Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Searching For Balance Between The Positive And Negative Effects, Courtney K. Fusting

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) is the behavior of taking on extra roles in the workplace outside of one’s explicit duties. There are many reasons why one may be motivated to aid his/her organization in this way. Motivation may come through one’s personal values towards volunteerism, desire to build social capital, increase in self-esteem and flow, or even due to the commonality of organizational citizenship behavior among the workplace culture. Contributing to one’s workplace through OCB has the potential to positively impact an individual. However, taking on too many extra roles in the workplace can become detrimental. Role overload, stress, and …

Where The Rainbow Ends: The Hidden Humanitarian Crisis For Members Of The Lgbtqia+ Community In International Business, John R. Krendel

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Before pursuing an international career, members of the LGBTQIA+ community must be aware of the hardship that may be exacerbated by living and working abroad. This study addresses the trends in laws, including employment and anti-discrimination laws, that provide and restrict certain rights of members of the LGBTQIA+ community in eight countries. These nations, both progressive and discriminatory, include the United States, England, Switzerland, Germany, Taiwan, China, the Philippines and Kazakhstan. Eight LGBTQIA+ business professionals spoke on their experiences living and working in each of these countries and provided advice to members of the community wishing to pursue an international …

Think Outside And Inside The Box:The Role Of Dual-Pathway Divergent Thinking In Creative Idea Generation, David Peterson, Marshall Pattie

Department of Management - Faculty Scholarship

The Dual Pathway to Creativity Model theorizes that creative performance arises from cognitive flexibility, persistence, or a combination of the two. Existing research has only examined these pathways independently, limiting our understanding of the model and of how people generate ideas. We extend the DPCM model by predicting that creative output arises from the generation of response sets containing both highly related (persistence pathway) and unrelated (flexibility) ideas, an idea generation strategy we call Dual Pathway Divergent Thinking (DPDT). In a study of 147 subjects, we propose a serial mediation model: people higher in Openness to Ideas use DPDT as …

Expanding Business To Harrisonburg, Graham Maguire

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This study will attempt to determine whether Harrisonburg is a viable option for expanded retail options. Fifteen stores will be examined that have performed well throughout the United States over the past several years based on several different metrics. Data used to compared these stores will be collected via a survey distributed to James Madison University students and public census data. Additionally, several stores that are already in operation in Harrisonburg will be assessed to serve as a comparison group. By the end of this study, I will offer recommendations on which of the 15 stores in the study would …

An Analysis Of Tourism’S Impact On Our Modern World And Possible Solutions To Creating Sustainable Tourism Management, Morgan Hack

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

→ This is an in-depth analysis of how tourism impacts communities around the world, looking at four specific case studies, taking into account each nation’s human development index (HDI), population, location, and the number of tourists traveling to these destinations each year. The research concentrates on the strengths and weaknesses of each city’s tourist management practices, and then there are proposed solutions based on their needs and available resources. When talking about sustainable tourism, it is essential to understand it in terms of future maintainability. Sustainable tourism is defined as “tourism that takes full account of its current and future …

A Cross-Cultural Examination Of The Effect Of Employer Support On Employee Productivity, Shawn Tuman, Haley Lipton

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The purpose of this creative, collaborative, capstone project is to conduct a cross-cultural examination of the effect of employer support on employee productivity by compiling, examining, and synthesizing conclusions from existing research. In a world of growing globalization and technological innovation, the speed of productivity is often the cornerstone that differentiates successful businesses from unsuccessful businesses, providing a competitive advantage to the quick while the others fall behind. Often this increased level of efficiency comes at a cost beyond the price of the product and the salary of employees, a deeper, psychological cost. By reviewing research focused in the United …

Cultural Influences On Nonprofit Servant Leadership, Sungil Chung

Dissertations, 2014-2019

This research explores national and cultural differences in nonprofit leadership. Despite the global expansion of nonprofit organizations, limited research is found in the literature that studies national and cultural differences in nonprofit leadership specifically. This research is designed in two phases to address the overall research question of whether national cultures influence servant leadership in nonprofits. The first phase is a comparison study between U.S. nonprofit employees and South Korean nonprofit employees to examine if there are national differences on people’s preferences for nonprofit leadership. The second phase explores the relationship between Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions (i.e. power distance, individualism …

Revitalizing Classical Music Interest And Concert Attendance: Why Today's Youth Are Deterred From Classical Music And Why Symphony Orchestras And Businesses Need To Get Involved, Caroline M. Clouse

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This paper seeks to explore the divide between classical music institutions and the youth of today. Interest in classical music is on a steady decline among Millennials and this paper provides a discourse on some of the prevailing reasonings behind the deterrents to classical music concert attendance. German studies concerning the current state of classical music and it's standing among youth that previously have never been translated are described within, so that this important information may be disseminated. Lastly, there is a discussion on the importance of innovative marketing techniques and concert offerings as well as how and why today's …

Leading From The Center Out: The Joint Library Services Leadership Team At James Madison University, K.T. L. Vaughan, Kristen S. Shuyler, Kelly N. Miller-Martin, Erika Peterson

Libraries

In a system with multiple service points, how can leadership work together to keep the library as a whole relevant and central to students? James Madison University Libraries created the Joint Library Services Leadership Team, which works outside traditional departmental silos to provide coherent, consistent, and collaborative services regardless of location.

Three major service points of James Madison University Libraries, the two main library circulation/reference departments and the media resources center, have historically been both physically and philosophically separate from each other. Although the departments shared common goals of providing excellent student learning-focused services, they did not systematically work together …

Customer Complaint Management Systems (Ccms) In A Food Processing Industry, Maggie A. Macleish

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Abstract

The food processing industry must meet customers’ highest quality expectations at the lowest cost. I partnered with Nestlé’s pizza facility in Little Chute, WI, to improve the current customer complaint approach of the quality department, which aimed to improve product quality. To improve the total quality of the system, this project established a defensive method of addressing customer complaints. Some strategies used to improve the current Customer Complaint Management System (CCMS) include Quality Functional Deployment (QFD), fuzzy logic, Kano’s methods, Voice of the customer (VOC) and Go-See-Think-Do (GSTD). These strategies are all related, but have not previously been used …

No More Design By Committee: Strategies For Building Lean Mean Web Project Teams, Jennifer A. Keach, Jody C. Fagan

Libraries

Whether you are implementing a virtual reference service or redesigning the library website, today’s web projects require organizational buy-in and web skill. Even when working well, standing committees don’t always have the skills needed to create a successful website, clear authority, and resources to complete the job. This program and paper presents research study findings about web committees and teams, and proposes an alternate strategy for developing project-focused, skill-driven teams to manage your library’s next web project.

Project Dynamics: An Analysis Of The Purpose And Value Of System Dynamics Applied To Information Technology Project Management, Timothy Charles Delobe

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Project failure in the Information Technology (IT) sector is well documented in the literature; project managers miss their target budgets and schedules more than twice as often as they meet them. Traditional project management methodologies initially developed for the large-scale engineering projects of the 1950’s, while still relevant and useful, are reductionist in nature and are therefore missing a systems approach that concentrates on knowledge creation before, during and after a project. The research presented herein will demonstrate the role of system dynamics in augmenting a project’s control processes, as well as the skill set used by the project manager. …