Business Commons^™

Looking In The Mirror: Including The Reflected Best Self Exercise In Management Curricula To Increase Students’ Interview Self-Efficacy, Jennifer Robertson, Noelle Baird, Mathew Mclarnon

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Students often choose to pursue a business major during their post-secondary education to increase their chances of securing employment post-graduation. However, evidence suggests that many recent business degree graduates struggle with underemployment, highlighting the importance of examining how post-secondary institutions can better prepare students for the transition to work. In the current study, we investigated how including a personal strengths-driven intervention, the Reflected Best Self Exercise (RBSE), in management curricula may help better prepare students for securing employment by increasing students’ confidence in their ability to succeed in an employment interview (i.e., by enhancing interview self-efficacy). Using a pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental …

Addressing The Lack Of Digital Literacy Learning At A Kuwaiti Higher Education Institution, Mariam Sarhan Alshammari

The Dissertation-in-Practice at Western University

This Organizational Improvement Plan is an effort to address the lack of digital literacy learning at a Kuwaiti higher education institution. Digital literacy, and by extension, digital citizenship are critical skills to have in today’s world. Global College of Kuwait (GCK, anonymized) is a relatively new college in the region that is struggling to retain students, particularly after COVID highlighted the college’s lack of experience/preparedness with digital literacy. To tackle the problem, a reform committee was formed and tasked with finding a feasible solution to improve digital literacy learning in the college’s Foundation Program. A Foundation Program is a preparatory …

Engaging Health Professionals Toward The Redevelopment Of A Continuing Competence Program, Salima Thawer

The Dissertation-in-Practice at Western University

Continuing competence is the combination of knowledge, skills, abilities, and judgment of a professional, applied safely and ethically to their practice of the profession. Under the Health Professions Act in Alberta, health regulatory colleges must oversee the continuing competence of their registrants, ensuring they act in the public’s best interest. At Health Professionals Regulatory College (HPRC), over 3500 registrants are accountable to its continuing competence program (CCP). The current CCP, in place for over 15 years, has not integrated collection and analysis of diversity data that may influence individual competence, nor has it evolved with trends toward right-touch regulation that …

Employees’ Response To Corporate Greenwashing, Jennifer Robertson, Wren A. Montgomery, Timur Ozbilir

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Research on corporate greenwashing has expanded rapidly in recent years. At the same time, emerging studies in related literatures have found that employees are seeking out firms that are social and environmental leaders, and employee activism within firms is growing. However, the effect of firms’ exaggeration and misrepresentation of environmental claims, or greenwashing, on their own employees has been overlooked. Accordingly, we investigate greenwashing from an organizational psychology lens, exploring the impact it can have on employees, and whether these effects differ for different types of employees. Using data collected at three separate time points from a sample of employees …

The Effect Of Innovation Performance On The Pricing In Private Placement, Tong Liu

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

We propose a research project examining the effect of firms’ innovation performance in the pricing of private equity placements, namely private investments in public equity (PIPEs). We investigate whether firms’ previous innovation outputs have been considered in the PIPE issuance. Innovative activities are important for firms to gain strategic advantage against their competitors. Firms with innovative opportunities frequently lack capital. However, financing innovation tends to be more difficult due to the uncertainty and information asymmetry (Acharya and Xu, 2017). Compared to public firms, private firms have the limitations to access the broader investor pool and higher cost of capital. Unlike …

Effects Of Perceived Scarcity On Covid-19 Consumer Stimulus Spending: The Roles Of Ontological Insecurity And Mutability In Predicting Prosocial Outcomes, R. Bret Leary, Rhiannon Macdonnell Mesler, Bonnie Simpson, Matthew D. Meng, William Montford

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

In 2021, the United States government provided a third Economic Impact Payment (EIP) for those designated as experiencing greater need due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With a particular focus on scarcity and ontological insecurity, we collected time-separated data prior to, and following, the third EIP to examine how these variables shape consumer allocation of stimulus funds. We find that scarcity is positively associated with feelings of ontological insecurity, which, interestingly, correlates to a greater allocation of stimulus funds towards charitable giving. We further find evidence that mutability moderates the relationship between ontological insecurity and allocations to charitable giving. In other …

Statistical Applications To The Management Of Intensive Care And Step-Down Units, Yawo Mamoua Kobara

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis proposes three contributing manuscripts related to patient flow management, server decision-making, and ventilation time in the intensive care and step-down units system.

First, a Markov decision process (MDP) model with a Monte Carlo simulation was performed to compare two patient flow policies: prioritizing premature step-down and prioritizing rejection of patients when the intensive care unit is congested. The optimal decisions were obtained under the two strategies. The simulation results based on these optimal decisions show that a premature step-down strategy contributes to higher congestion downstream. Counter-intuitively, premature step-down should be discouraged, and patient rejection or divergence actions should …

Systematizing Dark Personality Traits Within Broader Models Of Personality, Radosław Rogoza, Christopher Marcin Kowalski, Donald H. Saklofske, Julie Aitken Schermer

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Previous research has attempted to derive arguments for the categorization of traits as ‘dark’ without theoretical justification or rationalizations. We begin with a description of current conceptualizations of the darkness of traits followed by a new perspective on the catalogue of dark personality traits and the theoretical boundaries of different shades of darkness within the broader personality structure. Finally, we address the redundancy problem observed within the field on dark personality traits. Our analyses are offered as a guide to future research towards a more parsimonious and useful set of criteria (a “compass” of sorts) for inclusion within the “dark” …

Identity Salience Moderates The Effect Of Social Dominance Orientation On Covid-19 ‘Rule Bending’, Rhiannon Macdonnell, Bonnie Simpson, Jennifer Chernishenko, Shreya Jain

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Amidst the economic, political, and social turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting responses to government mandated and recommended mitigation strategies have posed many challenges for governments as they seek to persuade individuals to adhere to prevention guidelines. Much research has subsequently examined the tendency of individuals to either follow (or not) such guidelines, and yet a ‘grey area’ also exists wherein many rules are subject to individual interpretation. In a large study of Canadians (N =1032, Mage =34.39, 52% female; collected April 6, 2020), we examine how social dominance orientation (SDO) as an individual difference predicts individual propensity to …

Perspectives On Firm Strategies In The Non-Market Environment, Vittal Kartik Rao

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The non-market environment, which includes “the rules of the game” that govern economic interactions in the market, plays a central role in the ability of firms to create economic value and to sustain competitive advantage. This dissertation focuses on firms’ interactions with different elements of the non-market environment and is comprised of three essays.

Essay 1 examines the conditions under which firms reach agreements with environmental activists in regulatory agency proceedings to mutually settle disputes. The chapter argues that actions of firms will be dictated by the features of the regulatory decision-making process and the heterogeneity in the attributes of …

Three Essays On Corporate Sustainability Language, Nahyun Kim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation explores how public firms employ language in their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports to lengthen the horizons of their strategic decisions. The three essays included in my dissertation introduce and investigate the pursuit of temporal equilibrium in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis. Specifically, I compare the emphasis placed on the short versus long- future in the annual sustainability reports of public firms and derive three explanations for the increased emphasis of long-termism.

In Essay 1 (Chapter 2), I describe how firms seek and find temporal equilibrium after the Financial Crisis. Using topic modeling, I linguistically and …

Predicting Pro-Environmental Values And Behaviors With The Supernumerary Personality Inventory And Hope, Bonnie Simpson, Meghan Maguire, Julie Aitken Schermer

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This research examinesthe role ofpersonality traits beyond the Five-Factor Model (FFM) frameworkin predicting pro-environmental values and behaviors. A sample of 410participants completed personality scalesand reported both their environmental values and the extent to which they had engaged in a series of pro-environmental behaviors in the preceding 24 hours. Small positive correlations were found between environmental values and behaviors with integrityand femininityand negative correlations with religiosity. Overall, the results show limited evidence supporting the personality dimensions measured in predicting pro-environmentalvalues and behaviors.Implications of the findings are discussed.

The State Of Ohio’S Auditors, The Enumeration Of Population And The Project Of Eugenics, Moe Faroukh

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This research focuses on how state auditors and superintendents in the State of Ohio participated in the Enumeration process between 1800 and the late 1900s. It focuses around the unexpected nature of auditors carrying out this work. Normally, auditors would review financial statements not count people in such questionable circumstances. The project is essentially trying to piece together from fragmentary historical documents to understand as much as possible why and how these activities were carried out and the role of auditor’s in these processes.

Antecedents And Consequences Of Hospitals’ Responses To Institutions: Three Contemporary Essays Concerning Ontario Reforms, Gabriel J. A. Huppé

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation contributes new insights on the antecedents and consequences of hospitals’ responses to institutions. It consists in three essays that collectively explore why and how hospitals balance their technical requirement of providing high-quality and affordable healthcare with an evolving constellation of institutional demands. The collective findings provide a contemporary perspective on the reconditioning of decoupling as a multi-form process, and a nuanced conception of factors affecting the institutionalization and deinstitutionalization of practices within hospitals.

Extending research on institutional leadership, Essay 1 examines hospitals’ approaches to an external mandate for energy conservation and climate mitigation. Through a qualitative investigation, it …

How Affective Displaysand Self-Construal Impact Consumers’ Generosity, Rhiannon Macdonnell, Bonnie Simpson

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Nonprofit brands vary widely in their positioning to consumers, ranging from crisis and desperation, to joy and optimism.The literature, however, provides limiteddirection for the many nonprofit organizations that seek to align their brand with positive emotions. Herein, we examine the relationship between affective displays (sad vs. happy) portrayed in charitable advertisements and consumer self-construal in shaping consumer generosity.We employ one field study (study 1) and one lab experiment (study 2), using different charitable causes (i.e., Kiva.org[study 1] and a fictitious children’s cancer charity [study 2]) and currencies (i.e., lending money [study 1] and volunteering time [study 2]).Taken together, we find …

Lean Supply Management In The Canadian Agri-Food Sector, Fernando Naranjo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines a novel conceptualization and operationalization of the lean supply management (LSM) construct and investigates its practical relevance for the Canadian agri-food sector. The thesis consists of three integrated essays, intended to advance the LSM scholarly theorization and managerial understanding. The first essay offers a systematic literature review to gain a better comprehension of the current state of research on LSM regarding its definition, practices, and frameworks, as well as context and contingencies related to its implementation. The second essay offers a conceptual development of the LSM construct presenting a new definition and a new contextual contingent model …

Organizing And Sustainable Development Between The Local And Global: The Case Of A Tibetan Enterprise, Haitao Yu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I investigate how place and space guide organizations towards sustainable development. The current paradigm for business organizing seeks economic efficiency, whereas a sustainable development paradigm requires businesses to accommodate the ecological, social, and economic principles between the local and global. Yet, as organizations are increasingly globalizing and virtualizing, they are becoming increasingly placeless. The loss of local connection to place is one of the primary reasons sustainable development is so elusive.

I am motivated to understand better organizations' role between the local and global on sustainable development. To answer the question, I collected qualitative data through conducting …

Entrepreneurial Action By Métis And First Nations Entrepreneurs In Saskatchewan: Similarities And Differences With Established Notions Of Entrepreneurial Action, Ketan Goswami

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Entrepreneurial actions, i.e., activities like hiring, marketing, financing, hustling (even bribing!), etc., requisite for building small businesses are less studied than antecedent opportunity recognition processes. The two most common form of contexts in which entrepreneurial actions are studied are opportunity-driven (Silicon-Valley type) and necessity-driven (poverty contexts). While there is a fair amount of research on community-based and band-driven Indigenous entrepreneurship, less is known about entrepreneurial actions by individual self-employed Métis and First Nations entrepreneurs in Canada/ Turtle Island. Métis and First Nations entrepreneurs face a differential set of obstacles in their pursuit for economic self-determination compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts. …

Analyst Talent, Information, And Investment Strategies, Zhichuan Li, Stephen R. Foerster, Zhenyang Tang, Chongyu Dang

Business Publications

Analyst talent, rather than the number of analysts following a firm, matters most to investors. We find: 1) Analysts with greater “natural” forecasting talent—controlling for experience, brokerage affiliation, and task complexity—contribute relatively more firm-specific rather than industry or market information; 2) Earnings forecasts by low-talent analysts may lead to substantial mispricing; 3) When earnings surprises are large, post-earnings-announcement drift is more prominent among firms covered by low-talent analysts; 4) Firms with low-talent analysts have significantly more insider trading prior to positive earnings news; and 5) Investing following insider trading is more profitable in stocks followed by low-talent analysts.

Predicting Donation Behaviour With The Supernumerary Personality Inventory, Christopher M. Kowalski, Bonnie Simpson, Julie Schermer

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

The present study aimed to broaden the investigation of personality traits and donation behaviour beyond the Five-Factor Model (FFM) framework. A sample of 506 participants completed the Supernumerary Personality Inventory (Paunonen, 2002), reported both their frequency of charitable giving and, given the option to donate potential lottery winnings to a charitable cause, the amount that they would donate. Religiosity was moderately positively correlated with charitable frequency, while integrity was weakly positively correlated with donation amount. Manipulativeness and egotism were weakly negatively correlated with donation amount. Overall, the results show limited evidence for the relevance of Supernumerary Personality Inventory personality traits …

A Truly Magical Summer: My Experiential Learning Credit With The Walt Disney World Cultural Exchange Program, Sierra Joseph

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

For my SASAH experiential learning credit, I participated in the Culture Exchange Program (CEP) at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. This program invites international post-secondary education students to work at Disney during their summer break. I worked as a Slide Operator at the Typhoon Lagoon Waterpark. Working in the “Most Magical Place on Earth” necessitates lots of training, structure, and specific procedures to follow in this safety-critical role. While working at the waterpark was a wonderful experience, my experiential learning also existed outside working hours such as connecting with other international students and being integrated into American culture. This …

Examination Of Institutional Investment In The United States Of America From 1999 To 2018, Martin R. Lefebvre

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the evolution of spatial preference of institutional investors located in the United States of America for the time period of 1999 to 2018 using a mix of exploratory data analysis techniques and more sophisticated space-time and machine learning techniques such as ESRI Space-Time cube and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling. This thesis concludes that despite having the appearance of a footloose industry due to almost negligible fixed costs, institutional investors are attracted to highly dynamic urban centres and on the 20 year time horizon, appear surprisingly sticky in their location preference. This is consistent with the belief …

Optimal Policies On Managing Drug Supply And Patient Access To Drugs, Hongmei Sun

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Health care decision-makers face several uncertainties regarding pharmaceutical products. For new and expensive drugs, the performance outside of clinical trials could be uncertain. For old and low-profit pharmaceutical products, the supply could be uncertain, causing drug shortages. In three essays, I study mitigating strategies to deal with different types of uncertainties associated with pharmaceutical products.

In the first essay, I compare two types of pharmaceutical reimbursement contracts to mitigate the uncertainties associated with new and expensive drugs. I construct a game-theoretic model to analyze the interactions between a pharmaceutical manufacturer and a payer. The payer’s reimbursement of a drug is …

Making The World A Better Place: How Crowdfunding Increases Consumer Demand For Social-Good Products, Bonnie Simpson, Martin Schreier, Sally Bitterl, Katherine White

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative means of financing new ventures wherein a large number of individuals collectively back a project. This research specifically looks at reward based crowdfunding, where those who take part in the crowdfunding process receive the new product for which funding is sought in return for their financial support. This work illustrates that consumers make fundamentally different decisions when considering contributing their money to crowdfund versus purchase a product. Six studies demonstrate that compared to a traditional purchase, crowdfunding more strongly activates an interdependent mindset and, as a result, increases consumer demand for social-good products (i.e., …

A Study Of Job Satisfaction And Turnover Intention Among Acute Care Nurses Working In Rural And Urban Settings, Yasin Yasin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In Canada, a close look at the nursing workforce shows a decline due to limited supply and increasing demand resulting in a looming shortage in the near future. Retaining nurses’ is a key strategy to overcome the shortage by limiting nurses’ turnover. Nurses’ job dissatisfaction is the most significant predictor of turnover intention and is associated with undesired outcomes such as nurses’ absenteeism, burnout, low service quality, and patient dissatisfaction. The differences in factors affecting job satisfaction between rural and urban nurses have not been fully studied. This study aimed to identify the differences and similarities in the extrinsic and …

The Experiential Learning Connections Between University And Community: Recent Ontario Experience, Emmanuel Asafo-Adjei

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Experiential Learning (EL), including a range of pedagogical approaches such as co-ops and community service learning, connect the university and its external community. Universities are considering such approaches to meet a number of needs and priorities both on and off-campus. As it unfolds rapidly at the present time, EL becomes the connection between the university and the community beyond its gates, both locally and more extensively. However, university-community or so-called town-gown (TG) connections traditionally focus on research and/or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This thesis focuses on the teaching and learning connections, especially in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences …

My Internship With Scrumgenius, Alexandra Wyatt

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Presentations

In her presentation, Alexandra Wyatt details her tasks and different roles and the work she accomplished during her internship with ScrumGenius. She discusses what she learned during her internship, including copywriting, vector image creation, and SEO and keyword targeting tactics to help boost the online presence of ScrumGenius and how the internship allowed her to hone many pre-existing skills in writing and content creation and develop new skills that will be very helpful in her future career and life.

Experiential Learning Final Report: Scrumgenius, Alexandra Wyatt

SASAH 4th Year Capstone and Other Projects: Publications

Alexandra Wyatt reports on her internship with ScrumGenius, a digital standup bot that works to get rid of wasted time in in-person standup meetings by asking teams a few simple questions to gather metrics on their goals, tasks and blockers. This report details her tasks and different roles and the work she accomplished, as well as what she learned from working there, including copywriting, vector image creation, and SEO and keyword targeting tactics to help boost the online presence of ScrumGenius. Alexandra discusses honing pre-existing skills in writing and content creation and developing new skills that will be helpful in …

Managerial Attributes, Incentives, And Performance, Zhichuan Li, Jeffrey L. Coles

Business Publications

We examine the relative importance of observed and unobserved firm- and manager-specific heterogeneities in determining executive compensation incentives and firm policy, risk, and performance. First, we decompose executive incentives into time-variant and time-invariant firm and manager components. Manager fixed effects supply 73% (60%) of explained variation in delta (vega). Second, controlling for manager fixed effects alters parameter estimates and corresponding inference on observed firm and manager characteristics. Third, larger CEO delta (vega) fixed effects predict better firm performance (riskier corporate policies and higher firm risk). These results suggest that the delta (vega) fixed effect captures managerial ability (risk aversion).

A Framework For Considering Dissociative Identity Effects In Consumption, Bonnie Simpson, Lea Dunn, Katherine White

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

This chapter examines the mirror image of the identity association principle: dissociation. While the association principle posits that stimuli associated with a positively regarded identity receive more positive evaluations, the dissociation principle suggests that stimuli associated with negatively regarded identities will receive negative evaluations and be abandoned. The authors focus on the nature of dissociative reference groups or groups that the consumer is motivated to avoid association with, and present a framework outlining how dissociative influence can impact consumer behavior. They review the literature on dissociative influence and note that although dissociative reference groups often spur avoidance behaviors, they can …