Business Commons^™

The Value Of A Master’S Degree To Recreation Professionals, Camilla J. Hodge, Brian J. Hill, Christian Brinton

Faculty Publications

This study assessed the nature of the relationship between earning advanced degrees and career outcomes such as salary, job satisfaction, social capital, and human capital among professionals in the parks and recreation field. The sample (n = 196) was drawn from parks and recreation agencies located in the United States. Agencies, excluding educational institutions, were identified via an Internet search for parks and recreation agencies in urban areas. Findings indicated there was a positive relationship between earning a master’s degree and salary. Earning a master’s degree, however, was not significantly related to job satisfaction, social capital, or human capital. Furthermore, …

An Evaluation Of The General Vs. Specialist Nature Of Top Accounting Journals, Scott L. Summers, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Academic research has a role in advancing and enlightening society in broad areas of study. Many forces interact to influence the directions, topics, and methodologies used in research. In this paper, we explore and discuss the relationships between the top general-interest and specialist accounting journals. We test whether top journals (e.g., “Top 3” or “Top 6”), relative to a set of high-quality but specialist journals, (1) are perceived to be general in what they will consider publishing, (2) have historically published diverse sets of articles, (3) have editorial board members with diverse sets of interests and skills, and (4) publish …

Extreme Sports: A Study Of Free-Solo Rock Climbers, Jacob Ray Sparks

Theses and Dissertations

Extreme sport participation has traditionally been conceptualized as a psychological disorder and something to be avoided (Cashmore, 2002). Viewed in this way, these individuals are thought to be enacting an unhealthy psychology (Ogilvie, 1997; Slanger & Rudestam, 1997). Other research has described participants in extreme sports as sensation seekers under-stimulated by their normal surroundings and out of control (Zuckerman, 1979). Using Brymer's (2005) focused definition of extreme sports, "activities where a mismanaged mistake or accident would most likely result in death, as opposed to injury" (p. 5), this study utilized a phenomenological method to analyze semi-structured interviews with 16 free-solo …

Decision Making In The Backcountry While Carrying A Cellular Phone, Quinn S. Linford

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to gain understanding about the influence of technology, specifically cellular phones, on decision making during potentially risky situations in the backcountry. Previous research in this area is contradictory and some studies indicate technology is influencing people to take more risks while others suggest it is not. Further confounding the relationship is the fact that previous studies have found people may be taking more risk in the presence of technology were based largely on respondent perceptions, not observation data. The current study used a scenario-based decision model to examine the difference in decision making between …

An Architectural Framework For Global Talent Management, Shad S. Morris, Scott Snell, Ingmar Björkman

Faculty Publications

A unique characteristic of the multinational corporation is that it consists of culturally diverse employees that embody both firm-specific and location-specific human capital. This paper takes an architectural approach to describe how different types of human capital develop from the individual level, to the unit level, and then to the firm level in order to build a talent portfolio for the multinational corporation. Depending on the company’s strategy (multidomestic, meganational, transnational), different configurations of the talent portfolio tend to be emphasized and integrated to achieve competitive advantage. Implications for theory and practice are discussed and a research agenda is introduced.

From Warning To Wallpaper: Why The Brain Habituates To Security Warnings, Bonnie Anderson, Anthony Vance, C. Brock Kirwan, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, David Eargle

Faculty Publications

Warning messages are fundamental to users' security interactions. Unfortunately, research has shown that they are largely ineffective. A key contributor to this failure is habituation: decreased response to a repeated warning. Previous research has inferred the occurrence of habituation to warnings or measured it indirectly, such as through the proxy of a related behavior. Therefore, there is a gap in our understanding of how habituation to security warnings develops in the brain. Without direct measures of habituation, we are limited in designing warnings that can mitigate its effects. In this study, we use neurophysiological measures to directly observe habituation as …

Examining Intrinsic Motivation And Holistic Functioning: The Role Of Therapeutic Recreation In Residential Substance Use Treatment, Damien Christopher Cavanaugh

Theses and Dissertations

This evaluative study examined the impact of recreational therapy interventions on intrinsic motivation and holistic functioning among adults at a substance use treatment facility. West (2001) identified motivation as a key variable in treating substance use disorders, and self-determination theory, specifically intrinsic motivation, provided a useful framework for this study. Intrinsic motivation is grounded in self-determination theory and defines various motivation types and how to increase participants' engagement. Holistic functioning is another tool in assessing a participant's recovery. For this evaluation, four domains were specifically assessed: (a) physical, (b) leisure, (c) social, and (d) daily living functioning. These quality of …

Compliance Police Or Business Partner? Institutional Complexity And Occupational Tensions In Human Resource Managment, Kurt Sandholtz, Tyler N. Burrows

Faculty Publications

Faced with institutional demands, organizations often create departments whose work is divorced from technical imperatives. This paper examines workers in one such department: Human Resources. Analysis of HR's recent history and evidence from an ethnographic study of HR work highlight the institutional origins of conflict between HR's established "compliance police" role and the "business partner" expectations of line managers. The paper outlines a theory of how organizational responses to institutional complexity contribute to persistent tension in HR and other heteronomous occupations.

More Harm Than Good? How Messages That Interrupt Can Make Us Vulnerable, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Bonnie Anderson, Anthony Vance, C. Brock Kirwan, David Eargle

Faculty Publications

System-generated alerts are ubiquitous in personal computing and, with the proliferation of mobile devices, daily activity. While these interruptions provide timely information, research shows they come at a high cost in terms of increased stress and decreased productivity. This is due to dual-task interference (DTI), a cognitive limitation in which even simple tasks cannot be simultaneously performed without significant performance loss. Although previous research has examined how DTI impacts the performance of a primary task (the task that was interrupted), no research has examined the effect of DTI on the interrupting task. This is an important gap because in many …

Recreation At Work: More Than Fun And Games?, Andrew Lacanienta

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of Duerden, Courtright, and Widmer's (n.d.) Recreation at Work (RAW) Model and explore the relationship between RAW and employee flourishing (i.e., resilience, work engagement, organizational identification). This study explored the unique contribution from RAW and work activities in relation to employee flourishing. Structural equation modeling revealed RAW and leisure as a state of mind (LSM) perceptions (i.e., intrinsic motivation, perceived freedom, positive affect) had positive relationships with personal expressiveness (β = .704, p < .001) and organizational identification (β = .164, p = .002). Additionally, RAW had a positive relationship with resilience mediated by personal expressiveness (β = …

Robustness Of Multiple Indicators In Automated Screening Systems For Deception Detection, Ryan M. Schuetzler, Nathan W. Twyman, Jeffery Gainer Proudfoot, Aaron C. Elkins, Douglas C. Derrik

Faculty Publications

This study investigates the effectiveness of an automatic system for detection of deception by individuals with the use of multiple indicators of such potential deception. Deception detection research in the information systems discipline has postulated increased accuracy through a new class of screening systems that automatically conduct interviews and track multiple indicators of deception simultaneously. Understanding the robustness of this new class of systems and the limitations of its theoretical improved performance is important for refinement of the conceptual design. The design science proof-of-concept study presented here implemented and evaluated the robustness of these systems for automated screening for deception …

The Intersect Of Housing And Health, Cameron Zenger, Paul Godfrey

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Housing is closely related to mental and physical health. Extensive research demonstrates that even relatively basic housing features such as cement floors or running water create life-altering improvements in the health of occupants. Predictably, homeless populations benefit from such interventions. Utah provides a unique environment to study the transition from homelessness to housing, and from health crises to health care. After a study revealed the cost effectiveness and savings of moving homeless people from the streets to housing, Utah implemented the Housing First program in Salt Lake City, a system that addresses homelessness by providing homeless individuals (clients) with housing …

Network Of Sensing Environment (N.O.S.E.), Kuo-Chih Lo, Derek Hansen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

About two years ago, there is a huge explosion that killed many people, most of them are fire fighters, in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan R.O.C. Therefore I come up with the sensor new work idea, aka N.O.S.E Project. This project is formed by sensor combo network. Any sensors that can turn the environment into data can be consider as part of the network.

Making Ethics Practical, Tyson Tharp, Dr. Brad Agle

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project was to gain a deeper understanding of ethical dilemmas in an organizational context. From our increased understanding of these dilemmas, we hoped to offer guidance for practitioners and students of management that would help them to identify the major types of dilemmas they could expect to face, know when they could expect to face those dilemmas, and understand how to properly respond to those dilemmas. To help achieve this, a 13-category typology had already been created from a collection of data on dilemmas faced by MBA and EMBA students. This project was focused on performing …

Human Capital Strategy: The Effect Of Human Resource Competencies On Innovative Capabilities Within The Firm, Grant Russell, David Kryscynski

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The aim of this project was to better understand how individuals within an organization would affect the organization’s ability to innovate, compete, and sustain strategic advantage in the marketplace as measured through ‘expert’ surveys. This was driven by David Kryscynski in partnership with the RBL group and the University of Michigan as a part of the 2015 Human Resources Competency Survey. While my role shifted significantly over time, generally my involvement was split into 3 phases which are described in the methodology below.

Mergers And Acquisitions Document Vector Space Analysis, Steven Fortney, Karl Diether

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project involved looking at Mergers and Acquisitions and a textual analysis of their SEC filings. We index, clean and match documents in the SEC EDGAR database to the CRSP and Compustat databases in order to consider multiple instruments for “specificity” and uniqueness in a filing. We then scrape each document and use the data to create these instruments. One instrument for specificity we create uses parts of the Stanford Natural Language Processing library and the NLTK and GenSim libraries in python to convert each filing into a vector in a vector space. This allows us to find the cosine …

How Users Perceive And Respond To Security Messages: A Neurois Research Agenda And Empirical Study, Bonnie Anderson, Anthony Vance, C. Brock Kirwan, David Eargle, Jeffrey Jenkins

Faculty Publications

Users are vital to the information security of organizations. In spite of technical safeguards, users make many critical security decisions. An example is users' responses to security messages—discrete communication designed to persuade users to either impair or improve their security status. Research shows that although users are highly susceptible to malicious messages (e.g., phishing attacks), they are highly resistant to protective messages such as security warnings. Research is therefore needed to better understand how users perceive and respond to security messages. In this article, we argue for the potential of NeuroIS—cognitive neuroscience applied to information system (IS)—to shed new light …

Effects Of Exposure To Anthropomorphized Products On Social Behavior, Wade Wade, Dr. Ryan Elder

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project was designed to investigate the effects of exposure to anthropomorphized products on the way that consumers treat other people. Researchers have shown that people starved of social connectedness will sometimes seek relationships with products or brands as a way of relieving social insecurity and the fear of death (Rindfleisch, Burroughs & Wong, 2009). Additional research has shown that people whose needs for social interaction have been satisfied are more likely to dehumanize distant others (Waytz & Epley, 2012). We thus reasoned that anthropomorphism of brands and products, while efficacious for improving the consumer’s sense of social connectedness, might …

The Power Of Progress In Positive Identity Work, Rolf David Dixon Jr., Jeff Bednar

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The retention of employees is a major financial and cultural concern for almost all organizations. As a result, the study of voluntary turnover has a rich history in the domain of organizational behavior. We believe that this research has at least two blind spots that create an opportunity for new inquiry and insight. First, the nature of the employment contract between employees and organizations has changed over time. Employment in previous decades was largely founded on expectations of a long-term employment in one organization, however, in more recent years, this view of careers has been replaced with the notion that …

Designing Consumer Furniture For A Positive Mental Well-Being, Nichole Cross, David Morgan

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Currently there are several common considerations to factor in when designing furniture for the consumer market such as ergonomics, color trends, manufacturability, materials, regulatory standards, shipping costs, economic forecasts, etc. The objective of this exploration was to research the psychological effects of design elements, such as color and texture, for the purposes of applying lessons learned to the design of furniture that contributes to a positive emotional state.

Natural Movement As Input To A Virtual World, Kyle Bryant, Derek Hansen

Journal of Undergraduate Research

With Facebook’s recent acquisition of Oculus Rift, the virtual reality (VR) craze has left the den of nerds and tech enthusiasts and gone mainstream. Sony, Steam, and other big name companies’ pledges to develop their own VR platforms have further confirmed the coming of VR to every-home USA. However, this dream may still be far off, with each company’s desires to create its own usually costly and complex solution. All of these companies are not only currently lacking VR experiences to demonstrate, but those that do currently exist require the user to move and interact in the game using a …

The Value Of Connections In Turbulent Times: Evidence From The United States, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak, Todd Mitton

Faculty Publications

The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a prior connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner’s confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Personal connections to top executive branch officials can matter greatly even in a country with strong overall institutions, at least during a time of acute financial crisis and heightened policy discretion.

When Training Gets Trumped: How Dual-Task Interference Inhibits Security Training, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Bonnie Anderson, Anthony Osborn Vance, Scott Jensen

Faculty Publications

Security training programs are an important intervention to protect users and organizations against security threats. Unfortunately, users often ignore their training and engage in poor security behaviors. We explain how dual-task interference (DTI) is a primary cause of security training disregard. DTI is a cognitive limitation wherein humans cannot perform more than one task simultaneously without experiencing a deterioration of performance. In our context, we hypothesize how prompting users to perform security behaviors during high-DTI times may derail one’s previous security training, resulting in less secure behaviors.

We test our hypotheses in an experiment that compares users’ adherence to security …

The Wealth Of Subnations: Geography, Institutions, And Within-Country Development, Todd Mitton

Faculty Publications

I study determinants of economic development in a new dataset covering 1867 subnational regions from 101 countries, focusing on within-country effects of geography and institutions. Several geographic factors have significant explanatory power forwithin-country differences in per-capita GDP, including terrain ruggedness, tropical climate, ocean access, temperature range, storm risk, and natural resources such as oil, diamonds, or iron. Institutions have a significant positive effect on income among subnational regions with greater autonomy, suggesting that strong subnational institutions enhance development when not dominated by national institutions.

The Role Of Journaling In Reflective Writing In Experiential Education: A Case Study Intervention, John Bennion, Mat Duerden, Anne Whitehouse

Faculty Publications

Research suggests that journaling will increase reflection and improve program outcomes (Bain, et al, 1999; Duerden, et al, 2012) This study involved a partnership with a non-profit, Global Explorers (GEx), which provides international immersion experiences for youth. Their programs are designed to teach youth participants principles of leadership, environmental awareness, service, and science. This study, which tested whether teaching journaling techniques to youth program facilitators would have a positive impact on participant outcomes, addressed the following hypotheses: 1) Greater training in reflective thinking among participants would be associated with higher outcome scores, and 2) Participants in the intervention group (facilitators …

Using Unstructured And Qualitative Disclosures To Explain Accruals, Richard Frankel, Jared Jennings, Joshua A. Lee

Faculty Publications

We examine the usefulness of support vector regressions (SVRs) in assessing the content of unstructured, qualitative disclosures by relating MD&A-based SVR-accrual estimates (MD&Aaccruals) to actual accruals. We find that MD&A accruals explain a statistically and economically significant portion of firm-level accruals and identify more persistent accruals. We find that the explanatory power of MD&A accruals is higher for more readable 10Ks, thereby providing evidence for the construct validity of the readability measures. To highlight the flexibility of the SVR method, we apply it to other dependent variables and disclosures. We find that MD&A-based cash-flow forecasts produced by SVR predict next …

More Than Meets The Eye: How Oculometric Behaviors Evolve Over The Course Of Automated Deception Detection Interactions, Jeffrey G. Proudfoot, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Judee K. Burgoon, Jay F. Nunamaker

Faculty Publications

Eye-tracking technology has exhibited promise for identifying deception in automated screening systems. Prior deception research using eye trackers has focused on the detection and interpretation of brief oculometric variations in response to stimuli (e.g., specific images or interview questions). However, more research is needed to understand how variations in oculometric behaviors evolve over the course of an interaction with a deception detection system. Using latent growth curve modeling, we tested hypotheses explaining how two oculometric behaviors—pupil dilation and eye-gaze fixation patterns—evolve over the course of a system interaction for three groups of participants: deceivers who see relevant stimuli (i.e., stimuli …

My Family Made Me Do It: A Cross-Domain, Self-Regulatory Perspective On Antecedents To Abusive Supervision, Stephen H. Courtright, Richard G. Gardner, Troy A. Smith, Brian W. Mccormick, Amy E. Colbert

Faculty Publications

Drawing on resource drain theory, we introduce self-regulatory resource (ego) depletion stemming from family–work conflict (FWC) as an alternative theoretical perspective on why supervisors behave abusively toward subordinates. Our two-study examination of a cross-domain antecedent of abusive supervision stands in contrast to prior research, which has focused primarily on work-related factors that influence abusive supervision. Further, our investigation shows how ego depletion is proximally related to abusive supervision. In the first study, conducted at a Fortune 500 company and designed as a lagged survey study, we found that, after controlling for alternative theoretical mechanisms, supervisors who experienced FWC displayed more …

Who Is Easier To Nudge?, John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, Sean (Xixiang) Wang

Faculty Publications

Identifying who is more influenced by a default is challenging, since individuals may be more likely to remain at the default either because they are more susceptible to defaults in general or because the default is closer to their preferred choice. We apply a statistical model to ten large companies’ 401(k) plans to distinguish between these two channels. Even after controlling for contribution rate preferences, low-income and young individuals are slower to opt out of contribution rate defaults. The evidence is consistent with the default changing contribution rate preferences, as predicted by anchoring or endorsement effects, and there is weaker …

Integrating Csr And Behavioral Ethics: Csr And Circles Of Moral Regard, Isaac Smith

Faculty Publications

My hope is to highlight a point of intersection between CSR and Behavioral Ethics research that might serve as a “primer” of sorts, encouraging more integration between the two literatures.