Business Commons^™

Engaging The Disengaged: Implementing A No-Tech Policy After Years Of Adding Tech To The Classroom, Keith Quesenberry

Business Educator Scholarship

After a decade of adding technology to the classroom, students asking for a laptop ban sent me on a journey of discovery. After a literature review of existing research and a semester of a no-tech policy, I found less tech, not more increases student engagement and learning. Despite more than a dozen studies over the last decade detailing the negative learning effects of laptops in the classroom, the majority of faculty believe that laptop use in class increases learning. I highlight the research findings, explain my experience with the new policy, and provide suggestions on how to attempt your own. …

Consumption Of Healthy And Unhealthy Foods By The African Poor: Evidence From Nigeria, Tanzania, And Uganda, Michael Dolislager, Lenis Saweda Liverpool-Tasie, Nicole Mason, Thomas Reardon, David Tschirley

Business Educator Scholarship

We use national Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) datasets from Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda to examine consumption by the rural and urban poor of “unhealthy foods” (including ultra-processed foods such as sweets and sugary beverages) versus “healthy foods” beyond starchy staples (such as vegetables, beans, animal products, and fruits). Consumption of processed foods and nonstaples is often associated in policy discussion in Africa with middle-class urban consumers rather than the poor. We analyzed household food consumption expenditure with Locally Weighted Scatterplot Smoothing (LOWESS) curves and augmented Engel regressions. We found that substantial shares of the consumption expenditure of the poor, …

Bridging General Education And The Business Discipline: Surfacing Central Themes Through A Core Course, Jennifer Dose

Business Educator Scholarship

General education and business major courses often follow parallel paths with little intersection or appreciation of the other. Students benefit, however, by seeing key themes and skills linked to both general education and specialized disciplinary courses. Giving specific attention to Christian institutions, this paper argues for more intentional connections between these two parts of the curriculum, highlighting their common ideals of shared learning, shared connections as human beings, practical skills, institutional distinctiveness, and integration. One strategy to overcome the bifurcation of general education and business curricula has been to ground institutional distinctives within a core course experience, which can then …

Customer Satisfaction As An Antecedent To Engagement In Co-Creation Of Value In The Hotel Industry, Andrew Babyak, Laurence Bell

Business Educator Scholarship

Purpose - An examination of the existing literature found that no research had been performed examining customer satisfaction as an antecedent to co-creation of value. This is important because organizations have difficulty engaging customers in co-creation of value, which can increase loyalty, trust, innovation, and competitive advantage. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between customer satisfaction and its constructs, and engagement in co-creation of value.

Design - Six hypotheses were developed regarding the relationship between customer satisfaction, each of its components, and customer engagement in co-creation of value. A survey was distributed to 256 adults who …

Toward A Theory Of Biblical Leadership, Andrew Babyak

Business Educator Scholarship

The Faith at Work Movement started in the 1980s to address the needs of Christians who felt like their life was being segmented between their work and faith (Miller, 2003). As Christians have been searching for meaning at work, they have accepted servant leadership as the ideal form of leadership because it has been taught as the leadership of Jesus (Niewold, 2007). In this paper, an ideological exegesis of Luke 9:57-62 reveals that the true leadership of Jesus does not fit into the construct of servant leadership. As a result of the ideological exegesis, this paper proposes a new theory …

Biblical Leadership At Work Scale Development, Andrew Babyak

Business Educator Scholarship

The faith at work movement began in the 1980s (Miller, 2007) and has been growing at a fast pace in recent years, but most of the work done in these fields has been religion neutral. Scholars have postulated that leadership based on the Bible would be divisive and produce negative results for the organization, but no studies have been performed to actually support those assertions (Hicks, 2002). The purpose of this study was to develop a new theory of biblical leadership and a scale that may be used to study it. A thorough review of previous research on leadership and …

Current Trends In Communication Graduate Degrees: Survey Of Communications, Advertising, Pr, And Imc Graduate Programs, Keith A. Quesenberry, Michael K. Coolsen, Kristen Wilkerson

Business Educator Scholarship

© AEJMC 2015. A survey of 61 master’s degree advertising programs reveals significant trends in program titles, curriculum design, course delivery, and students served. The results provide insight for current and planned master’s degree programs as research predicts a continued increase in demand for master’s education over the next decade. Survey results are compared against overall education trends such as the growth of nontraditional students, increase in online education delivery, and the increase of for profit universities.

Beyond Association: How Employees Want To Participate In Their Firms' Corporate Social Performance, David J. Hagenbuch, Steven W. Little, Doyle J. Lucas

Business Educator Scholarship

© 2015 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University. Although many studies have found a positive relationship between corporate social performance and employer attractiveness, few have examined how different forms of responsibility might mediate that attraction, particularly when those social practices afford different degrees of employee participation. The current study undertook this line of inquiry by examining prospective employees' attraction to three common approaches to corporate social performance (CSP) that offer increasing levels of participation: donation, volunteerism, and operational integration. Unexpectedly, findings from an empirical investigation challenged the study's main hypothesis; that is, prospective employees were least attracted to firms …

Response: Spreading The “Tone At The Top” Throughout The Organization, Jennifer Dose

Business Educator Scholarship

Many thanks to Dov Fischer and Hershey Friedman, the authors of “Psalms: Lessons for a ‘Tone at the Top’ Based on Trust and Justice,” for a very interesting and timely article. I am pleased that my own article, “Proverbs: Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Organizations” (Dose, 2012), published in the JBIB, sparked the ideas presented in “Tone at the Top.” My goal in the Proverbs paper was to conduct an inductive study of Proverbs to find themes related to business. The assumption was that organizational members, particularly leaders, who follow the set of principles that Proverbs advocates, bring about beneficial organizational …

A Qualitative Investigation Of Self-Directed Learning In Senegal, West Africa And Its Implications For Human Resource Development, Andrew Babyak

Business Educator Scholarship

The purpose of this study was to investigate the current status of self-directed learning by SME leaders in Senegal, West Africa, and then to identify some of the human resource development (HRD) implications. This qualitative study collected data through two sets of interviews. First, eight leaders who were either the owner or manager of SMEs in Senegal were interviewed through questions that focused on the four factors that Confessore (1992) identified as necessary for autonomous learning: (a) desire, (b) resourcefulness, (c) initiative, and (d) persistence. Results were then discussed while incorporating the importance of understanding some of the basic elements …

Jonah Lehrer - How We Decide (Book Review), Keith A. Quesenberry

Business Educator Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Proverbs: Ancient Wisdom For Contemporary Organizations, Jennifer Dose

Business Educator Scholarship

This article discusses how the Biblical Book of Proverbs applies to contemporary organizations. An inductive study of the Proverbs related to organizational life elicited a set of thematic categories. All proverbs related to these categories are reported, and a subset of these categories is explored further. Select examples of proverbs are provided to illustrate each topic with connections made to current management scholarship. Finally, these topical themes are integrated in the context of organizational trust, demonstrating the importance of comprehensive adherence by organizations and their members to all the principles that Proverbs advocates. The degree to which all of the …

Organizational Effectiveness In Higher Education: Faculty Informal Structure As Social Capital, Jennifer Dose

Business Educator Scholarship

Higher education institutions encounter complex external environments, requiring increasing responsiveness and innovation. Research on social capital has demonstrated that highly connected employee relational networks are more creative, effective, and exhibit higher member satisfaction. The present study examines one college to demonstrate how social network analysis can be used to assess the informal relational networks of faculty members within a higher education institution. Characteristics of the faculty social network are described and mapped. The relationship between aspects of individuals’ network linkages, governance participation, and their organizational commitment, satisfaction, and trust are assessed. Recommendations for building effective organizational networks, particularly through expanding …

Work Values: An Integrative Framework And Illustrative Application To Organizational Socialization, Jennifer Dose

Business Educator Scholarship

This article examines the work values and ethics literatures with the goal of integrating these diverse and independent research streams. The vocational behaviour literature and the management and organizational behaviour literature on work values, the Protestant Work Ethic construct, and business ethics theory are first reviewed and discussed, demonstrating how insights from these diverse research areas can inform each other. I propose a comprehensive definition of work values and a structural framework that reflects the central elements of the construct and reduces confusion over its conceptual boundaries. The framework consists of a two‐by‐two dimensional structure, with one continuum ranging from …

Human Nature And Teaching Management Theory, Jennifer Dose

Business Educator Scholarship

Ghoshal (2005) spurred considerable discussion with his pronouncement that “Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices,” using agency theory to exemplify how theories with negative assumptions about people perpetuate the behaviors that inspired those assumptions. According to Ghoshal, teaching that managers maximize their own interests legitimizes such behavior to students, therefore shaping future norms. This article proposes to summarize and respond to Ghoshal’s arguments, then discuss the implications for pedagogy and make recommendations, emphasizing that although secular management teaching can improve, only by incorporating a Christian view of human nature can management students develop an accurate and ethical worldview.

Difficult Choices In Total Compensation: Balancing Health Care Costs And Wage Increases, Jennifer Dose

Business Educator Scholarship

This article describes an experiential exercise suitable for undergraduate or master’s-level students. The goals of the exercise are for students to correctly apply health insurance concepts such as premium, deductible, co-pay, and coinsurance; to understand and explain the dilemma facing organizations in an environment of increasing health care costs and limited compensation budgets; to discern and apply the concerns of employees with varying demographic profiles to health care cost sharing; and to develop competency in calculating health care costs at the organizational level. Students receive a scenario in which they act as an employee representative and are asked to provide …

Leader-Member Exchange In Scripture: Insights From Jesus, Noah, And Abraham, Jennifer Dose

Business Educator Scholarship

Although much has been written about leadership from a Christian perspective, Christian principles have greater potential to be integrated into the academic research literature than has yet been realized. Leadership theory and practice is one area in which Scripture can contribute significantly, leader-member exchange theory (LMX) being one example. LMX states that leaders have limited personal, social, and organizational resources (e.g., time, energy, personal power); thus, rather than interacting similarly with each follower, leaders have different relationships with different followers. Some followers receive a higher degree of social exchange including increased levels of information sharing, interaction time, mutual support, and …

Information Exchange In Personnel Selection Decisions, Jennifer Dose

Business Educator Scholarship

Personnel selection decisions often involve group decisions in which individual group members do not share all the available information about candidates. Serial interviews are one example of this situation. Although serial interview techniques are commonly used to select employees, the selection literature has not extensively investigated serial interviewing, especially the process of coming to a selection decision as a group at the conclusion of the process. The information exchange literature is used to shed light on this process. Results showed that groups often failed to exchange sufficient information to come to the correct decision, discussed a higher proportion of negative …

Relationships Between Accountability, Job Satisfaction, And Trust, Peg Thoms, Jennifer J. Dose, Kimberly S. Scott

Business Educator Scholarship

With the trend toward self-management comes increasing accountability of individuals to their coworkers and organizations. There is an implicit assumption that workers like self-management and the accompanying accountability, despite little supporting empirical evidence. This study examines the idea that workers’ perceptions of their level of accountability are related to their job satisfaction. A significant correlation was found between job satisfaction and perceived accountability to coworkers and perceived accountability to management. In addition, we found that accountability to both coworkers and management was positively related to trust in supervisors and managers. However, only two aspects of accountability—manager and coworker awareness—seem to …

The Diversity Of Diversity: Work Values Effects On Formative Team Processes, Jennifer Dose, Richard J. Klimoski

Business Educator Scholarship

The benefits and drawbacks of homogeneity and heterogeneity for staffing work teams have been debated at length. The relevance of work values and work values similarity for effective team processes has been largely ignored, however. This article discusses the conditions under which work values and different work values types will impact early team processes and the implications of these relationships for staffing. Ways that work values similarity can mitigate against the negative effects of demographic diversity are discussed.

An Empirical Test Of Conclusions From Effective Schools Research, Michael A. Zigarelli

Business Educator Scholarship

Effective schools variables identified in several literature reviews were collapsed into 6 constructs, and the independent effect of each construct was empirically tested on student achievement level. The data for this analysis were taken from the National Educational Longitudinal Study for the years 1988, 1990, and 1992. The regression analysis of the data indicates that the most important effective schools characteristics are an achievement-oriented school culture, principal autonomy in hiring and firing teachers, and high teacher morale. No evidence was found that teacher empowerment, teacher education level, most principal influences, and quality of relations between the administration and the school …