Business Commons^™

Cross-Functional Integration In The Supply Chain: Construct Development And The Impact Of Workplace Behaviors, Daniel A. Pellathy

Doctoral Dissertations

Cross-functional integration (CFI) is central to supply chain theory and practice. However, researchers have yet to settled on a consistent definition or measure of CFI, creating confusion over its conceptual content and making it difficult to validate given operationalizations. In addition, researchers have only recently begun to explore the impact of workplace behaviors on CFI and supply chain performance. The two studies in this dissertation seek to contribute to the supply chain literature in both of these areas. Study 1 develops a comprehensive definition and valid measure of CFI based on a systematic process of construct development. Study 2 employs …

Examining The Nature And Consequences Of Interfunctional Bias In A Corporate Setting, William Adam Powell

Doctoral Dissertations

Interfunctional bias is examined in this dissertation as a potential barrier to interfunctional cooperation. Interfunctional cooperation is desirable in modern corporate organizations as a contributor to effective service delivery, operations planning, and sales performance. Interfunctional stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are hypothesized to relate positively, and together provide the bias-based theoretical basis through which barriers to interfunctional cooperation can be more thoroughly understood. Based on the extant literature in marketing and psychology, competing models of interfunctional bias are developed and hypothesized. In the first of three studies a questionnaire-based survey of supply chain employees’ perceptions of salespeople permitted the examination of …

Is Political Skill "The New Black?", Lauren Elisabeth Steele

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

International Expansion In The Retail Industry: A Multi-Case Study On Strategic Expansionary Variables, Patrick Conaty

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Subordinate Humor And Leader-Member Exchange Relationships: Laugh And The Boss Laughs With You?, Nancy Marietta Scott

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation used a political lens to investigate humor in a leader-member exchange (LMX) framework to explore how subordinates can use humor to manage relationships with their superiors and the subsequent outcomes associated with the quality of these relationships. This dissertation linked humor to outcomes that had not previously been studied, such as political skill and employee guarding tactics. This dissertation uniquely contributes to the current body of research by 1) empirically investigating subordinate humor in an LMX framework, 2) exploring how political skill affects the relationship between humor and LMX relationship quality, and 3) examining an unexplored outcome of …

Rogue And Deviants: A Game-Theoretic Perspective On Opportunism In Strategic Alliance Relationships, Anton Pavol Fenik

Doctoral Dissertations

Opportunistic behavior is often studied in interfirm relationships, yet we don’t know the different types of behavior that are hidden behind the general opportunism label. Therefore, using game theory as guidance, this dissertation examines the roots of and influences on two types of opportunistic behaviors in strategic alliances. Specifically, the author suggests that the strategic alliances literature would benefit from recognizing that opportunistic behaviors don’t always originate from the firm (rogue-firm opportunism), but instead often originate from individual alliance employees (deviant-personal opportunism). Moreover, this dissertation examines how relational factors between two alliance partners impact these two types of opportunistic behaviors. …

Managing The Co-Creation Of Innovation: The Influence Of Team Regulatory Style And Reflexivity On Customer Idea Selection And Innovation Outcomes, Matthew Brady Shaner

Doctoral Dissertations

The cocreation of new products with customers has been shown to be associated with higher new product quality, the development of products that more closely match customers' unmet needs, lower development costs, and faster speed-to-market (Hoyer, Chandy, Dorotic, Krafft, & Singh, 2010; O'Hern & Rindfleisch, 2010). However, little is known about the evaluation and selection process in the cocreation of innovation (Bayus, 2013). To be successful, product development teams must identify customer ideas that have the potential to both fulfill unmet market needs and be profitable for the firm. This dissertation looks at two cognitive factors related to team decision-making, …

A Theoretical And Experimental Investigation Of Efficiency, Equity, And Uncertainty In Tournaments, Nicholas Busko

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays centered around labor incentives that arise in relative compensation contracts. Chapter 1 poses the question: if devotion to a core competence were truly optimal, why would firms do otherwise? We argue that the behavior of drifting from the core may be motivated by the competitive incentives faced by managers who seek to rise within a firm. We find competition creates an incentive for a manager to look for less correlated opportunities that pull the firm in a new direction. In a symmetric equilibrium all managers behave this way, leading to lower expected output for …

Mindset Manifestation: The Environmentally Conscious Mindset, Alexander Speed

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

A Study Of Espoused Corporate Cultural Factors And Their Relationship With Business Success, Tonya Denise Brown

Doctoral Dissertations

Reshoring of manufacturing companies is vital to the United States’ economy. Although one may assume that all of the business reshored will be large companies, statistics show that small businesses comprise the largest share of the U.S. economy. Small businesses make up 99.7% employer firms. Yet, 80% of entrepreneurs and small businesses who start will fail within the first 18 months.

This study defines the key success variables of the espoused culture for selected Fortune 500 companies that could be used by entrepreneurs and small businesses to emulate their continued successes. The method to define the key success variables was …

The Dissolution Of Effective Leadership: A Multiple-Case Study Analysis Of Destructive Leadership, Joshua B. Leonard

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Group Personality Composition On Project Team Performance: Operationalizations And Outcomes, Mark Collins

Doctoral Dissertations

Teams are used to achieve organizational goals and objectives, and their success has led to a broad increase in their use in businesses, non-profits and NGO’s. Extant research suggests that group personality composition is related to team performance (Barry and Stewart, 1996; Halfhill, Nielsen, Sundstrom, and Weilbaecher, 2005; Peeters, Rutte, Tuijl, and Reymen, 2006; Bell, 2007). Project teams are frequently used in the business world and undertake a wide variety of tasks (Hackman, 1990). This paper investigates the relationship between the group personality composition of project teams and team performance. The study context is project teams involved in a semester-long …

The Implications Of Distance And Envy In Organizations: An Exploration Of Leader-Member Exchange And Organizational Citizenship Behaviors, Taylor K. Odle

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Multilingual Reality In American Business, Zachary Z. Lim

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Relationship Of Personality To Entrepreneurial Performance: An Examination Of Openness To Experience Facets, Adam R. Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

The role of personality has resurfaced in entrepreneurship research. The results surrounding the broad personality traits have varied. Although openness to experience has been found to generally have a positive relationship with entrepreneurial intentions and performance (e.g., Zhao, Seibert, & Lumpkin, 2010), conflicting and inconsistent results have emerged (e.g., Baron & Markman, 2004; Ciaverella, Buchholtz, Riordan, Gatewood, & Stokes, 2004). Therefore, an in-depth look at the facets of openness to experience may offer additional information.

The present investigation used a sample of founder/owners and examined the facets of openness to: fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, and values. Specifically, it was …

Marketing Opportunities For Small-Scale Organic Wine Producers In Slovenia: Proposing A Wine Cluster Model, Maja Djorcev

Masters Theses

The organic wine sector provides high quality artisan products as well as public goods and services and is gaining an importance in a global context. As such, this approach to wine production is seen as a potentially significant source of economic development and an initiator of change in local, rural areas. However, despite recent growing public and scientific interest in alternative approaches farming, organic wine production is still poorly researched.

This thesis focuses on examining the characteristics, challenges, and goals of the organic wine sector in Slovenia through the eyes of ten participant winemakers. Each participant winemaker is a small-scale …

Integrity, Self-Control, And The Impact Of Ego Depletion On Counterproductive Behavior, Joshua D. Bazzy

Doctoral Dissertations

Although integrity has been found to significantly predict job performance and counterproductive behaviors, the constructs that underlie it have remained unclear. Personality, specifically conscientiousness, has been linked to integrity most consistently, but only accounts for a small amount of integrity’s variance. Research points to a relationship between integrity and self-control, but this has not been investigated.

The present investigation examined the nature and implications of this relationship. Results found that self-control contributed significantly to the variance in integrity beyond conscientiousness and the other dimensions of personality. Indeed, the addition of self-control to the model, essentially eliminated conscientiousness as a significant …

Cognitive Style Diversity In Decision Making Teams, Abby Lynn Mello

Doctoral Dissertations

Rational and intuitive cognitive styles represent two typical manners of acquiring, organizing, and processing information. Rational style is data-driven, slow, and detailed. Intuitive style is feelings-driven, fast, and global. People have a stable preference for one style over the other and style underlies such processes as decision making (Leonard, Scholl, & Kowalski, 1999). The present study took the perspective that cognitive style is an individual difference upon which members of a decision making team may vary and that diversity in cognitive style is related to team processes and outcomes. Specifically, it was hypothesized that diversity in cognitive style would increase …

Development Of An Organizational Hardiness Construct: Examining Configurations Of Sensemaking, Organizational Identity, And Enactment., Joshua Lloyd Ray

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to develop the construct of organizational hardiness which is thought to distinguish organizations that thrive under conditions of turbulence and uncertainty from organizations that whither under these same conditions. This new construct is based on individual hardiness which is a constellation of personality dispositions that a large body of empirical work has suggested supports individual performance under conditions of turbulence and uncertainty. Paralleling the individual hardiness dispositions of challenge, commitment, and control, organizational hardiness is posited to consist of the organizational level constructs of sensemaking, organizational identification, and enactment. The development of organizational hardiness …

Complex Adaptive Systems Theory Applied To Virtual Scientific Collaborations: The Case Of Dataone, Arsev Umur Aydinoglu

Doctoral Dissertations

This study is the exploration of the emergence of DataONE, a multidisciplinary, multinational, and multi-institutional virtual scientific collaboration to develop a cyberinfrastructure for earth sciences data, from the complex adaptive systems perspective. Data is generated through conducting 15 semi-structured interviews, observing three 3-day meetings, and 51 online surveys. The main contribution of this study is the development of a complexity framework and its application to a project such as DataONE. The findings reveal that DataONE behaves like a complex adaptive system: various individuals and institutions interacting, adapting, and coevolving to achieve their own and common goals; during the process new …

Professional Preparation Of The Ncaa Division I Athletic Director: An Occupational Framework, Jeffrey Charles Spenard

Masters Theses

The study collected occupational data from the 99 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I membership institutions head athletic directors. The purpose of this study was to identify common professional preparation and occupational characteristics among NCAA Division I athletic directors. Through issuing an electronic survey, the current study identified common characteristics and themes among Division I athletic directors specifically within the socio-demographical background, educational background, professional experience and career progression, and career and job satisfaction. The study also provided demographic information about the participant’s institutional athletic department. The necessity of this study is not due directly to the current lack …

Identifying Types Of Teaching And Learning In An Informal Community Of Practice, Shalane Balfour Navorska

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to identify indicators of three different types of teaching and learning used within an informal community of practice. Peters and Armstrong’s (1998) article, Collaborative learning: People laboring together to construct knowledge, served as the basis for this case study, which expanded upon the types of teaching and learning as a framework for understanding practitioners’ interactions within communities of practice (CoP). No other research has comparatively examined these three types of teaching and learning, or examined the types of teaching and learning as a framework for understanding interactions within CoPs.

Eight members of a CoP …

Generational Perceptions Of Productive/Unproductive Information Received From Management Through Different Communication Channels, Eva Lynn Cowell

Doctoral Dissertations

This exploratory study identified generational preferences for receiving information from management through different communication channels and determined if age predicted productivity for productive and unproductive information received through different communication channels. This is the first study to empirically examine the relationship between age cohorts, communication channel preferences, information categories, and productivity. Sample participants worked as Extension agents at a major land-grant university. The four generations represented in the sample utilized multiple communication channels and were geographically dispersed throughout the state. The survey was administered electronically and completed by 204 (74%) of the eligible 275 employees in the organization. Independent Samples …

Local Financial Services Innovation: Local Management, Strategy And Change; A Field Investigation, Ann Catherine Nave

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.