Business Commons^™

A Portrait Of The Leadership Of Women In Early Christianity: An Archaeological Study In Light Of The Historical And Socio-Cultural Contexts, Carina Prestes

Dissertations

Problem

The participation of women in the Early Christian communities is widely accepted. Nevertheless, there is no consensus on what was their role in these communities. Until now the study of women in the Early Christian communities has focused mostly in the writings of some ancient authors and a few biblical texts. These studies have been done mostly by theologians and historians. Such studies rarely take a deep look at the Greco-Roman background and at the historical, socio-cultural contexts. This contextualization can be quite fruitful and should be informed by recent archaeological discoveries of the first centuries of Christianity. Thus, …

Twitter Sentiment Analysis: Applications In Healthcare And Finance, Jiali Wang

Dissertations

This research explores the influence of Twitter sentiment on healthcare and finance industries. It assesses how Twitter sentiment and culture measure influence COVID-19 statistics, and it investigates the impact of Twitter sentiment on S&P 1500 stock mispricing. Furthermore, it examines how tweet sentiment predicts major industry returns.

The first part examines how Hofstede’s Culture Dimensions (HCD) and Twitter economic uncertainty index (TEU) relate to COVID-19 infection rate and death rate. The results show certain aspects in HCD, such as power distance index (PDI) and masculinity (MAS) both are negatively and significantly associated with the infection rate, while indulgence (IVR) and …

Psychological Capital And Perceived Employability: Exploring Women Veterans’ Military-To-Civilian Career Transition, Tundra Gatewood

Dissertations

The veteran human capital remains integral to the U.S. workforce and sustainment of its competitive advantage (Carter, Schafer, et al., 2017). Women constitute 17% of 1.4 million servicemembers and 10% of 18.4 million veterans, with a projected population growth of 18% by 2040 (Defense Manpower Data Center [DMDC], 2021; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020a). Each year, an estimated 30,000 ex-servicewomen enter the national labor force (National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics, 2019; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020a). Most of these ex-servicemembers turned veterans must navigate the military-civilian divide and negotiate their economic worth in highly divergent and …

Strategic Human Resource Management Practice Integration And Organizational Ambidexterity In Vuca Times, Gizzatta Cook

Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The failure rate of business strategy implementation hovers around 50% due to a lack of organizational ambidexterity in the realities associated with a four-dimensional paradigm referred to as a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment (Chattopadhyay et al., 2017). Anwar and Abdullah (2021) state that organizational success depends highly on how well organizational leaders manage and administer their human resource management practices. Today's successful organizations must adapt to societal changes to survive and thrive (Chattopadhyay et al., 2017).

Surviving and thriving beyond today’s organizational constraints also involves a business's ability to demonstrate organizational ambidexterity. Organizational ambidexterity is the …

Social Class And Employability: Equalizing Perceived Competence And Warmth To Control Biased Decision-Making During Resumé Screening, Mindy Gambino

Dissertations

Implicit bias during the resumé screening process can adversely impact the ability of an organization to achieve a competitive advantage through human capital (Coff & Kryscynski, 2011). The purpose of this study was to determine if teaching resumé screeners how to control biased decision-making during resumé screening results in equal employability ratings for upper-middle and lower-middle-class applicants. The study used a quantitative, causal, quasi-experimental, single-group pretest-post-test design. The target population was people in the United States who screen resumés as part of their current job duties (Thomas, 2018). The researcher used Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to recruit participants.

Participants received …

A Bright Idea: Assessing Stakeholder Impact Of Social Sustainability Strategies, Sara Theis

Dissertations

The performing arts industry is experiencing an awakening in terms of the need to integrate inclusion, diversity, equity, and access (IDEA) into their practices. This is the result of calls for change in the industry from members of historically marginalized communities. The challenge is that in order for social sustainability strategies like IDEA to be effective, they need to integrate them into the organization’s culture (Serafeim, 2020). IDEA cannot be a checklist. Using stakeholder theory and resource-based view as theoretical foundations, this qualitative case study examines one exemplary organization that has differentiated on social sustainability for decades. In 27 open …

A Longitudinal Study On The Impact Of Occupational Health And Safety Practices On Employee Productivity At Sibca Llc, Maryam Ibrahim Mohamed Hussain Lari

Dissertations

Occupational health and safety (OHS) refer to practices that businesses use to proactively ensure the health and safety of employees. OHS scholars believe companies can use such practices to improve the health and safety of their organization and employee productivity. This study assesses how OHS practices can impact employee productivity at SIBCA LLC, a UAE-based company. It employed a longitudinal research design with pre- and post-intervention data collection to determine the effect of OHS practices on employee productivity. The study sample comprised 293 SIBCA LLC employees. Participants completed the same questionnaire twice, and productivity data were collected twice, 13 months …

Key Internal Factors Affecting Safety Performance In The Aviation Industry, Yasser Salah Elyan

Dissertations

Continuously improving aviation safety and enhancing its performance at both the organizational and individual levels is always considered a high priority by the aviation industry in all sectors. In addition, governments and aviation regulatory authorities have put significant efforts into creating a safety culture with clear safety practices at all levels of the organization. Moreover, international aviation organizations and associations worldwide have established safety standards, guidelines, and management systems that are essential to ensure the successful implementation of safety practices. However, based on the reviewed literature and the researcher's knowledge in this area, there is a clear perception gap concerning …

The Impact Of Performnace Scorecard On Drilling Operations Effectivness: The Case Of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), Adnan Mohamed Almenhali

Dissertations

The balanced scorecard (BSC) has been newly introduced to drilling operations. This research evaluates the impact of performance scorecard implementation on drilling operations in Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and the ability to develop and construct a new framework for performance scorecards. The oil and gas sector is critical to the UAE since it is one of the main sources of income driving the economy. UAE is one of the leaders in the region in oil and Gas production. As a result, studies to enhance the performance of the industry and UAE companies are critical for overall economic wellbeing. …

The Impact Of Ecosystem Drivers On Investor Satisfaction In Dubai's Hospitality Industry For Destination Competitiveness And Investment Attraction, Ayesha Mohammed Binlootah

Dissertations

The travel and tourism industry accounts for more than 10% of the global GDP and has become a driver for foreign investments and destination competitiveness. The main objective of this dissertation is to examine the impact of ecosystem drivers (i.e., [C] Core Resources and Attractors, [S] Supporting Factors and Resources, [D] Destination Management, [P] Destination Policy, Planning and Development, and [Q] Qualifying and Amplifying Determinants) on Investor Satisfaction in Dubai's hospitality industry to achieve destination competitiveness for investment attraction. As part of the methodology, a partial least square is used to assess the interaction and impact of the ecosystem drivers …

Towards A Revised Model For Cpa Firm Ownership And Compensation In A Tight Labor Market And A Changing Culture, Andrew Thomas

Dissertations

The Post Senior Manager (PSM) position is a relatively new development in accounting firms. PSMs are accountants who do not make partner either by personal choice or firm decision. Research relating to PSMs in large firms has indicated that demographics, especially gender, work-life balance issues, managerial skill, and geographic preferences, play a role in determining who becomes a PSM. Research also notes that PSMs are viewed as economically vital to firms since their high skill level and billed hours represent an essential component of firm revenue. At the same time, research notes that PSMs are often viewed unfavorably for not …

Corporate Tax Avoidance And Fraud Risk, Zhonghua Cao

Dissertations

Corporate Tax Avoidance and Fraud Risk

There is mixed evidence on whether corporate tax avoidance (CTA) is positively or negatively related to aggressive financial reporting. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) requires that auditors assess fraud risks that are related to aggressive financial reporting. In this study I extend the research of CTA by examining the relationship between CTA and fraud risk. I use accrual quality related variables, performance variables, and non-financial measures (NFMs) to measure fraud risk. Drawing on agency theory and fraud risk triangle theory, I find that CTA is positively related to fraud risk. However, I …

A Digital Leadership Lens For A Physical World: Digital Transformation Levers Of Control For Incumbent Companies, Michael J. Seals

Dissertations

A new wave of advanced technologies is disrupting companies of all types and transforming business models within every industry. Long-standing industrial firms that rose to prominence in a pre-digital economy are particularly vulnerable. Prevailing views suggest these companies (hereafter referred to as incumbents) must reimagine their value propositions and transform themselves by leveraging today’s advanced technologies. The opportunities provided by these advanced technologies will significantly affect incumbents whether they participate or not. The pursuit of these opportunities, commonly referred to as digital transformation (DX), is the focus of our research.

Traditional technology-enabled business endeavors creating incremental operational improvements fell within …

Optimizing Incentives For Systems With Heterogeneous Agents, Chen Chen

Dissertations

This dissertation explores new models and applications based on the game theory of incentives. This exploration starts with controlling an invasive insect problem to address one of the most significant challenges facing our forests, the invasion of the Emerald ash borer (EAB), a non-native, wood-boring insect that threatens to kill most ash trees in North America, through designing two new cost-sharing programs between the landowners and local governments. Ash trees are one of North America’s most widely distributed tree genera and a vital part of the green infrastructure of cities, where they provide residents with numerous social, economic, and ecological …

Passive Interpretable Deep Learning From Cell Phone Activity For Optimal Patient Care, Pelin Ayranci

Dissertations

The majority of individuals in need of mental healthcare fail to seek it, and the diagnosis of those who do is driven predominantly by the patient's subjective self-assessment. There is a need for mental illnesses trackers that measure psychological and physiological symptoms and provide alerts and interpretable data for therapeutic interventions. We present a system that complements existing protocols to detect distress in mental health, passively monitor patients, and quickly alert authorized parties on possible mental health distress. We evaluate modeling a person's mental health from the sensors and activity logs of her/his cell phone using logistic regressions, LSTM, and …

Critical Mass Of Women On Biotech Corporate Boards And Its Implication For Firm Performance: A Mixed Method Explanatory Sequential Study, Shesh Sharma

Dissertations

This study examined the influence of demographic, functional, and cognitive diversities on firm performance of North American Biotech companies using a mixed method explanatory sequential approach. One-year cross-sectional data of 100 companies was analyzed followed by purposeful semistructured interviews with eight board members from the dataset. The combined results resolved several ambiguities present in the literature regarding board selection, composition, and the correlation of board diversity with firm performance. This study used the well-known market-based financial metric Tobin’s Q to measure firm performance.

The quantitative results showed a dichotomous relationship between gender ratio and Tobin’s Q based on a theoretically …

A Managerial Ecosystem For Excellence In Hospital Administration, Denish Gangasingh

Dissertations

Major healthcare systems and hospital organizations face a myriad of challenges in today’s business environment, having to provide very complex and more comprehensive medical care with fewer resources. In this study, we investigate determinants of hospital performance in critical dimensions and propose an information infrastructure intended to promote excellence in clinical performance while sustaining a solid financial footing.

Senior executives must be knowledgeable in both business and clinical aspects of hospital administration because their decisions ultimately affect patient care and clinical outcomes. Key performance indicators (KPI) are necessary on both dimensions to inform their decisions. Financial and operational aspects of …

Marching Forward: A Qualitative Examination Of Adapting Enlisted Veteran Leadership Skills In The Corporate Environment, Casey W. Jensen

Dissertations

planning, resource utilization, and conforming to corporate policies all required adaptation. Veterans primarily adapt their leadership skills through internal and external networking, mentors, coaches, managing and resetting expectations, and understanding light and dark ambiguity. The theoretical contributions of this research are in paternalistic leadership and veteran enlisted research. The practical implications assist veterans in understanding how to adapt and strategies to adapt their skills. In addition, managers and peers may use this research to understand veterans' challenges better when leaving military service. Next, talent acquisition professionals can use this research to better identify military veteran candidates for specific roles and …

Relationship Of Leader-Member Exchange On Role Stress And Burnout: A Public Accounting Perspective, Sammie Parsley

Dissertations

An issue that concerns public accounting firms, both large and small, is that of employee burnout within the workplace. As a service-oriented industry, accommodating client needs is pivotal to long-term success. With that in mind, meeting client demands often means accountants must work long and strenuous hours, an attribute inherent to the industry. Consequently, public accounting firms often find themselves struggling with voluntary turnover as a result of burnout and opportunity for increased financial incentives elsewhere. The busy season in public accounting can be especially difficult, as accountants can find themselves working very long hours for weeks on end. This …

Factors Influencing The Adoption Of Smart-Home Appliances: Users' Perspectives, Prakash Shahi

Dissertations

Smart appliances will be a significant part of the annual $300 billion smart-home market by 2025. Their use is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 31% for the foreseeable future. Currently, 12-16% of households use smart-home products in the U.S., including thermostats, TVs, refrigerators, coffee machines, garage door openers, and vision-equipped doorbells. Smart appliances provide significant benefits to us over traditional appliances. Smart appliances simplify our lives by automating various tasks in our homes and allowing us to monitor and control them remotely from our offices, grocery stores, and wherever we may be.

Despite the usefulness …

The Impact Of Emotional Intelligence On The Leadership Of Chief Human Resources Officers In The California Community Colleges System, Tonya Davis

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the perceptions of chief human resources officers (CHROs) in the California Community Colleges System regarding the impact of emotional intelligence (EI) on their leadership in four areas: self- awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

Methodology: This qualitative phenomenological study described the lived experiences of CHROs as those experiences relate to the impact of EI on their leadership. A random sample was selected from the target population of 24 CHROs located in the Central and Southern Regions of California. The instrumentation used in the study was semistructured interview questions adapted …

Lean Accounting: A Connection To Strategic Partnership & Collaboration Between Management Accountants And Operations Managers, Colleen Mpofu

Dissertations

Technological advances, such as automation and artificial intelligence, have transformed the accounting profession. There is a consensus in the academic and practitioner literature that management accountants must move from their traditional role into one that serves as a strategic partner. However, literature that examines how management accountants have moved from this traditional role to one that is more strategic is limited. This study combines concepts from three different literature streams to explore how utilizing lean accounting practices relate to management accountant’s participation in strategic decision making, partnership with operations managers, and overall operational performance in manufacturing firms utilizing a lean …

Entrepreneurship And Heterogeneity Among Firms' Strategies: Three Essays, Xi Zhang

Dissertations

The first essay of this dissertation focuses on the entrepreneurship survival in the early stage, during which time an entrepreneur plays the game at the "edge of chaos" and improvises in real-time to learn the strategic playing field. It examines the social networks of entrepreneurs and the impact on new venture survival. Specifically, it explores how the entrepreneurs' social connections with other entrepreneurs and their types of employment differentially affect survival during the different stages of the entrepreneurial journey in the United States and India. Using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) dataset, this study documents not only how the social …

Representation Learning In Finance, Ajim Uddin

Dissertations

Finance studies often employ heterogeneous datasets from different sources with different structures and frequencies. Some data are noisy, sparse, and unbalanced with missing values; some are unstructured, containing text or networks. Traditional techniques often struggle to combine and effectively extract information from these datasets. This work explores representation learning as a proven machine learning technique in learning informative embedding from complex, noisy, and dynamic financial data. This dissertation proposes novel factorization algorithms and network modeling techniques to learn the local and global representation of data in two specific financial applications: analysts’ earnings forecasts and asset pricing.

Financial analysts’ earnings forecast …

Graph Enabled Cross-Domain Knowledge Transfer, Shibo Yao

Dissertations

The world has never been more connected, led by the information technology revolution in the past decades that has fundamentally changed the way people interact with each other using social networks. Consequently, enormous human activity data are collected from the business world and machine learning techniques are widely adopted to aid our decision processes. Despite of the success of machine learning in various application scenarios, there are still many questions that need to be well answered, such as optimizing machine learning outcomes when desired knowledge cannot be extracted from the available data. This naturally drives us to ponder if one …

Learning To Fly: The Impact Of Project-Based Learning On Development Of The 4cs In The Elementary Grades, Deborah Francois

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to investigate the impact of project-based learning on K-5 students’ development of the 4Cs (Critical Thinking, Communication, Creativity, Collaboration) as perceived by elementary charter school teachers.

Methodology: A phenomenological design was selected to address the research questions for this study. Through purposeful sampling, 12 charter elementary teachers who met a pre-determined set of criteria (including the routine integration of project-based learning within their instructional programs) were selected to participate in virtual, semi-structured interviews. All teachers were employed by charter schools located in six counties within California. The interviews were conducted using …

Executive Peer Advisory Groups: Who They Are? What Are Their Benefits? Why Do Members Join And Stay?, Andrew Feghali

Dissertations

Executive peer advisory groups (EPAGs) are exclusive organizations in which chief executive officers (CEOs) and presidents of businesses can problem solve business challenges, discuss business strategies, share best practices, and solve critical growth and performance issues. Executive peer advisory groups are based on the premise that the collective experience and resources of peer groups empower like-minded executives to solve challenges more effectively and more rapidly than they could do on their own. A key component of EPAGs is the forum, in which six to 16 members meet, typically monthly, in small-group sessions to function as each other’s personal advisory boards. …

Examining And Exploring Social Constructs, Conflict Management Style, And Workplace Conflict Among Workers In The United States, Keith Boyd

Dissertations

This mixed-methods study explored social constructs, conflict management style (CMS), and workplace conflict among workers in the United States. Workers do not understand the connections between social constructs, CMS, and workplace conflict. A lack of information on workers' experiences and representation in conflict literature supports the gap in understanding (Aquino, 2000; Bourdieu, 1986; Hayes, 2008; Herr & Anderson, 2005; Lin, 2001; Long, 2007; Meng et al., 2019; Mertens, 2003, 2009, 2018; Sosa, 2019). The study used a transformative-emancipatory explanatory sequential design focused on workers. There were 82 convenience sample participant surveys and 12 purposive sample low-level cooperativeness CMS participant interviews …

Examining Workplace Elearning Programs Using Persuasive Learning Design: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study, David Akanbi

Dissertations

eLearning platforms have become the primary method for employee development in organizations (Dellagiacoma et al., 2020). This shift from the in-person approach has increased resources and budget allocation for authoring software applications needed to develop interactive eLearning programs (Kshirsagar et al., 2020). Despite spending a considerable amount of money on eLearning authoring software, there are concerns that most workplace eLearning programs do not achieve the desired outcomes (Jones, 2016; Patel, 2017; Sidhu, 2019). Although studies show that eLearning programs have effectively enhanced learning transfer, the same studies suggest that employees do not retain information in some eLearning programs (Dellagiacoma et …

Digital Equity: Difficulties Of Implementing The 1:1 Computing Initiative In Low-Income Areas, Demetric D. Williams

Dissertations

Successful One-to-One Computing Initiative implementation requires educators to communicate and collaborate effectively with everyone in the learning community. However, other factors such as teacher’s professional development, student’s perception, and parent’s perception often affect the implementation of the One-to-One Computing Initiative. School districts, which serve low-income areas in Mississippi, have difficulties ensuring students and communities have access to the information technology they need to participate outside the school setting. The concept is often called digital equity. However, when officials do not address the capacity, there is a vital threat to the participants’ civic, cultural, employment, lifelong learning, and access to essential …