Business Commons^™

Influencing Air Force Logisticians' Information Seeking During The Covid-19 Pandemic: The Role Of Organizational Meetings In An Expanded Prism Framework, Matthew D. Roberts, Christopher T. Price, Seong-Jong Joo

Faculty Publications

Purpose: This research aims to understand how organizational workplace meetings surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic impacted logistics Airmen across the United States Air Force and how these meetings impacted their risk seeking behavior on social media.

Design/methodology/approach: This survey research tested an extended Planned Risk Information Risk Seeking Model (PRISM) with organizational meetings as an antecedent to determine if current meetings influenced an Airman's perceived behavioral control, attitude toward seeking, subjective norms, knowledge sufficiency and intention to seek information regarding COVID-19.

Findings: Results of the CFA showed that the expanded PRISM model had good model fit. Additionally, using …

The Effects Of Team Surface-Level Diversity On Creativity & Innovation, Roman Mitchell

Faculty Publications

During the last 20 years, the global marketplace has become more competitive due to increased globalization, aggressive market competition, and changing customer demands. This has forced organizations to assemble teams with diverse knowledge, skills, and abilities to remain competitive. However, previous meta-analytic investigations examining the relationship between team surface-level diversity (i.e., race or gender identity), creativity, and innovation have indicated a small negative relationship. Despite the said positive effects of team diversity, theory and empirical evidence suggests that increased surface-level team diversity leads to decreased team collaboration, team cohesion, and diminished creativity and innovation (Bell, 2007).

This study explores the …

National Income Inequality And International Business Expansion, Nathaniel C. Lupton, Guoliang Frank Jiang, Luis F. Escobar, Alfredo Jiménez

Faculty Publications

We examine the extent to which host country income inequality influences multinational enterprises’ (MNE) expansion strategy for foreign production investment, depending on their specific strategic objectives. Applying a transaction cost framework, we predict that national income inequality has an inverted U-shaped relationship with foreign production investment. As inequality increases, MNEs accrue lower transaction costs arising from interactions with various local actors, leading to higher probability of investment. As income inequality increases further, its effect on location attractiveness will become negative, as its attraction effect is increasingly offset by additional monitoring, bargaining, and security costs owing to the more fractious nature …

The Impact Of Innovative Executive Servant Leadership On Organizational Citizenship, And Organizational Cynicism, Jerry L. Chi, Grace Chi, Nile M. Khanfar, Gabriel Gao, Belal A. Kaifi

Faculty Publications

Have you ever wondered how your employees complained to their friends about how things happened in your organization? The most challenging part for Servant Leadership is to reduce organizational cynicism and nurture organizational citizenship. The major research interest for this study was to discover whether the bottom-up servant leadership theory to “serve” first and “lead” second can be truly practiced by the president of a university and whether it is valid and effective in reducing employee’s organizational cynicism and enhancing employee’s organizational citizenship. The results showed that the goodness of fit (GFI) was good and sufficient and adequate. The null …

Multi-Study Analysis Of Learning Culture, Human Capital And Operational Performance In Supply Chain Management: The Moderating Role Of Workforce Level, Robert E. Overstreet, Joseph B. Skipper, Joseph R. Huscroft Jr., Matt J. Cherry, Andrew L. Cooper

Faculty Publications

Purpose — The purpose of this study is to empirically evaluate the relationship between learning culture, workforce level, human capital and operational performance in two diverse supply chain populations, aircraft maintenance and logistics readiness. Design/methodology/approach — Drawing upon competence-based view of the firm and human capital theory, this paper analyzes data from two studies. Findings — The results provide support for the hypothesized model. Workforce level moderates the relationship between learning culture and human capital, and human capital partially mediates the relationship between learning culture and operational performance. Research limitations/implications — The findings have implications for behavioral supply chain management …

Innovation In Ill-Structured Decision-Making By Teams: Contributions Of What Members Say And Don’T Say And How They Are Related, Steven D. Silver

Faculty Publications

The contributions of both types of information that are exchanged and coaction in silence to innovation objectives of decision-making teams are considered. Ideation and idea generation are recognized as critical to innovation in decisions that are ill structured. We focus on coaction in silence and the conditions in interaction that are likely to facilitate idea generation. Integration of ideas and evaluations that are likely to contribute most to the quality of decisions are given explicit forms. Major contentions of the account are examined in experimental data.

Global Command And Control For The Future Operating Concept: Implications For Structural Design And Information, Ian M. Slazinik, Benjamin T. Hazen

Faculty Publications

Due to increasing demands on air mobility aircraft, US Transportation Command(USTRANSCOM) has more recently advocated retaining operational control (OPCON)of aircraft it might have transferred to a requesting combatant command in the past. This recent approach mirrors that of similar-type civilian logistics operations that are centrally managed to maximize efficiencies by flowing resources to the point of need without having to navigate through time-consuming sourcing processes. Furthermore, the acceleration of information availability has condensed decision timelines and changed how similar civilian organizations organize and perform, allowing them to react seemingly on a dime to changing market conditions anywhere.4While retaining OPCON might …

Organizational Structure And Knowledge-Practice Diffusion In The Mnc, Nathaniel C. Lupton, Paul Beamish

Faculty Publications

Purpose

This study aims to examine the interaction of formal and informal cross-border knowledge-sharing practices of four large multinational corporations (MNCs) in aerospace, software, IT services and telecommunications industries. The goal was to determine the manner in which coordination and control mechanisms facilitated knowledge transfer.

Design/methodology/approach

Case studies comprised secondary data and semi-structured interviews with corporate headquarters and subsidiary managers in large MNCs conducted in the USA, Canada, Mexico, China, India and Eastern Europe.

Findings

The primary finding of this study is that knowledge transfer mechanisms arise as a result of both formal and informal structures of the MNC. Formal …

The Mexican Idea Of Twoyear University Degrees: A Model Of Opportunities And Challenges, Gus Gregorutti

Faculty Publications

This study had the following general goals: a) Map some of the political and social factors that prompted the establishment of two-years Technological Universities in Mexico; b) Describe the main features of the model and how it differs from other models; c) Discuss Neoliberal Human Capital Theory as one of the main theoretical backdrop for expanding this kind of institutions; and finally, d) Assess the model’s strengths and weaknesses. To accomplish these goals, the study drew data from existing policies and from a set of six interviews to human resources directors in Monterrey area, Northern Mexico. These recruiters belonged to …

Zoom In, Zoom Out: How Global Context And Individual Preferences Impact Workplace Design, Jay Brand

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Managing Joint Ventures, Paul W. Beamish, Nathaniel C. Lupton

Faculty Publications

Joint ventures aid firms in accessing new markets, knowledge, capabilities, and other resources. Yet they can be challenging to manage, largely because they are owned by two or more parent companies. These companies may have competing or incongruent goals, differences in management style, and in the case of international business, additional complexities associated with differing government policies and business practices. We examine research on joint venture (JV) performance in order to identify prominent academic discussions established over the last 25 years. From this research, we draw implications from past research and areas for future research on successfully managing JVs, taking …

An Overview Of The Near-Death Experience Phenomenon, David San Filippo Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

Near-death experiences appear to be universal phenomena that have been reported for centuries. A near-death encounter is defined as an event in which the individual could very easily die or be killed, or may have already been considered clinically dead, but nonetheless survives, and continue his or her physical life. Reports of near-death experiences date back to the Ice Age. There are cave paintings, in France and Spain that depict possible after life scenes that are similar to reported scenes related to near-death experiences. Plato's Republic presents the story of a near-death experience of a Greek soldier named Er. In …

Outsourcing The Human Resource Function: Environmental And Organizational Characteristics That Affect Hr Performance, J. D. Lilly, D. A. Gray, Meghna Virick

Faculty Publications

A theoretical model is presented that identifies environmental and organizational characteristics that affect human resource (HR) performance in an organization. Specifically, we address the issue of when and under what circumstances does HR outsourcing contribute value to the firm by attempting to identify environmental and organizational characteristics that affect HR department performance and how HR outsourcing mediates that relationship. We propose that supplier competition in the HR provider market has a direct effect on the amount of HR outsourcing which in turn has a direct effect on HR performance. Environmental uncertainty (primary, competitive, and supplier) is proposed to moderate the …

Cost Overrun Optimism: Fact Or Fiction, David D. Christensen

Faculty Publications

Program managers are advocates by necessity, When taken to the extreme, program advocacy can result in the suppression of adverse information about the status of a program gram. Such was the case in the Navy's A-12 Program. In A-12 Administrative inquiry, Beach (1990) speculates that such abiding cultural problems were not unique to the Navy. To test that assertion, this paper examines cost overrun data on 64 completed acquisition contracts extracted from the Defense Acquisition Executive Summary database. Cost overruns at various contract completion points are compared with projected final cost overruns estimated by contractor and government personnel. 17 comparison …