Business Commons^™

Strategic Audit Of Spreetail, Aryn Huck

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This report investigates the history and current situation of Spreetail, a local ecommerce company in Lincoln, Nebraska. The company faces several challenges going forward, including determining how to best compete with large companies in the same market such as Amazon. This report looks at Spreetail’s current standing using tools such as SWOT and PEST analyses and examines the company’s competitive analysis. Spreetail is recommended to speed up its rebranding process to maintain the benefits of the more fitting name and rebranding efforts already underway.

Assessing The Validity Of Emotional Intelligence Measures, Christopher T. H. Miners, Stéphane Cote, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We describe an approach that enables a more complete evaluation of the validity of emotional intelligence measures. We argue that a source of evidence for validity is often overlooked by researchers and test developers, namely, evidence based on response processes. This evidence can be obtained through (a) a definition of the ability, (b) a description of the mental processes that operate when a person uses the ability, (c) the development of a theory of response behaviour that links variation in the construct with variation on the responses to the items of a measure, and (d) a test of the theory …

Utilization Of Csr To Build Organizations’ Corporate Image In Asia: Need For An Integrative Approach, Augustine Pang, May O. Lwin, Chrystal Shu-Min Ng, Ying-Kai Ong, Shannon Rose Wing-Ching Chau, Kristle Poh-Sim Yeow

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been found to be a strong predictor of a favorable corporate image [Gray, 1986. Managing the corporate image: The key to public trust. London: Quorum Books]. Websites have become an essential communication platform [Dawkins, 2004. Corporate responsibility: The communication challenge. Journal of Communication Management, 9(2), 108–119]. This study aims to investigate how CSR can be used in enhancing organizational corporate image. Content analyses of 150 corporate websites of organizations in Asia headquartered in Singapore were conducted, followed by in-depth interviews with public relations (PR) practitioners to examine the motivations behind their CSR engagement. Findings showed …

The Macroeconomic Environment And The Psychology Of Work Evaluation, Nina Sirola, Marko Pitesa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This research tested the idea that the perception of the state of the macroeconomic environment impacts the psychology underlying an essential organizational function: The evaluation of employees’ work and the associated promotion and demotion decisions. We predicted that when the macroeconomic environment is perceived to be more (less) prosperous, people’s generalized sense of the extent to which individuals have control over outcomes increases (decreases), leading them to attribute more (less) responsibility for work outcomes to individuals rather than contextual influences. In Study 1, we tested this theory using data from 124,400 respondents surveyed across 57 countries and 19 years and …

Two Applications Of Financial Economics To Real Estate, Jeffrey Dibartolomeo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My first essay examines the effects of dividend policy on the liquidity risk of REITs. I argue that the mandatory high cash payouts of REITs reduce investor reliance on the stock market to satisfy their liquidity needs. Using a sample of equity REITs from 1980 through 2015, I find strong empirical evidence consistent with this paradigm. Unlike non-REIT property companies, I find REITs exhibit negative sensitivity to marketwide liquidity shocks; a result that is evident across most property type sectors. Moreover, while my findings are robust across a wide range of portfolios based on size, dividend frequency, leverage, market-to-book, operations …

A Study Of The Soft Skills That Contribute To The Success Of Newly Graduated Business Students In The Workplace, Promeet Jaswant Singh

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This quantitative study is focused on assessing the soft skills that newly graduated business students possess. Using the first and only skills inventory in the United States that has been endorsed by Department of Labor, the study seeks to determine what sets employees apart based on their level of performance on the job. The main purpose was to assess and interpret the soft skills that employees bring to the workplace soon after graduating. The population for the current study was human resources professionals from a variety of industry sectors in the state of Minnesota. The businesses represented a range of …

Operational Research: Multi-Period Stowage Policies Within A Multi-Zone Storage Framework., Joseph Loeffler

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This paper will be extending the single period stowage decision model presented by [Yuan, 2017] into a multi-period stowage decision model. The stowage decision determines how incoming items are distributed and stored across multiple storage zones. The amount of items that can be picked in any given storage zone is finite within a single time period. With this constraint, this research attempts to optimize how items are stored across many zones to meet uncertain demand requirements. A simulation study will be performed to compare the stowage policies given by [Yuan, 2017] to see how well they generalize to multi-period model. …

Online Doctoral Students At A Faith-Based University: Concerns Of Online Education, Kelly Price-Rhea, Julia Price, Deborah Hayes

ETSU Faculty Works

Online doctoral education enrollment continues to rise, and the number of academic institutions who offer the degrees are increasing proportionately. Various types of institutions are involved in this growth, including those that are faith-based. Due to the competitive nature of all online doctoral degrees, including faith-based and secular programs, it is imperative to understand the needs and concerns of the students who enroll in such programs. Students enrolled in a faith-based university online doctoral program were surveyed regarding their concerns about online doctoral education. The results revealed three main themes of concerns/non-concerns, and these results could be beneficial to faith-based …

Social Media Usages In Small Not-For-Profit Organizations, Sarah Nolan

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

Effective social media management takes time, effort, and intentionality. Small not-for-profit organizations would benefit from doing this, but often have difficulty with being able to do so. In order to find out how small not-for-profit organizations use their social media and how social media could best be used to accomplish their mission, the following research questions were asked: What communications policies and procedures are followed by small not-for-profits organizations? Are the current social media practices of these organizations effective? What are the primary needs of these organizations in terms of social media and how can they be addressed?

In order …

Municipal Responses To The Shifting Environment Of Shopping Mall Retail, Paul Kleier Iii

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

Economic development is a vital local government responsibility because it guides the provision of jobs for residents, markets for the purchase of goods, and revenue for the government itself. Shopping malls have been key drivers of local economic activity for decades, but their viability going forward has become uncertain since the turn of the century. This paper considers both reasons for this uncertainty and strategies that have been or can be implemented to improve mall sustainability and profitability. While literature addressing this topic focuses almost exclusively on the role played by mall management, this paper places special emphasis on the …

Great Score! But What About Her Hair? – When Performance Isn’T Enough, Kelly Price-Rhea

ETSU Faculty Works

Dr. Kelly Price analyzes key research confirming that elite female athletes including pro tour golfers are still judged on their physical attractiveness and social behaviors.

The Cpa Exam Is Changing: Are The Professors Ready?, Michelle S. Freeman

ETSU Faculty Works

Accounting professors will now be accountable for teaching their students to think critically, analyze, and evaluate information. The pressure to change accounting higher education cannot be ignored with the new version of the CPA exam, released in April 2017, which now tests analysis and evaluation skills. Have the professors made the changes in their classrooms that will help their students to be successful with this format of questioning? This research seeks to find whether professors have indeed embraced pedagogy that will enhance students’ ability to develop higher order thinking skills. The study begins by explaining changes to the CPA exam. …

What Do We Know About Celebrity Endorsement In Advertising?, John B. Ford

Marketing Faculty Publications

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within issue on topics including source-credibility theory and its impact on brand performance for celebrity endorsements, celebrity in advertising can influence consumer perceptions and market value of celebrity endorsement.

Digesting The Disaster: Understanding The Boom Of Refugee Food Entrepreneurship In The Face Of Increasing Xenophobia, Sonia De Mello

Scripps Senior Theses

Over the last few years, we are seeing an emergence of new food entrepreneurship across the globe. In the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, these food-related social enterprises are not only providing job opportunities to refugees but they are also increasing awareness about their cause and creating new narratives surrounding their arrival. This present study seeks to contribute to the knowledge surrounding refugees and entrepreneurship by explaining how several refugee food enterprises have gained great popularity despite greater nationalism and xenophobia. In the analysis of food entrepreneurship, one finds that this phenomenon is able to partly fill the void …

The Vendor In A Retail Setting: A Survey, Jesse Laporte

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

We consider the problem of managing nonperishable inventory as a vendor in a grocer setting. To manage inventory effectively, we must meet the demand of our customers as closely as we can. Too much inventory results in holding costs and ties up a large amount of capital and too little inventory results in lost sales or substitution. It is typical in a retail setting for the vendor to have access to past ordering data, but this data is only representative of the demand when we have sufficient inventory. Otherwise, the demand exceeds the inventory on hand and we lose, in …

Symptomatic Leadership In Business Instruction: How To Finally Teach Diversity And Inclusion For Lasting Change, Linda L. Ridley

Publications and Research

Are business faculty complicit in mythologizing business concepts by ignoring historical precedence?

The refusal to examine in totality the history of discrimination and racism allows us to perpetuate a mythology of white supremacy that is enhanced through impotent diversity programs repeated throughout corporate America. This paper examines the importance of demythologizing the business curriculum through symptomatic thinking, which allows faculty and students to untangle the quagmire of diversity and inclusion in corporate America. Students are thereby equipped with tools for behavior transformation in the workplace that uses a symptomatic, rather than symbolic approach, to decision making and problem solving.

Toward Understanding The Role Of Web 2.0 Technology In Self-Directed Learning And Job Performance, Shirley J. Caruso

Literacy, Leadership, and Development Faculty Publications

This paper serves as an exploration and thick description of job performance outcomes based upon the manner in which self-directed learning activities of employees are conducted, mediated by the use of Web 2.0 technologies in organizational settings. It provides a collective view of the role that Web 2.0 technology plays in self-directed workplace learning and job performance outcomes to benefit employees, organizations, and human resource development professionals. To expand further the knowledge base of adult learning and self-directed learning activities, this paper places its focus on the role of Web 2.0 technology in adult learners’ engagement in self-directed learning. Part …

Re/Framing The Hispanic/Latino Nonprofit Identity, Jasmine Villa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The focus of my Dissertation is to examine how an organizational identity is constructed rhetorically by three Hispanic/Latino based non-profit organization. By looking at how a non-profit organization's online presence contributes to the transformation of the organization as a public, we are able to see rhetoric as a discursive and material practice taking place.

Estimating The Optimal Cutoff Point For Logistic Regression, Zheng Zhang

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Binary classification is one of the main themes of supervised learning. This research is concerned about determining the optimal cutoff point for the continuous-scaled outcomes (e.g., predicted probabilities) resulting from a classifier such as logistic regression. We make note of the fact that the cutoff point obtained from various methods is a statistic, which can be unstable with substantial variation. Nevertheless, due partly to complexity involved in estimating the cutpoint, there has been no formal study on the variance or standard error of the estimated cutoff point.

In this Thesis, a bootstrap aggregation method is put forward to estimate the …

The Contribution Of Higher Education-Based Technology Start-Up Incubators To The Co-Production Of Knowledge, Innovation And Growth: Experiences From The Edge, Anthony Paul Buckley, Stephen Davis

Articles

Start-up incubators are one of a number of micropolicy interventions used by states to support their technology entrepreneurs. Since 2000, the number of incubators in the United States has almost trebled while that in Europe has more than doubled. This article outlines the challenges involved in attempting to evaluate the contribution of the higher education technology start-up incubator process. It advocates theory-based evaluation (TBE) methodology as a possible solution for effective evaluation (and policy learning) in complex research settings such as this, where a study is unable, for myriad reasons, to meet the stringent requirements of experimental research design. TBE …

Self-Concept Orientation And Organizational Identification: A Mediated Relationship, Chun Guo, Jane K. Miller, Melissa S. Woodard, Daniel J. Miller, Kirk D. Silvernail, Mehmet Devrim Aydin, Ana Heloisa Da Costa Lemos, Vilmante Kumpikaite-Valiuniene, Sundhir Nair, Paul Donnelly, Robert D. Marx, Linda M. Peters

Articles

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to test a mediated model of the relationship between self-concept orientation (individualist and collectivist) and organizational identification (OrgID, Cooper and Thatcher, 2010), with proposed mediators including the need for organizational identification (nOID, Glynn, 1998) as well as self-presentation concerns of social adjustment (SA) and value expression (VE, Highhouse et al., 2007).

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected from 509 participants in seven countries. Direct and mediation effects were tested using structural equation modeling (AMOS 25.0).

Findings

Individualist self-concept orientation was positively related to VE and collectivist self-concept orientation was positively related to nOID, VE …

Credit Union Loan Rate Determinants During The Post-2009 Expansion, Esmeralda Patricia Muniz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Credit union deposits have grown substantially in recent years. Given that, an increasing number of consumers and small businesses are joining credit unions as members. This study investigates the determinants of credit union loan rates during a period of economic expansion in the United States using fourth quarter 2015 data for 5,942 credit unions. Five different interest rate categories are analyzed using nine potential loan rate determinants. The results indicate that credit union loan rates tend to be lower when economies of scale exist, while high ratios for net charge-offs and operating costs cause interest rates to increase. Opposite of …

Technical Project Management: Union Of Systems Engineering Processes With Project Management Processes, Deyaaldeen M. Abusal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Today, most projects in technical fields utilize project management to complete projects as planned, and some of the projects utilize system engineering to cover the project in both technically and commercially. This Thesis investigates the relationship between Project Management (PM) and Systems Engineering (SE) to determine if a suitably professional level of management and level of quality can be achieved. When studying PM and SE separately and make a comparison between both, there is much overlap between these two mature fields. The project could be planned and completed solely by either process. This study combines both fields of Project Management …

Ministries Of Catholic Sisters In The Diocese Of Cleveland: Assessing Capacity And Opportunity In A Period Of Transition, Robert L. Fischer, Rong Bai

Faculty Scholarship

Catholic sisters have long played a vital role in addressing the needs of the poor, neglected, and vulnerable members of society. In northeast Ohio, sisters have been instrumental in the arenas of education, healthcare, social service, and advocacy. This research builds on research conducted in 2009 on the characteristics of the ministries of Catholic sisters. Using a survey approach, responses were collected from 358 Catholic Sisters in 12 religious orders, approximately 60 percent of the sisters living in the Diocese of Cleveland. The study explores sisters' current ministries (work and service), the plans for their ministries to continue, and their …

The Correlation Between Job Satisfaction And Turnover Intention In Small Business, Jane Ann Reukauf

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Employee turnover has been responsible for the failure of many small businesses in the United States. Business leaders do not always understand the reasons employees choose to leave an organization. This correlational study, grounded in Herzberg's 2-factor theory, examined the relationship between intrinsic employee job satisfaction, extrinsic employee job satisfaction, and employee turnover intention among employees in small businesses. Participants included 129 employees of a small business in Western New York. The Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire and Turnover Intention Survey were used to collect the data. The multiple regression analysis significantly predicted extrinsic employee turnover intentions, F(3, 103) = 25.687, p …

Improving Workers' Safety And Health In The Zimbabwean Mining And Quarrying Industry, Bernard Mabika

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Lack of effective occupational safety and health (OSH) strategies is a reason that

workplace accidents in the mining and quarrying industry remain high, making the

industry one of the riskiest operations worldwide. The purpose of this multiple case study

was to explore successful strategies mining and quarrying leaders in Zimbabwe used to

improve OSH. The key research question addressed successful strategies leaders in the

mining and quarrying industry use to improve employee occupational safety and health in

Zimbabwe. Six successful business leaders from 3 mining and quarrying mines in

Zimbabwe demonstrated an exception to unsafe practices, particularly through their

exceptional …

Small And Medium-Size Enterprise Owner Strategies For Invoice Factoring Financing, Winniefred Nabawanda

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) business owners influence the growth and development of sub-Saharan Africa and the welfare of its citizens. However, SME owners often lack the strategies to access and obtain invoice factoring financing to fund their businesses. Guided by the pecking order theory and the credit rationing theory, the purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies that 3 SME owners in Kenya used to access and obtain invoice factoring financing to fund their businesses. Data were collected from in-depth semistructured Skype interviews and organizational documents. Data were analyzed using the Krippendorff content analysis methodology. Member …

Impact Of Empowerment And Autonomy On The Nursing Director's Intent To Stay, Tiffany Bergquist

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Retention of nursing directors is important to the viability and success of the healthcare industry because they have a large impact on nursing job satisfaction, overall retention of nurses in an institution, productivity, and patient outcomes. Factors that retain nurse directors, such as autonomy and empowerment, appear to be important to job satisfaction, but there is little in the current research to corroborate these findings. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine what factors impact nursing directors' intent to stay in their current role and what effect role autonomy and empowerment have on their intent to stay as …

Strategies To Decrease Business Failure In Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises, Pantiva Navamarat

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In Southeast Asia, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) fail each year; in 2010, SME failure rate exceeded 50%. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies that some SME business leaders use to decrease the failure rate of SMEs in Southeast Asia. The target population consisted of 5 SME business leaders in Southeast Asia who demonstrated success in using strategies to decrease the failure rate of SMEs. The conceptual framework for this study was the Ulrich model, which supports the notion that a human resource manager needs to be involved in overall organizational decision making as …

Barriers To Women Leadership Of Small And Medium Enterprises In Nigeria, Roseline Iruoma Ojinta

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Management literature lacks a deeper understanding of barriers to Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) leadership among women entrepreneurs in Nigeria focusing on women leaders' daily business experiences, their agency, and their entrepreneurial context. Women in Nigeria seeking promotion to leadership roles in SMEs continue to look for answers on how to surmount the multiple barriers hampering their leadership aspirations. To address this need, this study was designed to explore how women entrepreneurs in Nigeria describe barriers to SME leadership through narratives about their daily business experiences, their agency, and their entrepreneurial context. The women's entrepreneurial development in Nigeria, the Nigerian …