- 2015-03-09 (x)
- Kumar, Ganesh (x)
- 2008-05 (x)
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Show moreThe instrument for industrial pollution control in Nigeria is the “command and control” approach. It specifies the adoption of technology for a firm’s compliance with statutory permissible levels of wastewater effluent parameters. However, the industrial pollution laws are poorly enforced. Previous studies indicate there has been some adoption of cleaner technologies by some industries. However, it is uncertain whether the driver of the eco-innovation is the environmental policy or whether other factors are involved. The pulp and paper industry is a sector in which environmental developments will significantly affect future economic performance. This sector depends on forest resources and recycled paper for its raw materials. It is one of the most energy intensive of all industries; emits a wide range of toxic and conventional pollutants to air, water and land; and is one of the largest contributors to the solid waste stream. The purpose of this study is to investigating the drivers of environment-benign technologies in the pulp and paper industry in Nigeria. The study attempts to identify empirically the conditions under which cleaner technologies have been adopted, leading to competitiveness in the pulp and paper industry in Nigeria. This research will be conducted through a qualitative approach using individual structured interviews of conversation and narrative (phenomenological) with participants through the use of a natural flowing dialogue of questions and answers. Twenty five interviews will be conducted covering selected pulp and paper industries, relevant government ministries, selected national research institutes and professional associations within the pulp and paper industries. Data analysis will be carried out using open coding, axial coding and selected coding with a combination of intelligent qualitative analysis coding software, qualrus and manual coding. The findings from the study will document firm characteristics, ownership structure, and rate of adoption of eco-innovation technologies within the pulp and paper industry in Nigeria. The results of the study will also document the drivers of environment-benign technologies in the Nigerian small, medium and large scale pulp and paper industry. The study will also indicate the conditions under which cleaner technologies can drive competitiveness in each segment of the Nigerian pulp and paper industry.
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Show moreComputer assisted surgery has not been overwhelmingly adopted by surgeons even after extensive formal training in the technique. Physician technology adoption behavior is not well understood, particularly technology that changes clinical practice. Within technology adoption research there are limited studies in discontinuance. The traditional research states that discontinuers tend to be less educated and of a lower socio-economic status. This is clearly not the case with surgeons who experiment with but subsequently discontinue using computer assisted surgery. This paper is a proposal to research this discontinuance phenomenon.
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Show moreIn a world of increasingly complex environments decision making processes become ever more important. This research examines the role of the pathfinder leader in a specific collective action of a complex galaxy of actors seeking to develop an enforceable water resources regime and extends that examination to a more general population engaged in complex civic collective actions within the context of municipal governance. This work extends emergent leadership research within governance structures, with implications for research and practice. The research also develops quantitative measures for collective action costs, benefits and outcomes.
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Show moreThe research proposed will examine the differences and similarities between the mindsets of people who lead nonprofit Social Entrepreneurial Enterprises (SEEs) and those who manage traditional non-for-profit organizations (NFPs) in Mexico. In particular, the study will seek to identify the extent to which risk orientation, opportunity recognition, selfefficacy, innovativeness, and social capital influence social entrepreneurial behavior. By comparing these two types of leadership roles, we can further our understanding of how some social leaders in Mexico, despite diminishing traditional revenue streams, are able to scale up and sustain their nonprofit organizations.
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Show moreWork teams have become increasingly important, yet do not always perform in an efficient manner. Researchers have developed conceptual and normative models of group behavior and have mapped them to teamwork effectiveness criteria such as team composition, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability. Despite these behavioral-science research attempts to improve teamwork effectiveness, operational models and guidelines for practitioners are still lacking. Moreover, there is a gap in the literature concerning two particular factors that contribute to teamwork effectiveness, Emotional Intelligence and group shared vision. Qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews with members of successful and struggling teams is proposed to produce a grounded theory about how these two factors contribute to team effectiveness. Implications for both scholars and practitioners are suggested.
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Show moreThe importance of entrepreneurship to economic development is widely debated and acknowledged. With rising unemployment and growing disenchantment with corporate employment, more policy makers and scholars are turning to entrepreneurship and self employment as a solution to youth unemployment. College experiences and learning have the potential to change attitudes, beliefs and focus not only in a student’s general life outcomes but also in career orientation. Colleges therefore provide a window of opportunity for creating positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship and influencing students’ entrepreneurial self efficacy making careers in entrepreneurship more feasible and desirable. The manner in which these factors inter-relate is the essence of social cognitive career theory which postulates that environmental variables can moderate, mediate or directly affect the relationship between interest and career intentions or goals as well as the relationship between intentions and action. Research in higher education has shown student engagement to be one of the processes through which college impacts on student outcomes. The extent of this involvement is in turn influenced by college characteristics. This study explores the impact of college entrepreneurial orientation on students’ entrepreneurial self efficacy and attitudes towards entrepreneurship on the one hand and their entrepreneurial intentions on the other as mediated by students’ involvement in college activities in and out of class. Student involvement or engagement is hypothesized to impact on entrepreneurial intentions through increased exposure to vicarious experience, expanded information and supportive networks. Engagement is also hypothesized to mediate the influence of prior exposure to entrepreneurship, gender and perceptions of formal learning on self efficacy and attitudes towards entrepreneurship. Keywords: College environments, engagement, self efficay, attitudes, intentions
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Show moreWe examined how Western Business Practitioners (WBPs) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) interact to assist Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries. Interviews with North American WBPs, and NGOs in ten developing countries provided the data for the study. Findings suggest that partnership form (on a continuum from transactional to collaborative) has a direct and positive relationship with the extent of complementarity achieved by the actors. Complementarity, recommended as best ensured by management intervention, overcomes partners’ geographical, cultural and socio/political differences, reduces power differentials, mitigates distrust and promotes communication. Three elements of complementarity- learning, communication and process- are discussed.
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Show moreTo develop, maintain and retain competitive advantage, organizations must learn new skills and adapt to rapidly changing environments. My research is focused on the means by which individuals come together to learn from each other, and to collectively advance the objectives of the organization in a fast-paced, changing environment. In particular, I am interested in the power of the conversation and the conversation space as tools to facilitate this learning, to permit individuals to share their own experiences, build on the experiences of others and catalyze innovation. Increasingly, people are called to together to innovate, to solve thorny problems and to guide decision making in conversational settings. What makes one conversation effective and another a waste of time? How valuable are the conversations in the satisfaction of these objectives and what do we understand about them? What do the individuals who participate in conversations feel about them and their efficacy? More importantly, what might we distill and discover to improve conversations and their outcomes? Expressed as a problem of practice, how might organizations facilitate the “great conversation” to permit collective and meaningful learning, innovation and results, and what elements must these “great conversations” contain?
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Show moreFamily owned businesses are a significant and important component of our economic landscape. However, to date, a full understanding of family firm members’ perception of success and the implications for ultimate firm performance has not been articulated. Investigations into family business goals and notions of success have not utilized a multi-stakeholder approach. An improved understanding of how family firm members understand success may provide the basis for evaluating ultimate firm performance from the perspective of family firm stakeholders. Using systems theory as an organizing framework this research proposal seeks to explore how family firm members understand and work to achieve ‘success’ in their family owned businesses.
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Show moreQualitative research is proposed to study the derivation and effect of stigma in the marketing domain where it has been observed as an underexposed theoretical construct. The study seeks to build on previous research in the social domain by considering how product stigma derives and if it can be characterized similarly in the marketplace. The study is designed to discover, for example, if consumers, in their responses to product stigma, engage in the same stigma development processes that sociologists and psychologists have described operate in social situations. And we are motivated to shed light on how and to what extent consumer attitudes, fueled by beliefs about stigmatized products and the consequences of their use, influence marketplace behavior. The proposed research relies upon theoretical constructs related to social stigma, self and social identity and well-tested theories about determinants of behavior and attitude/behavior consistency. A consumer-focused examination of market domain attitudes is recommended to promote our understanding of buying and/or shunning behaviors relative to stigmatized products. A conceptual model is presented and a research design, based on the conduct of semi-structured interviews with a defined sample of consumers in the US Midwest is described.
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Show more“Accounting may provide security, the reporting provides the information” - Anonymous. Calls for the reformation of financial reporting have exacerbated in recent years in light of a rapidly changing global investment climate and in the wake of financial crises such as Enron. This study explores the existing model of financial reporting, and the characteristics that are identified with investor confidence, and whether they meet their primary objective: providing information that helps users to make resource allocation decisions. The study examines current literature and conducts interviews to determine the types of information that users find relevant. The evidence suggest that the current financial reporting system is overly complex; that there is lack of disclosure of forward-oriented types of information which are comparable over time (e.g. value drivers, critical success factors as well as non-financial information), and, despite an increasing use of fair values as a measurement objective in some assets and liabilities, many investors propose using fair-values more pervasively for reasons of importance and relevance.
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Show moreWhy do some work teams make more efficient resource-allocation decisions than others? Why are some organizations considered more innovative than others? These were the questions that led us to investigate decision-making processes in organizations of the durable consumer goods industry. This paper will test our theory that information-processing capabilities, information sharing through appropriate communication channels, combined with inclusive decision-making processes will create what we have called alignment or congruence in decision making, allowing organizations to make more effective and efficient resource-allocation decisions in innovation. Using data from our quantitative-research study conducted within a holding company in the Midwest, we created an anatomy of group decision-making in areas ranging from innovation to cost-reduction projects to find support for our notion. Key Words: Group Decision-Making, Sensemaking, Sensegiving, Inclusion, Alignment, Information Exchange, Information Flow, Distributive Justice, Procedural Justice, Procedural Rationality, Behavioral Theory of the Firm.
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Show moreA very high proportion of those engaged in selling cannot sell…. If American sales efficiency is to be maximized and the appalling waste of money and manpower which exists today is to be minimized, a constructive analysis must be made of what selling really is and how its effectiveness can be enhanced…. We must look a good deal further - into the mysteries of personality and psychology - if we want real answers. (McMurray, Robert 1961) This research seeks to explore the use of Kolb’s experiential learning theory as a framework for understanding salesperson success in relationship selling. Augmenting previous research, we investigate the influence of advisor learning styles and advisor adaptive flexibility on sales performance. Building on David Kolb’s (Kolb, 1976, 1977, 1985) and Richard Boyatzis’ (Boyatzis & Kolb, 1993) previous experiential learning research, we selected the Learning Style Inventory and Adaptive Style Inventory as the instruments to gather this data. The results of this research suggest that relationship sales success is influenced by flexibility, regardless of learning style preference. Key words: Experiential Learning Theory, Learning Style, Adaptive Flexibility, Relationship Sales, Sales Performance, Financial Advisor
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Show moreIn November of 2001, Wall Street and Main Street were rocked as Enron filed for bankruptcy protection. This was followed by financial and ethical implosions at Arthur Anderson, WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, and more recently, Bear Sterns. Today, increased stakeholder distrust is routine. This paper presents a grounded theory research agenda to examine the impact of procedural equity on the restoration of trust with primary stakeholders. Given different levels of trust, the exit, voice, loyalty and neglect (EVLN) typology is used as a framework to understand stakeholder options in the face of distrust. Despite the growing body of literature devoted to stakeholder theory, there is insufficient guidance regarding the process needed to regain the trust of stakeholders. Specifically, the proposed research seeks to understand the impact of procedural equity on stakeholder trust. This research will extend the procedural equity literature to a larger stakeholder body beyond employees. The author also seeks to answer the call in literature to further investigate the role of procedural equity in stakeholder management.
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Show moreMore and more, not-for-profit health and human service organizations are turning to collaboration to address serious community problems. Understanding the role of governance and leadership within a collaborative structure is critical. This research proposal focuses on governance and leadership within interorganizational collaboration addressing health and human service issues. We propose an examination of three collaborations sharing the same lead agency. The intention is to explore the governance structure and the elements of leadership that provide the infrastructure and lay the ground work for a sustained collaboration. The research question is: How do governance structures and leadership practices facilitate sustained collaboration among human service organizations? A careful exploration of this question will bring value to practitioners who are looking for ways to influence the sustainability of collaboration.
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