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Show moreOrganizations promote widely ranging workplace programs and initiatives with the goal of instituting change or maintaining previously adopted change. Often these programs and initiatives are designed to establish global standards through consistent member behavior. Using data from over 400 members of diverse organizations, this study examines several factors that affect program commitment and usage. Drawing upon innovation theory, I focus on the concept of end-user adaptation, or, as used herein, adaptation proximal activities. With regard to this mechanism, I propose and establish the mediating role that personal engagement plays in employee propensity to adopt adaptation proximal activities with regard to the program commitment and usage outcomes. Further, several conditions antecedent to personal engagement are identified with a focus on the elements of trust, control, and management behavior. Lastly, the role of risk taking propensity is explored and found to be more complex than originally conceptualized. Taken together the results indicate that characteristics of both the organization member and the workplace environment determine the degree to which workplace programs and initiatives will prove successful.
Doctorate of Management Programs
English
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Show moreThis study was conceived after the realization that there was inadequate literature linking intention to venture creation and psychosocial factors in Kenya. The critical question of the study was; how do psychosocial factors impact on an individual’s intention to venture creation? The data was sourced from college students and nascent entrepreneurs in Nairobi. This paper explores the relationship between perceived desirability and feasibility, and intention to venture creation. Further, the paper seeks to establish the relationship between perceived social norms, social support network and entrepreneurial experience on perceived feasibility and desirability. It also seeks to establish the relationship between these antecedents and intention to venture creation. Exploratory factor analysis was done to test both discriminant and convergent validity of measurement items. Structural equation modeling was used to examine and confirm the structural relationship in the network. Perceived desirability and feasibility were found to have a significant effect on intention to venture creation. Entrepreneurial experience, perceived support networks and social norms had no direct significant effects on intention to venture creation. The three had positive effect on perceived desirability and feasibility. This study provides ground breaking scholarly work in this field of entrepreneurship that will hopefully provoke Kenyan entrepreneurship scholars to conduct more research on this fallow ground. Key words: Intention to venture creation, Perceived desirability, Perceived feasibility, Perceived social norms, Perceived social networks, Entrepreneurial experience.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreDevelopment or transition economists are generally not part of the interdisciplinary team of clinicians, historians and diplomats that engage in ethno-national social change management. A model is presented that now includes an economist in a specific sub-species of social change management, namely, ethnonational conflict resolution. A SOCS model that considers the Situation, Options, Consequences and Simulation of the best option chosen has been deployed to link non -economic decision making to economic decision making using observations of variations in human development in the face of such macroeconomic issues as external debt, corruption, economic freedom and rate of growth of GDP. Interdisciplinary conflict resolution teams can therefore have a frame to guide their respective but interdependent efforts in ethnonational conflict resolution. This SOCS decision model with a mathematical correlate is decisively a practitioner scholar’s praxis and not part of a hypothesis-driven verification research intervention.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreImmigrant’s remittances represent a substantial flow of capital from developed economies to their countries. Unfortunately, the efforts have negative consequences because the recipients take advantage of the asymmetric information dilemmas and divert the resources for personal use against the immigrants’ desires (Chami, Fullenkamp, & Jahjah, 1989). Nigerian immigrants in the United States have been engaged in various social, ethnic, professional networks to maintain their cultural heritage and identity. Over the years, they have transformed their efforts into generating and transfer economic capital for the development of their home communities. In a qualitative research study, by the author (Ogundele, 2005), several leaders of these organizations claimed to support home development objectives. The purpose of this research is to substantiate and quantify the underlining factors upon which the immigrants’ networks are built to support the transnational objectives of developing people and communities at home. The study revealed that patriotism, familism and human capital among immigrants enhance the home communities’ development efforts. These factors are transformed to tangible benefits for people at home through the collective volunteerism actions of the immigrants in Diasporas. The negative consequences of remittance by individual immigrants are getting mitigated due to the norm of reciprocity and generalized trusts that developed within immigrants’ networks. The study unravels the puzzle of why immigrants tend to trust someone they recently met in their networks in the United States over their family members and old acquaintances from Nigeria. Our expectation is that the findings on these factors will help immigrants’ organizations and their leaders to be more effective and successful in their transnational efforts to improve the well-being of the communities and people left behind.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreImmigrant’s remittances represent a substantial flow of capital from developed economies to their countries. Unfortunately, the efforts have negative consequences because the recipients take advantage of the asymmetric information dilemmas and divert the resources for personal use against the immigrants’ desires (Chami, Fullenkamp, & Jahjah, 1989). Nigerian immigrants in the United States have been engaged in various social, ethnic, professional networks to maintain their cultural heritage and identity. Over the years, they have transformed their efforts into generating and transfer economic capital for the development of their home communities. In a qualitative research study, by the author (Ogundele, 2005), several leaders of these organizations claimed to support home development objectives. The purpose of this research is to substantiate and quantify the underlining factors upon which the immigrants’ networks are built to support the transnational objectives of developing people and communities at home. The study revealed that patriotism, familism and human capital among immigrants enhance the home communities’ development efforts. These factors are transformed to tangible benefits for people at home through the collective volunteerism actions of the immigrants in Diasporas. The negative consequences of remittance by individual immigrants are getting mitigated due to the norm of reciprocity and generalized trusts that developed within immigrants’ networks. The study unravels the puzzle of why immigrants tend to trust someone they recently met in their networks in the United States over their family members and old acquaintances from Nigeria. Our expectation is that the findings on these factors will help immigrants’ organizations and their leaders to be more effective and successful in their transnational efforts to improve the wellbeing of the communities and people left behind.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreThe Baby Boom generation’s peak earning years are rapidly coming to a close as its members approach age sixty. The reduction of defined benefit pension plans, minimal retirement savings, and greater life expectancies has created a looming economic crisis. The need for Boomers to save more and prepare better is well-researched and publicized. And while an ever-increasing amount of investment and financial information is available to the public, this wealth of information seems to overwhelm consumers into inaction. Clearly they could use some good advice. What has not received much academic research attention is the value Boomers place on professional financial advisory relationships in planning their retirements. The financial services industry continues to develop strategic plans based upon the belief that this consumer group highly values the advice of a trusted financial advisor in this endeavor. This belief has not been substantiated. Understanding the key factors that motivate consumers to seek out financial advice and develop long-term satisfactory financial advisory relationships would have significant effect on how the investment industry delivers retirement services. The extensive literature written about sales and relationship marketing focuses on the importance of service levels, transaction quality, and trust in building consumer loyalty. This qualitative research effort will build on prior literature, and move beyond the obvious importance of trust, to explore the specific factors and advisor behaviors most highly attributed by Baby Boomers to creating long-term financial advisor satisfaction. We seek to discover both compelling and non-compelling factors that drive loyalty and non-loyalty, and capture trigger moments that cause an increase or decrease in loyalty. A review of similarity theory and relationship marketing literature and six preliminary phenomenological interviews indicate that consumer-advisor values similarity may play a role in consumer satisfaction.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreCollaboration is widely studied and continues to draw attention from academics and practitioners alike. This paper builds on an everyday practitioner’s puzzle: Why are good collaborative practices difficult to duplicate? This paper uses an existing theoretical framework to explore the concept of pragmatic collaboration, and introduces the concept of rational divergence, which can weaken collaboration. Clearly the ever-changing economic, political, social, and technical world requires managers to continuously align incentives for individuals, firms, and the industry by way of policy to create a “winning” environment. Let us suppose that all incentives to collaborate are aligned, a culture of trust is present, and that economic, political, social, and technical matters are addressed. Even in such an ideal situation, individuals may diverge from a stated goal. Although some researchers have said that this divergence is because of lack of incentives or because of opportunism, this paper will suggest a different reason—that the divergence is seen as rational by the individual, based on that person’s own local set of circumstances. Such rational divergence results in sub-optimal participation during collaboration, both within companies and among supplier relationships. An individual may be reluctant to participate in collaboration, or try delaying tactics. The paper explores the idea of rational divergence; that individuals deliberately make decisions that result in reduced collaboration. The study looks at perceived opportunism and pragmatic collaboration, while asking the question, “What happens if we take the concept of trust out of the equation?” This paper reviews the elements of rational divergence, opportunism, and pragmatic collaboration, away from the overall dimension of trust. Following are eight results from this study: 1. As perceived potential opportunism increases, the likelihood of joint knowledge-creation, such as that associated with pragmatic collaboration, decreases. 2. Where high perceived potential rational divergence is present, increasing opportunism will have a more severe impact on pragmatic collaboration than low rational divergence. All else being equal, lower rational divergence can achieve better pragmatic collaboration for the same level of opportunism. 3. Joint knowledge-creation is negatively related to perceived potential opportunism, all else equal. 4. Although joint knowledge-creation is positively related to customer training, the relationship is not statistically significant. 5. Joint knowledge-creation is positively related to customer patience, but this relationship is not statistically significant. 6. Perceived potential rational divergence moderates the relationship between joint knowledge-creation and perceived opportunism. 7. Perceived potential rational divergence does not moderate the relationship between joint knowledge-creation and customer training. 8. Perceived potential rational divergence does not moderate the relationship between joint knowledge-creation and customer patience. The conclusions of this study are the following: 1. Careful consideration needs to be given to manage rational divergence in our organizations, thus enabling the possibility of practice pragmatic collaboration. Organizations are very complex, and it may not be possible to eliminate rational divergence through management. But management can definitely try to channel it and manage it as much as possible. 2. The conceptualization of rational divergence moderates the relationship between perceived opportunism and pragmatic collaboration. 3. It is difficult to emulate best practices because individuals, for context specific reasons, may choose to diverge and thus create a unique level of complexity in an organization that needs to be managed. 4. Best practices should not refer merely to a process intended to be copied; but more importantly, best practices should point to a way of implementing this process in order to control the presence of rational divergence or mitigate its effects.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreA current problem in practice in the medical industry is the underreporting of medical errors. Accordingly, there is no way of knowing whether the harm from medical errors is accurately calculated. Rates of error reporting in high reliability organizations (HROs) exceed those in other industries, including health care. HROs and error reporting have traditionally been examined through a lens of organizational culture and but not from the perspective of individual variations. To study the effect of individual variations on medial error reporting, we build on existing social cognitive theory, specifically adapting Albert Bandura’s Triadic Reciprocality Model. The adapted model explores the interaction of personal cognitive factors influenced by self-efficacy and outcome expectations, social behavior factors influenced by competing demands and clinical inertia, and environmental factors influenced by organizational culture and competing demands. Using a survey of health care professionals involved in direct patient care, the study assesses the likelihood that participants will report trivial, moderate and serious medical errors. The findings show that self-efficacy affects error reporting at all levels. Competing demands and clinical inertia affect the likelihood of reporting trivial errors. Self-efficacy affects the likelihood that moderate errors will be reported but clinical inertia, outcome expectancy and competing demands do not. Serious errors are more likely to be reported when self-efficacy is high. Organizational culture moderates the effects of clinical inertia on reporting trivial errors, and the effects of self-efficacy and outcome expectations on reporting serious errors. Lastly, the hospital work unit affects outcome-expectations and competing demands in the likelihood to report all medical errors. The results of the study target interventions to improve practice.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreRegional economies, not only in the United States but throughout the world, are looking for ways to increase high-technology (high-tech) entrepreneurial activity so that they can be home to the next Microsoft, Yahoo or Google. Successful enterprises such as these have historically created jobs with wages that, according to one study, were 95% higher than the nation’s average private sector salary. In addition, tremendous individual wealth has been generated in the past by stock option grants to the “rank and file” employees of these companies. Since most highly successful high-tech companies had venture capital funding at some point, an analysis of venture capital investments for seven different regions was performed. This paper presents a conceptual model and research questions for qualitative research regarding factors that influence high-tech entrepreneurial activity on a regional basis. The research will be conducted during the summer and fall of 2006. The results obtained from the qualitative research will be used to determine the design of quantitative research that will be undertaken in 2007. The dependent variable or outcome being examined is regional high-tech entrepreneurial activity. The qualitative research is designed to refine what constitutes high-tech entrepreneurial activity and how to measure it. Independent variables will serve as the beginning for the model. Those variables include motivation and what role it plays, management/leadership and what affect it has on the entrepreneurial process and, finally, the influence that the institutional environment has on entrepreneurial activity.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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