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Show moreWomen remain dramatically underrepresented in the engineering profession- and far fewer women than men persist in the field. In the first study of women who stay (vs. stray) from corporate engineering careers, we interviewed 21 long tenured female engineers and a control group of ten women who opted out of the profession after an average decade of employment to generate a grounded theory about their personal and professional “lived lives.” Women constitute only 11% of the U.S. corporate engineering workforce and remain as engineers for shorter periods of time than men. Several studies have described why women leave engineering careers, but the literature is silent about those that stay. We addressed that gap by focusing uniquely on women with two decades or more of corporate engineering tenure. Our findings should be of interest to universities and government agencies hoping to entice more women into the profession and to corporations in search of women engineers with long tenure potential.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Cleveland Play House Collection, Kelvin Smith Library
Cleveland Play House Collection, Kelvin Smith Library
Show moreDriven in part by recent corporate failures, consumers are increasingly distrustful of motivations and behaviors of corporate leaders, firms, and entire sectors of the economy. How do firms win consumer loyalty in distrust-dominated environments? We use two competing theoretical lenses to investigate the most salient strategic path to firm loyalty in trust- and distrust-dominated environments, from the consumer perspective. We find that consumer distrust in a firm is a grave threat to loyalty across industries. Additionally, we show that distrust-dominated environments present unique opportunity for some firms with high consumer trust to gain loyalty, while trust-dominated environments present fewer opportunities.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreBoards of Directors are often criticized for being compliant or silent on critical issues. In the powerful yet collegial environment of the board, raising “tough issues” has proven to be a challenging task. This lack of action can result in ineffective decision-making and, in some cases like Enron, the demise of the firm (O’Connor, 2003). In view of the fact that management’s expertise is valued (Baysinger, Kosnik and Turk, 1991), it takes tenacity to question management’s judgments and recommendations (Janis, 1992; Sonnenfeld, 2002; Leblanc & Gillies, 2005). This is especially true if management is long tenured and powerful (Arthur, 2001). However, Kramer, Konrad and Erkut (2006) revealed an interesting phenomenon with respect to women on boards. In their Critical Mass study, many CEO respondents (male and female) reported that women, more than men, were prepared to push the tough issues at the board. This finding raises the question that lies at the center of the present qualitative research. When women champion the “tough issues” at the board, how and why do they do it and do they do it differently than men? A championing model is presented to examine the “tough issues” phenomenon and the potential collateral benefits for board performance. Women, currently underrepresented in the boardroom, may have a unique role to play in improving the decision-making quality of boards.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreA Work-Life Fusion scale is introduced and developed to measure the extent to which people leverage technological tools both virtually and in face-to-face exchanges to concurrently manage work and life issues while at work. Subscales emerge from the data with strong reliability measures and rigorous techniques are employed to achieve validation. The scale is used as a resource to explore its impact on Work-Life Satisfaction, Job Satisfaction, and Psychological Job Control. Multi-group analysis across generations surfaces clear indication of a shift to a fused approach toward work and life management as cohorts become younger.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreThis applied research project focused on workforce development in a small manufacturing organization. Specifically, this study offers a CEO perspective regarding the work environment or setting in contributing to worker attitudes toward acquiring skills and knowledge, commitment to the organization, and performance of hard-to-pace workers. The conceptual framework that underpins this inquiry draws on the concept of communities of practice as development by Etienne Wenger and the theory of situated learning by Jean Lave as applied to learning and communication in the workplace. The study offers insight into limitations on workforce development and the role of the relationships and race in the work setting.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreHome health care organizations are met with many challenges including hiring the most effective practitioners, providing continual organizational support, and keeping well informed on factors that produce a successful working alliance. This quantitative study focuses on (1) the role of the practitioner in affecting the working alliance, and (2) the organizational support that creates a work culture conducive to a strong practitioner-patient working alliance.(3) identifying factors that influence the working alliance and also providing insight to the organization for better hiring practices. Our findings indicate that practitioner experience and organizational support appear to exhibit a primary role in the working alliance with the influence of reciprocal care giving. We found the type of care giving experience, years of experience, and prior experience have a relationship to the dependent variable the working alliance. The study posits that the common practice of hiring practitioners with ample hospital experience and seasoned in the field may not be the best fit for the home healthcare profession. The tightly structured hospital setting with performances bound by policies, procedures, and protocol keep the practitioner practicing in a rigidly defined culture. They may lack the flexibility and independence often required in home healthcare practice.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreA relationship between workplace volunteerism and the effectiveness of liaison employees is proposed that draws primarily upon four complementary sociological concepts: (1) the social identity theory (Tajfel, 1982); (2) a structural theory of action (Burt, 1982); (3) social capital (Adler & Kwon, 2002); and (4) weak-tie “bridges” (Granovetter, 1973). The complementary nature of each of the sociological theories is discussed to show how workplace volunteerism might be increased through the systematic application of their concepts. This paper proposes that workplace employees socially identify themselves with hierarchical workgroups at the workplace and utilize their strong and weak-tie relationships to influence their peers toward volunteering in their community. Employer-sanctioned liaison employees might be utilized as both strong-tie and weak-tie bridges between demand-side volunteer organizations and the resource-providing workplace. The concept of Role Theory supports the idea that people behave differently and predictable depending on their respective social roles and the situation (Biddle, 1986). This paper concludes with a proposed phenomenological study that compares the workplace recruiting behavior of both liaison and non-liaison employees to generate a grounded theory on workplace volunteering (Glaser & Strauss, 1967)
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreInvoking the term “best practices” often conjures up the notion of a historically contingent body of regularized routines that are condoned by a particular community. As a whole, they can be viewed as being made up of rules and procedures that construct and legitimatize the way certain people see things and how they talk about them. As a natural consequence, these practices make possible certain statements and communication processes while inhibiting others. The subsequent discourse not only delimits what can be said, it also empowers some to speak authoritatively on the topic in question. In many respects, those perceived to be well versed in the “best practices” are sanctioned by their community to create suitable representations that in turn shape and form an accepted worldview. Usually one finds such grandiloquence in the emotionally charged worlds of politics and religion and would normally not expect to encounter it in the staid, mechanistic realm of factory work. Nevertheless, under the guise of “World Class Manufacturing (WCM) Best Practices” there has been a concerted effort to mold industrial operations in the hegemonic manner described above. In the early 1980’s the poor alignment of production activities, caused in part by an overly rigid division of labor and the accompanying complex shop floor layouts, were leading explanations for the subpar performance of US manufacturing on the world stage (Deming, 1986). WCM innovations were designed to alleviate, if not eliminate, this adverse situatio n and thereby restore US manufacturing prowess (Schonberger, 1986). This point of view calls for the adoption of organizational precepts that significantly alter the coordination mechanisms within a production facility. These practices are typified by terms such as total quality (Oakland, 1993; Cole, Bacdayan, and White, 1993), lean manufacturing/just- in-time (Lillrank, 1995; Womack and Jones, 1996), cross-disciplinary teams (Dean and Susman, 1989), benchmarking (Watson, 1993), and cellular manufacturing (Chase and Aquilano, 1995). In constructing a production facility along these lines as opposed to any other, certain courses of action are invited and others discouraged. Through this particular discourse senior managers and/or consultants essentially attempt to define the normative expectations of the employees’ role. I am not so much concerned with the elucidation of WCM per se, rather I intend to capture the meaning, as expressed through participant observation, that a local manufacturer has developed concerning its internal operations against the backdrop of the latest production management thinking. Juxtaposed with this narrative, I will relate personal experience with the subject matter as experienced during my tenure with another manufacturing firm. In a final discussion section, a grounded critique of the WCM rhetoric based on these two sets of data will be provided.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Cleveland Play House Collection, Kelvin Smith Library
Cleveland Play House Collection, Kelvin Smith Library
Cleveland Play House Collection, Kelvin Smith Library
Show moreNonprofit leaders are frequently passionate about their organizations, many having devoted their lives and sacrificed significant material benefits for the sake of their causes. Often, though, this intense devotion unconsciously engenders an attitude of ownership towards their organizations (“This is my cause,” “I know best,” “No one else could possibly care/know/do as much as I do.”), rather than an attitude of stewardship (“We must welcome the best and all work in partnership together to address this great cause, and see that it continues addressing this need long after we are gone.”). This ethnographic study examined one nonprofit organization that espoused and essentially practiced the value of stewardship, to discover the attributes that created and perpetuated that culture. We uncovered critical organizational/systemic and personal/leadership traits that stimulate or obstruct stewardship in nonprofit organizations, which inform both governance and human resource practice.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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