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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
Using experience, observations, data, current research, and writings in the field of volunteer management, it was determined there was a need to study the effects of leadership/management practices on the productivity outcomes of a volunteer construction workforce. A simple wood bench that would be tiled and painted was designed to test the areas of Time, Waste, Quality, Safety, and Satisfaction of different volunteer groups. The challenge was bolstered by giving the teams no power tools and limited available resources. A simple design of experiment model was used to test highs and lows in the three management techniques of Instruction, Help, and Encouragement. Each scenario was tested multiple times. Data was collected, normalized and analyzed using statistical analysis software. A few significant findings were discovered. The first; the research showed that there was no significant correlation between the management practices of the leader and the satisfaction of the volunteers. The second; the research also showed when further analyzed into specific realistic scenarios that the organizations would be better to focus on high amounts of Help and Encouragement in order to maximize the productivity of their volunteer construction workforce. This is significant as it allows NPO's and governments to focus their attention where best suited to produce results. The results were shared and the study was further validated as "significant" by conducting interviews with experts in the construction nonprofit sector.
ContributorsPrigge, Diedrich (Author) / Sullivan, Kenneth (Thesis advisor) / Wiezel, Avi (Committee member) / Badger, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation is an exploratory study that examined the differences in perceptions about supply chain management strategy, topics, tools, and techniques between procurement professionals in public and private sector organizations. This was accomplished through a survey of procurement professionals in a Fortune 500 company and a municipality in Arizona. The data were analyzed to understand how perceptions of supply chain management differed within this sample and whether the differences in perceptions were associated with formal education levels. Key findings indicate that for this or similar samples, public procurement respondents viewed their organizations' approach to supply chain management as a narrow function within purchasing while private sector respondents viewed their organization's approach to supply chain management as a strategic purchasing perspective that requires the coordination of cross functional areas. Second, public procurement respondents reported consistent and statistically significant lower levels of formal education than private sector respondents. Third, the supply chain management topics, tools, and techniques seem to be more important to private sector respondents than the public sector respondents. Finally, Respondents in both sectors recognize the importance of ethics and ethical behavior as an essential part of supply chain management.
ContributorsHeller, Jacob (Author) / Cayer, Joseph (Thesis advisor) / Lan, Gerald (Committee member) / Eden, Catherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
After decades of dormancy, character is re-emerging as an important research topic among organizational leadership researchers in response to the need to better explain the source of certain exemplary and ethical leader performance (Hannah & Avolio, 2011; Leonard, 1997; Thompson & Riggio, 2010; Wright & Goodstein, 2007). However, efforts to operationalize character are criticized for their abstract and idealistic trait-based conceptualizations that fail to capture the reality of leadership and situational dynamics (Conger & Hollenbeck, 2010). The purpose of this study is to develop a more robust theoretical approach to character that is empirically grounded in the real life complexities of leadership. Combat provides the context for this study because the adversity of such an extreme context tends to make character a more salient and readily observable phenomenon than in more conventional organizational contexts (Wright & Quick, 2011; Hannah, Uhl-Bien, Avolio, & Cavarretta, 2009). I employed an ethnographic grounded theory design to gain a unique insider's perspective absent in many studies of leader character (Charmaz, 2009; Parry & Meindl, 2002). Data collection involved (1) physically embedding for six months with U.S. Army small unit infantry leaders operating in combat in Afghanistan; (2) participant observation in the full range of combat activities engaged in by these leaders; and (3) in-depth semi-structured interviews with key informants. An important contribution of this study is that the emergent concept of leader character is fully situated in the leader's social and environmental context represented by the leader's inner struggle to resist the adversity of combat and uphold the standards of leadership. In this dialectical framework, certain agentic resources important to resolving this inner struggle emerge as the locus of leader character. This agency-based concept of character is rooted in the internalization of the standards of leadership through identity-conferring normative commitments and entails particular motivational and volitional capacities. These produce a distinct mode of functioning--a strong form of personal moral agency--characterized by the leader's willingness to sacrifice in upholding standards in the face of adversity. This primacy of leader agency over adversity is the hallmark of leader character--what I call the character to lead.
ContributorsJennings, Peter L. (Author) / Corley, Kevin (Thesis advisor) / Waldman, David (Thesis advisor) / Hannah, Sean T (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The healthcare system is plagued with increasing cost and poor quality outcomes. A major contributing factor for these issues is that outdated leadership practices, such as leader-centricity, linear thinking, and poor readiness for innovation, are being used in healthcare organizations. Through a qualitative case study analysis of innovation implementation, a new framework of leadership was uncovered. This framework presented new characteristics of leaders that led to the successful implementation of an innovation. Characteristics uncovered included boundary spanning, risk taking, visioning, leveraging opportunity, adaptation, coordination of information flow, and facilitation. These characteristics describe how leaders throughout the system were able to influence information flow, relationships, connections, and organizational context to implement innovation.
ContributorsWeberg, Daniel Robert (Author) / Fluery, Julie (Thesis advisor) / Malloch, Kathy (Thesis advisor) / Porter-O'Grady, Timothy (Committee member) / Hagler, Debra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In many respects, the current public child welfare system closely resembles that of over 100 years ago. Then, as well as now, nonprofit child welfare agencies are the critical providers of service delivery to vulnerable children and their families. Contemporary nonprofits, however, are confronted with social and fiscal pressures to conform to normative practices and behaviors of governmental and for-profit organizations. Simultaneously, these agencies may also feel compelled to behave in accordance with a nonprofit normative ethic. Yet, scholars and practitioners are often unaware of how these different forces may be shaping the practices of child welfare agencies and, the nonprofit sector in general. This multi-paper dissertation examines how managerial and organizational practices of child welfare nonprofits are influenced business, government, and other nonprofit organizations and the extent to which processes process of institutional isomorphism in child welfare nonprofits are happening. Data was collected from a national ample of 184 child welfare administrators to explore marketization practices, collaboration behaviors, and managerial priorities of these agencies. Multinomial logistic, ordered logistic, and ordinary least squares regression, and historical analysis help shed light on the contemporary practices of these agencies. The results reveal that these agency's behaviors are shaped by government control, influences from the business community, identification with a nonprofit mindset (i.e., nonprofitness), funding streams, and various other factors. One key finding is that identification with a nonprofit mindset encourages certain behaviors like collaboration with other nonprofits and placing greater importance on key managerial priorities, but it does not reduce the likelihood of adopting business management strategies. Another important finding is that government control and funding does not have as strong as an influence on child welfare nonprofits as expected; however, influence from the business community does strongly affect many of their practices. The implications of these findings are discussed for child welfare agencies and the nonprofit sector in general. The consequences of nonprofits operating similarly to business and government are considered.
ContributorsRobichau, Robbie Waters (Author) / Catlaw, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Nahavandi, Afsaneh (Committee member) / Gustavsson, Nora (Committee member) / Wang, Lili (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In my dissertation, I develop a theoretical model that explains how leaders' daily work demands and recovery affect their leadership behaviors. In a departure from the trait approach of leadership which suggests that leaders tend to behave in certain ways that are determined by their heritable characteristics such as personality and intelligence (e.g., Bono & Judge, 2002), and from the contingency approach that suggests leaders behave in ways that are most suitable to the situation based on the needs of followers and the demands of their tasks (e.g., House, 1971), this dissertation draws from the transactional theory of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) and positions the stressful demands that leaders experience at work as important determinants of their leadership behaviors. Specifically, I propose that leaders' daily challenge demands (e.g., workload, time pressure, responsibilities) are positively related to job engagement whereas their daily hindrance demands (e.g., role ambiguity, office politics, and hassles) are negatively related to engagement. Engagement, in turn, is positively related to transformational and transactional leadership and negatively related to laissez-faire leadership and abusive supervision. Meanwhile, both challenge and hindrance demands are positively related to strain, which is negatively related to transformational and transactional leadership, and is positively related to laissez-faire leadership and abusive supervision. In addition, leaders' daily after-work recovery experience influences the mediating roles of engagement and strain in the relationships between work demands and leadership behaviors. Specifically, daily recovery moderates both the first stage (i.e., the linkages between work demands and engagement and strain) and the second stage (i.e., the linkages between engagement and strain and leadership behaviors) of the mediation. I test this two-level dual-stage moderated mediation model using a two-week experience sampling design. The sample consists of 26 supervisors and 73 employees who directly report to these supervisors from the flood control district of a metropolitan county in the Southwest United States. Results suggest that leaders' daily challenge demands have a positive influence on transformational leadership attributable to engagement, a negative influence on abusive supervision attributable to engagement, and a positive influence on abusive supervision attributable to strain. Leaders' daily hindrance demands, in contrast, have a positive influence on abusive supervision attributable to strain. In addition, leaders' daily recovery moderates the relationship between strain and laissez-faire leadership so that hindrance demands have a positive influence on laissez-faire leadership when the individual is poorly recovered. Leaders' daily recovery also moderates the relationship between strain and abusive supervision so that hindrance demands have a stronger positive influence on abusive supervision through strain when the individual is poorly recovered.
ContributorsZhang, Yiwen (Author) / Lepine, Jeffery (Thesis advisor) / Judge, Timothy (Committee member) / Ashforth, Blake (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
A Pairwise Comparison Matrix (PCM) is used to compute for relative priorities of criteria or alternatives and are integral components of widely applied decision making tools: the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its generalized form, the Analytic Network Process (ANP). However, a PCM suffers from several issues limiting its application to large-scale decision problems, specifically: (1) to the curse of dimensionality, that is, a large number of pairwise comparisons need to be elicited from a decision maker (DM), (2) inconsistent and (3) imprecise preferences maybe obtained due to the limited cognitive power of DMs. This dissertation proposes a PCM Framework for Large-Scale Decisions to address these limitations in three phases as follows. The first phase proposes a binary integer program (BIP) to intelligently decompose a PCM into several mutually exclusive subsets using interdependence scores. As a result, the number of pairwise comparisons is reduced and the consistency of the PCM is improved. Since the subsets are disjoint, the most independent pivot element is identified to connect all subsets. This is done to derive the global weights of the elements from the original PCM. The proposed BIP is applied to both AHP and ANP methodologies. However, it is noted that the optimal number of subsets is provided subjectively by the DM and hence is subject to biases and judgement errors. The second phase proposes a trade-off PCM decomposition methodology to decompose a PCM into a number of optimally identified subsets. A BIP is proposed to balance the: (1) time savings by reducing pairwise comparisons, the level of PCM inconsistency, and (2) the accuracy of the weights. The proposed methodology is applied to the AHP to demonstrate its advantages and is compared to established methodologies. In the third phase, a beta distribution is proposed to generalize a wide variety of imprecise pairwise comparison distributions via a method of moments methodology. A Non-Linear Programming model is then developed that calculates PCM element weights which maximizes the preferences of the DM as well as minimizes the inconsistency simultaneously. Comparison experiments are conducted using datasets collected from literature to validate the proposed methodology.
ContributorsJalao, Eugene Rex Lazaro (Author) / Shunk, Dan L. (Thesis advisor) / Wu, Teresa (Thesis advisor) / Askin, Ronald G. (Committee member) / Goul, Kenneth M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Researchers lament that feedback interventions often fail. Traditional theories assume a cognitive relationship between the receipt of feedback and its impact on employee performance. I offer a theoretical model derived from Affective Events and Broaden and Build Theories to shed new light on the feedback-performance relationship. I bridge the two primary streams of feedback literature-the passive receipt and active seeking-to examine how employees' affective responses to feedback drive how they use feedback to improve performance. I develop and test a model whereby supervisor developmental feedback and coworker feedback seeking relate to the positivity ratio (the ratio of positive as compared to negative affect), enabling them to be more creative and thus improving their performance. I test my model using Experience Sampling Methodology with a sample of MBA students over a two week working period.
ContributorsChristensen, Amanda L (Author) / Kinicki, Angelo (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Zhen (Committee member) / Hom, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
I develop and test theoretical hypotheses for how employees' authenticity at work influences their motivational, relational, and effectiveness outcomes. These hypotheses are grounded in the idea that when individuals feel they display their true selves at work, they can more fully employ their physical, cognitive and emotional energies in their work roles, which in turn leads to higher levels of employee effectiveness (e.g., task performance, perceived value to the organization, and promotability). In addition to this personal motivational process, individuals who are more authentic also develop high-quality relationships with their coworkers, thereby receiving more instrumental support and minimizing the antagonistic encounters they have with their colleagues. Both types of coworker interactions should, in turn, also influence the focal individual's effectiveness at work. Finally, I hypothesize that the relationships between authenticity and these relational and effectiveness outcomes are moderated by certain personality traits, such that when an individual is highly narcissistic, has very low self-esteem, or has strongly held values or beliefs generally perceived to be negative or deviant, the relationships change: authenticity's positive influence on coworker instrumental support becomes less positive, and authenticity's negative influence on coworker incivility becomes less negative. These moderation effects are expected for employee effectiveness as well. The sample used to test these hypotheses consisted of 102 employees and their 16 supervisors from two private companies headquartered in the Southwest United States. Authenticity was found to be positively associated with employee engagement, coworker instrumental support, and employee effectiveness, and negatively associated with coworker incivility. Once other factors were controlled for, significant relationships remained with employee engagement and coworker support. Contrary to expectations, neither engagement nor coworker interactions mediated the authenticity-employee effectiveness relationship. A dark side of authenticity was found for two of the three personality traits: self-esteem moderated the relationship between authenticity and coworker instrumental support, such that when self-esteem was low, the relationship between authenticity and coworker support was significantly weaker. Additionally, narcissism moderated the relationship between authenticity and employee effectiveness such that when narcissism was low, the relationship between authenticity and effectiveness was positive, but when narcissism was high, the relationship became negative.
ContributorsBuckman, Brooke R (Author) / Lepine, Jeffery (Thesis advisor) / Peterson, Suzanne (Committee member) / Zhang, Zhen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Over the past several decades, social network remains the most prevalent and prominent in the strategy and organization theory literature. However, despite the considerable research attention scholars devoted to exploring the implications and mechanisms of social ties and networks in management and organizational contexts, the following question has largely remained understudied: To what extent can top managers' personal ties and networks actually contribute to their firms? This thesis will strive to explore this research question by theoretically highlighting three logically consequent managerial decisions: (1) "When"--when will top managers choose to use their personal ties and networks in their firms; (2) "How"--will top managers use their managerial ties and networks to serve the best interest of their firms or to satisfy their self-interests; and (3) "So what" --how would the decision of using managerial ties and networks to benefit their firms influence other decisions of the firms. Using both primary data and archival information from Chinese firms, I will empirically test the step-wise framework. I expect this thesis to contribute to both strategic leadership and social network research and management practices.
ContributorsJiang, Han (Author) / Cannella, Albert A. (Thesis advisor) / Hoetker, Glenn (Committee member) / Mesquita, Luiz F. (Committee member) / Devers, Cynthia E. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014