Management & Organization Theses and Dissertations

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ADMIRATION AND ENVY AS AN IMPETUS: JOINT EFFECTS OF LEADER-MEMBER EXCHANGE DIFFERENTIATION AND GROUP INCENTIVE PAY ON GROUP AFFECTIVE CLIMATES, COORDINATION, AND PERFORMANCE
(2014) Han, Joo Hun; Liao, Hui; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Drawing upon cognitive appraisal theory of emotions in conjunction with incentive pay research, I examine the mechanisms and boundary conditions for the effects of group leaders' differentiated development of leader-member exchange (LMX) relationship on group coordination and performance. I propose that it is when groups receive a higher average proportion of group, as opposed to individual, incentive pay that LMX differentiation is more likely to foster group climate of admiration, rather than envy, which then enhances group coordination and subsequent performance. Using data on 828 sales groups in a major Chinese retailer, I find evidence that groups' use of group, rather than individual or hybrid (i.e., [1] incentive pay based on individual and group performance or [2] incentive pay based on individual, group, and store performance), incentive pay with a higher average proportion in total pay facilitated LMX differentiation to improve group coordination by cultivating group admiration climate. Also, group, as opposed to individual or hybrid, incentive pay buffered the negative effects of group envy climate on group coordination. Lastly, it was found that group coordination predicted groups' six-month lagged sales performance above and beyond prior sales performance. Several theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
ADVERSE EFFECTS OF COMPETITION WITH COWORKERS: THE ROLE OF THIRD-PARTY TIES
(2020) Yan, Taiyi; Venkataramani, Vijaya; Tangirala, Subra; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Employees rely on coworkers for support. Through workflow ties and friendship ties with coworkers, employees acquire task support and emotional support that allows them to be effective in their work. At the same time, employees often find themselves having to compete with those very coworkers for limited rewards and recognition (e.g., bonuses, promotion) that organizations provide. In this dissertation, I delineate the negative effects that competition with coworkers who are closely connected to employees in their workflow and friendship networks has on employees’ task performance. I note that such competition can prevent employees from obtaining critical task and emotional support required to remain effective in their roles. Using a social embeddedness perspective, I further highlight that these negative effects of competition can be avoided when employees and their competitors are connected to third-party peers in their teams who can act as mediators and allow for continued flow of task and emotional support via workflow and friendship ties between employees and their competitors. I test these hypotheses in the field (using a sample of 394 employees embedded in 39 R&D teams) and in two experimental studies (using 694 participants). I will discuss implications of my model for theory and practice.
ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF INSIDERS' EQUITY SHARE SELLING AT IPO: THREE ESSAYS
(2013) Li, Qiang; Goldfarb, Brent; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Secondary share sales at IPO by insiders happen frequently and on a large scale. Current literature offers mixed explanations. For example, signaling theory (Leland & Pyle, 1977) suggests that secondary share sales at IPO by insiders signal poor quality of the IPO firm. The premise is that insiders have more private information about the firm than outsiders. Therefore, insider sales should be indicative of trouble in the firm. This implies that insiders' secondary share sales will be associated with poor pre- and post-IPO performance. Agency theory (Jensen & Meckling, 1976) suggests that insiders will lower their commitment to the firm after they sell part of their shares; after such sales, managerial and firm interests are more poorly aligned. This theory suggests that poor post-IPO performance is causally associated with insiders' secondary share sales at IPO. Finally, risk aversion may drive insiders to diversify their risk away from the focal firm by selling secondary shares at IPO. This would suggest that sales have nothing to do with firm quality or managerial commitment. Although the above theories provide different implications for practice, the mixed nature of their explanations prevent us from having a clear understanding of the phenomenon. Additionally, prior studies have been unable to tease them apart. To address this issue, this dissertation investigates the following related questions: what factors predict insiders' secondary share sales at IPO and how do such sales affect various firm performances. Only by looking at the antecedents and consequences of insiders' share sales at IPO, as well as finding exogenous variation that affects secondary share sales and is unrelated to the characteristics of the firm can we see if the sales are associated with firm quality or risk aversion or if insiders lower their commitment after sales. The answers to these questions are investigated in three essays. In Essay 1, I ask which CEOs sell shares at IPO and under what conditions? Using a sample of 651 U.S. software IPOs from 1990 to 2011, I find that when more of the CEO's wealth is tied up in the firm, they are more likely to sell. The effect is especially strong for CEO founders. Interestingly, when board members also engage in equity share sales at IPO, CEOs are more likely to sell. This latter result suggests weakened board oversight of the CEO. Using an instrumental variable approach, I tease apart cotemporaneous selling due to poor firm quality and selling that only occurs with the reduction of oversight. In Essay 2, I ask when equity share sales at IPO influence IPO underpricing. Through an analysis of 633 IPOs in the U.S. computer software industry, I find that the equity share sales by outside directors (VCs and other institutional investors) are associated with upward offer price revision pre-IPO and lower IPO underpricing. The interpretation is that outside directors may be able to bargain for a higher offer price when they attempt to sell part of their equity shares at IPO. As such, the upward offer price revision pre-IPO results from outsiders' bargaining leads to lower IPO underpricing. These results are robust to a Heckman two-stage approach that addresses potential selection bias. In Essay 3, I examine whether insiders' secondary share sales at IPO impacts a variety of performance measures post-IPO and the contingencies under which any impact may vary. Through the analysis of 500 IPOs of the U.S. computer software industry, in general, I find that insiders' secondary share sales at IPO are not associated with sales or sales growth. Rather, they are only associated with slower R&D growth in the year post-IPO. This effect is less negative for large firms. The results are robust to an instrumental variable approach to address the potential endogeneity issues. Taken together, this dissertation finds that insiders' secondary share sales are not significantly associated with post-IPO firm performances, providing no support to signaling theory or agency theory. The findings are more consistent with risk aversion theory and imply that insiders' secondary share sales at IPO are not a significant negative signal and traditional wisdom may overreact to the sales.
The Backhaul Problem and Related Topics in Vehicle Routing
(1991) Casco, Daniel Orlando; Golden, Bruce L.; Business and Management; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
The problem studied in this dissertation is a variation of the classical vehicle routing problem (VRP) that has received limited research attention, and concerns the routing of vehicles over a set of mixed customers; that is, some customers are delivery or linehaul points but others are pickup or backhaul points. In contrast to deliveries, when a vehicle services a pickup point, product, bound for the distribution center, is loaded on the truck. Practical considerations usually dictate that the number of backhauls per route is small and they are serviced near the end of a route. The vehicle routing problem with backahuls (VRPB) can be stated as follows: Find a set of vehicle routes that service the delivery and backhaul customers such that vehicle capacity is not violated and the total distance traveled is minimized. In this dissertation, we examine three real-world routing applications with backhauls and several first-generation algorithms designed to solve VRPBs. The key dissertation research objective is to develop new heuristics to solve the VRPB that redress the shortcomings of existing solution methods in dealing with real-world considerations. The four new heuristics developed allow common carrier or supplier deliveries, dedicated backhaul routes, and mixed routes. In order to evaluate their performance, the heuristics were coded in Pascal and a series of computation experiments were performed on a Macintosh platform. The experiments consisted of generating twenty seven hundred random problems covering a range of possible combinations of critical problem parameters. These problems were solved by the heuristics and the main findings are as follows: 1) on average, the new heuristics outperformed heuristics which allow only pure delivery and mixed routes, 2) the effectiveness of the new procedures was found to vary with changes in problem size, the percentage of backhaul nodes, and the delivery node concentration region, 3) the effective of the new procedures was found not to vary with changes in the cost to insert backhaul location in mixed routes, or with changes in common carrier costs, and 4) the execution times to solve 40-node and 100-node problems was found to be less than a minute.
THE BENEFITS AND BURDENS OF HIGH REPUTATION DURING DISRUPTIONS: THE ROLE OF MEDIA REPUTATION, ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTIFICATION, AND DISRUPTION TYPE
(2012) Zavyalova, Anastasiya; Reger, Rhonda K; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Organizational researchers are increasingly interested in the role of social approval assets, such as reputation and celebrity, for financial success of organizations. In this three-essay dissertation I examine the role of these assets when an organization is involved in negative disruptive events. In Essay 1, I introduce four media generated organizational types: celebrity, infamous, peripheral, and unfamiliar organizations and develop a theoretical framework and propositions that examine how stakeholder decisions whether or not to transact with an organization after disruptions depend on the type of organization under examination. In Essay 2, I argue theoretically and find empirically that stakeholder reactions to disruptions depend on the level of organizational identification. On a sample of on-campus murders in U.S. colleges and universities in 2001-2009, I find that universities receive fewer applications after murders, and this effect is stronger for ranked universities. Additionally, percentage of alumni donating to schools increases after on-campus murders, but only in ranked universities. I test the robustness of these findings using different operationalizations of disruptions and stakeholder groups. The results indicate that reputation is a liability during disruptions when stakeholders under examination have low levels of organizational identification and reputation is a buffer for reactions by high-identification stakeholders. In Essay 3, I argue that the amplifying role of organizational reputation is due to differences in news coverage of disruptions in high-reputation compared to low-reputation organizations. The results of empirical analysis of news coverage of 106 on-campus murders indicate that even after controlling for the characteristics of the event, disruptions in high-reputation organizations receive more coverage. I further examine this finding using content analysis of articles that covered four pairs of similar murders that took place in ranked vs. non-ranked universities. I find that not only do disruptions in high-reputation organizations receive more news coverage, but the coverage is more in-depth and the name of a high-reputation organization is more likely to appear in the article title. Taken together, the findings advance research on the role of media reputation, reputation, and organizational identification for organizations experiencing negative disruptions.
Can voice harm team performance?: The role of relationship conflict and trust
(2018) Baker, Bradley Edward; Chen, Gilad; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Despite research substantiating the idea that when team members voice ideas and suggestions their team can perform better, some scholars have warned that voice can also harm team performance. Yet, our understanding of when, why, and how voice can undermine team functioning is still limited. Attempting to address these research gaps, I integrate and build on threat rigidity theory and regulatory focus theory to propose that the reason why voice has the potential to undermine team performance is because it can trigger relationship conflict – and that prohibitive voice, as compared to promotive voice, has a greater potential to trigger relationship conflict, especially when team trust is low. I test this theory using a time-lagged, laboratory study with 87 teams, as well as a time-lagged, multi-source field study with 49 teams of U.S. Air Force officers. Across studies, I largely do not find support for my hypotheses. For example, opposite of my predictions, it appears that both promotive and prohibitive voice have either a non-significant or negative effect on relationship conflict; however, I find partial support for the hypothesis that trust moderates the relationship between prohibitive voice and relationship conflict. Despite these mixed findings, this research contributes to the voice, teams, relationship conflict, and trust literatures by empirically investigating whether voice can undermine team performance.
Can You Hear Me Now? Examining Market Discourse as a Sensemaking Mechanism of Entrepreneurial Actions in the U.S. Wireless Telephone Industry, 1998-2007
(2010) Livengood, R. Scott; Smith, Ken G; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Entrepreneurial actions, such as new product introductions, infuse new information and drive the market process by moving the market either toward or away from existing market conditions. These products cause uncertainty for market participants, who engage in discourse as a sensemaking mechanism to reduce this uncertainty and eventually either accept or reject the new product, which is essentially the market process. Central to this process, however, is the oft-overlooked phenomenon of market discourse, or the objective and subjective information exchanged in the marketplace, that can be a key sensemaking mechanism when confronted by uncertainty surrounding new products by firms. However, little is known regarding the impact of entrepreneurial actions and the process of how market discourse moves the market. Using a unique dataset created from the United States wireless telephone industry from 1998-2007, I explore how novelty impacts various aspects of market discourse among market participants and how this discourse impacts subsequent sales of individual cell phones. Results suggest that discourse can act as a sensemaking mechanism when new products are relatively more novel than prior phones, but that reputation and competitive intensity can act as a substitute for discourse as a sensemaking mechanism to reduce uncertainty experienced by the market. In addition, discourse was found to positively influence sales but that this effect diminishes over time. Finally, findings indicate discourse acts to fully mediate the relationship between phone novelty and sales, which highlights the importance of studying discourse when examining firm actions.
COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING IN THE INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM
(2022) Chen, Mo; Waguespack, David M; Zenger, Todd R; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In this dissertation, I use archival data and a formal model to investigate how actors (firms) organize their innovation and coordinate in an innovation ecosystem and what the evolutionary outcome of the ecosystem is. Empirically I study Linux Kernel, the most commercially important open-source project. As of 2017, Linux has more than 99% of the market share in supercomputing, more than 90% market share of public clouds, and around 82% market share of smartphone operating systems. With over 1700 subsystems and over 50000 files, the Linux kernel is one of the most complex systems in innovation history. Moreover, unpaid work only contributes 8.2% to Linux kernel development. Ten big corporations contribute around 40% of development efforts (The Linux Foundation, 2017). Characterized by diverse commercial interests and high-level knowledge heterogeneity and complexity, Linux Kernel provides an ideal setting to understand open collaboration and coordination in an ecosystem. The first chapter investigates how individual innovations evolve in a complex ecosystem. While innovation outcomes have been extensively studied in strategy and related literature, prior studies often abstract away from the interdependent nature of innovation within broader assemblies or systems of technologies. Adopting the problem-solving perspective, I study how three types of complexity — technological, cognitive, and incentive — impact the coordination process of a proposed innovation becoming integrated into the shared infrastructure of the ecosystem. By focusing on Linux Kernel development, a rare setting where the technological and actor interdependence are both observable, I provide evidence of how technological interdependence, a critical concept in organization design, is associated with difficulty in reaching satisfactory solutions. The research context provides a setting to study how heterogeneous interests and potential conflicts between system participants impact innovation outcomes. The results also show that cognitive complexity, measured by the uniqueness of innovation, has a U-shaped relationship with innovation integration. In the second chapter of my dissertation, I investigate the tradeoff between discovery and divergence in the open form of collaboration in the innovation ecosystem. Building on the insight from problem-solving literature, I argue that strategic knowledge accumulation, i.e., actors shape knowledge creation based on self-interest, can create potential conflicts between the system and individual actors and thus impact the open innovation outcomes significantly. I then use a simulation approach to investigate the appropriateness of various coordination mechanisms for innovation systems with varying degrees of complexity and different patterns of the same level of interaction. Results show that both the level of complexity and the way the attributions interact impact the effectiveness of coordination mechanisms. Without system-level incentives, granting veto power to the individual actor would increase strategic knowledge accumulation hazard and thus decrease performance when complexity exists. With the system-level incentive, the composite solution and veto power could improve the overall system performance for systems of a wide range of complexity and interaction pattern. Yet modularized or "core-peripheral" systems see the best performance when no coordination mechanism exists. In the third chapter, I explore the evolutionary pattern of an innovation ecosystem and its components. While research has investigated how interdependence at the system-level impacts innovation in the ecosystem extensively, little is known about how micro-structure interdependence and local social environment impact individual components' evolution within an ecosystem. Utilizing Design Structure Matrices (DSMs), I explore the development of the Linux Kernel technological system and the ecosystems it is embedded in. The results, while exploratory, suggest that component level interdependence and the alignment between technological structure and designed communication channel are associated with an increased chance of component survival. The results also show that local environments' social composition, such as commercial participation percentage and concentration of power, have implications for the component survival.
Competition and Prosocial Incentives: Essays on the Role of Gender When Choosing to Compete for Others
(2021) King, Benjamin Charles; Agarwal, Rajshree; Starr, Evan P; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
My dissertation examines how prosocial and selfish incentives affect individuals' willingness to compete as a critical behavioral choice, and the role of gender in this relationship. Understanding more about this connection is key, as men are more competitive than women, on average, and higher levels of competitiveness are correlated with positive career outcomes. Using insights from economics and psychology, I test and expand theory that individuals become more willing to compete when the rewards benefit a charity or another individual. I suggest practical implications for organizational designers who seek to reduce gender gaps in wages and achievement.
Consequences of Winning: Evidence from Sell-Side Equity Research
(2021) Yan, Liyue; Goldfarb, Brent; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation studies the impact of winning awards on individuals’ behaviors, as well as their consequential effects on organizational outcomes. Essay 1 studies when managers may knowingly make poor decisions. Specifically, we posit “reputational herding,” whereby decision makers herd to avoid being uniquely wrong even when they know this will make them less likely to be correct. We model this phenomenon and show that decision makers will be less likely to herd when they have higher reputations and when experts have less correlated information. The theory provides predictions that distinguish between learning and reputational herding. The theory is tested in the context of sell-side stock analysts. Using winning a performance-based awards as a shock, a difference-in-differences estimation compares award-winning analysts and runners-up with similar ability to identify the causal impact of a change in reputation on the likelihood of herding. The results suggest that analysts herd less after an increase in reputation, which is consistent with the reputational herding mechanism. Essay 2 studies the effect of winning professional performance awards on entrepreneurial entry. We propose that performance awards can increase professionals’ likelihood to become entrepreneurs through increasing their confidence and reputation. We examine the effect of winning a performance award on stock analysts’ likelihood to become entrepreneurs by comparing the winners with a control group with similar ability. Using LinkedIn data, we trace the careers for about 3,000 analysts and find award winners’ likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs is 30% to 40% higher than that of the non-winners. Additionally, we find that the effect of winning is driven by mid-career professionals and those who work at relatively bigger firms. The evidence suggests that winning awards complements existing resources in entrepreneurial entry decisions. Our study provides evidence that performance awards may be low-cost instruments that complement formal policy to encourage entrepreneurship. Essay 3 discusses the empirical challenges and opportunities in studying awards for management research. We argue that existing research do not provide sufficient empirical evidence on the topic or theoretical explanations for different empirical results. We discuss several major challenges: internal validity, external validity, and disciplinary differences in studying awards. We propose some measures to deal with these challenges and suggest potential research avenues.
CREATING ORGANIZATIONAL CITIZENS: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL AND QUALITATIVE EXAMINATION OF SUPERVSIOR- AND PEER-BASED INTERVENTIONS
(2016) Parke, Michael; Tangirala, Subra; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Research suggests that supervisors and peers can help employees make sense of what is important or expected from them at work and, thereby, shape their behaviors. In this dissertation, I examine how employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), such as helping and voice, are differentially affected by these two sources of influence over time. In particular, I compare the relative and joint effectiveness of two field interventions to enhance OCB: (a) a role clarification intervention in which supervisors are trained to set expectations for OCB for their employees and encourage them to engage in OCB and (b) a norm establishment intervention in which peers are trained to set expectations for each other and encourage each other to perform OCB. I utilize a mixed methods approach involving a quasi-field experiment to test for changes in OCB and qualitative data to explore the theoretical mechanisms over the course of three months in a large food processing plant. I find that role clarification interventions alone have immediate positive effects on OCB, whereas norm establishment interventions alone take a longer period of time to increase OCB. In addition, in the condition where both interventions were combined, norm establishment interventions weaken the effects of role clarification earlier on; however, at later stages in time, this pattern reverses as norm establishment enhances the effects of role clarification on OCB. Through these findings, I highlight how (a) organizations seeking quick increases in citizenship might be better off focusing on supervisors as sources of influence; (b) organizations need to persist with peer-focused interventions to see positive gains; and (c) despite initial hurdles with peer-focused interventions, over time, they can lead to the highest increases in OCB when combined with supervisor-focused interventions.
Creative Star or Territorial Jerk? The Interpersonal Consequences of Claiming Ownership over Creative Ideas at Work
(2024) Hong, Rebekah SungEun; Venkataramani, Vijaya; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Employee creativity—the generation of novel and useful ideas—is vital for organizational growth and survival. To encourage creativity, organizations often reward employees who develop successful ideas, motivating them to claim ownership over their specific creative ideas. However, this dissertation argues that such idea ownership-claiming behaviors are a double-edged sword. Drawing from the Dual Perspective Model of social evaluation, this study proposes that claiming ownership of creative ideas leads to positive evaluations by coworkers of the focal employee’s creative potential but can also result in coworkers perceiving such individuals as territorial, influencing their willingness to collaborate on subsequent creative work. The study further proposes that the idea claiming employee’s granting of idea ownership to other coworkers’ ideas serves as a moderating factor, amplifying the positive effect of perceived creative potential and mitigating the negative effect of perceived territoriality on coworkers’ willingness to collaborate creatively with them. Finding support from a field study and three pre-registered lab experiments, the current research sheds light on the importance of balancing idea ownership claims with acknowledging others’ contributions to navigate the collaboration dynamics in organizations.
CUTTING ACROSS TEAM BOUNDARIES: ANTECEDENTS AND IMPLICATIONS OF INDIVIDUAL BOUNDARY SPANNING BEHAVIOR WITHIN CONSULTING TEAMS
(2004-07-28) Marrone, Jennifer Ann; Tesluk, Paul E; Management and Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Boundary spanning activities, or external team processes such as establishing and managing relationships with key external parties to the team, are critical to the success of many organizational work teams. Surprisingly, however, while the performance benefits of team boundary management have been documented in several seminal pieces by Ancona and her colleagues (e.g., Ancona, 1990; Ancona & Caldwell, 1992), little research has directly explored the role of the individual team members in carrying out these critical activities or if performance benefits exist for those engaging in boundary management for their teams. My dissertation addresses these limitations by considering potential predictors and consequences of individual boundary spanning behavior within a team setting. By investigating several personal and motivational antecedents to boundary spanning, I seek to expand previous teams research by predicting why particular team members engage in critical boundary spanning behaviors. Furthermore, complementing existing support for the performance benefits accompanying boundary management at the team level of analysis, I explore the consequences of boundary spanning on individual level outcomes, namely, peer ratings of individual leadership and contributions to the team. Finally, I present two sets of alternative hypotheses postulating a mediating and a moderating role for information network centrality in the boundary spanning behavior-individual outcome relationship. Hypotheses for this dissertation were tested using data from 27 consulting teams, comprised of 171 full-time MBA students. Data were collected primarily through surveys administered to team members at multiple points in time and were analyzed via hierarchical linear modeling, regression, and social network techniques. Results indicated partial support for the predictive value of self-monitoring, proactive personality, and boundary management self-efficacy on an individual's engagement in boundary spanning behaviors within their team. Additionally, boundary spanning directed toward clients and general scanning / scouting of the environment showed strong relationships with peer ratings of individual leadership and contributions, revealing that those engaging in boundary spanning behaviors were highly valued team members. Interestingly, the relationships between these boundary spanning behaviors and individual outcomes were fully mediated by information network centrality. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Decomposing Charismatic Leadership: The Effects of Leader Content and Process on Follower Performance, Attitudes, and Perceptions
(1992) Kirkpatrick, Shelley Ann; Locke, Edwin; Business and Management; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
Leadership entails both content and process elements, e.g., what the leader says and how the leader says it. For example, charismatic leaders are theorized to communicate and implement a vision (content) with an enthusiastic communication sty l e (process). In a laboratory experiment with manipulated independent variables and a simulated task, this dissertation separately examined the content and process components of charismatic leadership on performance and attitudes. The content aspect was separated into two parts, vision (versus no vision) and implementation of the vision through task strategies (versus no task strategies). Process was manipulated as enthusiasm level (low versus high). Thus, a 2 x 2 x 2 design was employed. Two trained actors, one male and one female, played the role of leader, a CEO/President of a local printing company. Upper-level business students served as participants and performed a binder assembly task. Students completed questionnaires before each session and at the end of the experiment to assess how they are influenced by the leader. Results indicated that content affected performance and many attitudes and perceptions. Process did not affect performance and affected only a few attitudes and perceptions. Exploratory analyses showed that self-set goals and self-efficacy served as mediators between the content variables and performance. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.
THE DEI SIGNALING THRESHOLD: WHEN AND WHY MORE MESSAGING IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER
(2024) Holmes, Tara; Derfler-Rozin, Rellie; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
When it comes to messaging diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts to employees, organizations take great care in considering the content of the signals they create. However, despite carefully designed communications, they continue to struggle to garner employee support and participation for these initiatives. Counter to the prevailing assumption that more DEI signaling is better (Roberson, 2006; Plaut et al., 2011; Nishii, 2013; Richard et al., 2013; Leslie, 2019; Hunt et al., 2020; Shuman et al., 2023), I argue that positive effects of organizational DEI signaling do not persist with increased exposure to DEI-related stimuli. Leveraging exposure effect research, I instead propose that employee attitudes shift from positive to negative as exposure to signaling increases, thereby decreasing their desire to engage with DEI at work. Specifically, I hypothesize that low and moderate levels of signaling are associated with employees feeling more engagement towards DEI, but at higher DEI fatigue and cynicism are more likely to develop, negatively impacting employees’ DEI effort. I further posit that because managers play a central role in shaping employee attitudes and behaviors, a manager’s consistency with organizational DEI signaling is the key to minimizing negative employee attitudes that emerge because of overexposure. I test these hypotheses in an experiment and a field study with implications for the literatures on DEI in organizations, issue fatigue, and behavioral integrity.
Demand-side Account on Firm Strategies in Response to Technological and Regulatory Changes
(2022) Lim, Najoung; Agarwal, Rajshree; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The focus of my dissertation is to understand how firms adapt to a new demand environment by leveraging their vertical and horizontal scope, the change triggered by an arrival of either new technological or regulatory regime. I follow an abductive approach to understand mechanisms using both quantitative and qualitative data in the context of the medical diagnostic imaging industry. In the first chapter, I document the process of an important technological regime change occurred in the early 1990s—standardization in medical image communication. Identifying users as an important actor, the chapter describes how the emergence of a medical image sharing platform and its underlying standard was triggered and influenced by user group’s (i.e., radiologists) request for interoperability across various imaging equipment. The chapter reveals that users can actively shapes both standard-setting process and a resulting competitive landscape for firms. The second chapter examines how the emergence of the standardized open platform affects firms’ product diversification, which connects pre-existing standalone products that were technologically independent but complementary for users. Compatibility and modularization reduced the benefit of internal coordination, but also lead to an increase in end-users’ heterogenous needs thanks to their ability to mix and match products, which in turn increased the benefit of internal coordination. I find the pattern of increasing product diversity in the post-standard period, which was particularly driven by the firms that became integrators to create customized systems around their platform software. The third chapter studies how and why prior differences in vertical structure affects firms’ ability to adapt to sudden and exogenous decreases in demand. Exploiting a major Medicare reform that created an unexpected negative derived demand shock for imaging device manufacturers, the analysis suggests that integrated firms were more likely to exit treated markets than nonintegrated firms. Drawing on literature conceptualizing firms’ vertical boundaries as a representation of existing resources and governance choices, the study explains that integrated firms with dedicated sales force were not able to shed costs associated with downstream sales functions effectively, while non-integrated firms were poised for timely reconfiguration by working closely with distributors in the locations unaffected by the shock. Together, the three chapters acknowledge the demand-side factors as an important source of change in firms’ external environment that firms (should) actively incorporate when deciding their scope of activities, which has been overlooked in the standard-setting, ecosystem, and diversification literature.
Diversity Sells: Why Mixed-Gender Coalitions Are Most Effective at Advocating Workplace Gender Equity Issues
(2019) Hussain, Insiya; Tangirala, Subra; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Employees often come together in coalitions to voice concerns and suggestions. However, such coalitions have achieved limited success thus far in advocating gender equity issues within organizations. I argue that the homophily that women demonstrate when forming coalitions on gender equity can explain their lack of effectiveness. I theorize that successful coalitions, via their composition, signal to endorsers that the issue they are advocating is organizationally relevant. Although female-only, compared to male-only, coalitions are seen as having the legitimacy to speak up about gender equity, they struggle to convince stakeholders that the issue is broadly relevant. I posit that mixed-gender coalitions, via the joint participation of women and men, can both signal sufficient legitimacy to voice about a gender equity issue while also conveying that the issue is not niche and holds relevance for everyone in the organization. As a consequence, such gender-diverse coalitions are uniquely positioned to earn higher support for gender equity issues relative to alternative, gender-heterogeneous configurations. In Study 1, a quasi-field experiment, 714 participants responded to their coworkers putatively advocating a gender equity issue in the workplace. Mixed-gender coalitions outperformed both female-only and male-only coalitions on issue support, as explained by advantages in both perceived legitimacy to speak up and perceived organizational relevance. The same pattern was found in Study 2, a fully randomized experiment involving 891 United States-based workers participating in an immersive managerial simulation. With this dissertation, I demonstrate that coalition diversity holds signaling value to potential endorsers, irrespective of any internal, functional value such diversity may bring to the coalition itself through a pooling of skills and resources. I additionally highlight that advocating for gender equity is a political process and women should enlist men as allies to better sell the issue within organizations.
Do Investor Capabilities Influence the Interpretation of Entrepreneur Signals? Theory and Testing in the Private Equity Setting
(2009) Gera, Azi; Kirsch, David A; Goldfarb, Brent; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Informing outsiders of the potential and quality of the organization in a way that will benefit the organization and avoid putting it at risk is a challenging task in competitive settings. Under conditions of uncertainty, in which external entities are imperfectly informed about the organization, outsiders will seek for alternative signals of quality. Current research of interfirm signaling has focused on the sender's ability to generate signals. In this dissertation, I propose that receivers of signals are heterogeneous in their ability to interpret signals and that this heterogeneity significantly influences the outcome of the interaction between signaler and interpreter. I apply this insight in an entrepreneurial setting to explain differences in signaling to venture capitalist and informal private equity investors (business angels) over the early stages of a firm's lifecycle. The findings have strong implications for entrepreneurial firms' strategy and, generally, to signaling theory. I argue that signals are multifaceted. Outsiders may base their decisions on two aspects of signal: the informative aspect, which relays direct information on the capabilities of the organization; and, the legitimizing aspect, which conveys legitimacy through actions of third-party entities. The use of each aspect is determined by the abilities of the sender to generate the signal and the receiver to interpret it. I posit that the informative aspect of the signal will be prominent when both the sender's and the receiver's abilities are high. When either the sender's ability to generate a signal, or the receiver's ability to interpret it, is limited, the legitimizing aspect of the signal will be prominent. When both the sender and the receiver possess low signaling abilities, the interpretation will be based on idiosyncratic data. This dissertation explores the differences between these two facets of signals, the relationships between the signal aspects at different stages of the organizational life cycle, and the usefulness of each signal aspect when considering the organization's target audience. The first essay explains the purpose of the two signal aspects for stakeholders and the interactive nature of the signals' facets. The two following essays test the theory by utilizing two large datasets of private equity investment solicitations. The second essay evaluates the effectiveness of the legitimizing aspect of the signal as a mechanism for screening startups' funding solicitations. The third essay compares the informative and legitimizing aspects of signals as decision making mechanisms for both angel and venture capital investors.
DOES NETWORK DENSITY MATTER: ESSAYS ON INTER-FIRM GROUP FORMATION AND PERFORMANCE IMPLICATION
(2011) Zhang, Lei; Gupta, Anil K.; Waguespack, David M.; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation studies inter-firm network formation and performance implication. Different from current network formation literature that focuses on the actor or dyad level, this dissertation examines network formation and its performance implication at the group level. Specifically, I examine: 1) How do inter-firm groups with different levels of density form? 2) When is a firm more likely to participate in a group with mostly unfamiliar firms? and 3) How do group internal and external network structures influence task performances? Using Venture Capital (VC) investments as the research context, I develop novel empirical designs to quantitatively test my theory. In Essay I, to investigate how groups with different levels of density form, I emphasize the path-dependence effect of previous ties among all potential group members and simultaneously examine the formation of all ties in a group. I find that both anticipated environmental adaptation and anticipated internal cooperation are important considerations in a group formation. Taking a firm-focused group perspective, Essay II studies when a firm participates in a group with mostly unfamiliar firms. The empirical results show that the group participation of an unfamiliar firm depends not only on the uncertainty it brings in value creation but also on the uncertainty in value appropriation. Essay III examines the impact of syndicate density and structural holes and finds that both have impacts on the startup company performance. This dissertation enhances our understanding of network formation by bringing in a brand-new perspective, by uncovering group-level antecedents of network formation, by illustrating the impact of concerns in value appropriation, by exploring group dynamics, and by linking network formation behaviors with task performance at the group level.
The Effects of Appropriately Participative Leadership on the Core Dimensionis of Climate
(1990) Kidder, Pamela J.; Schneider, Benjamin; Psychology & Business and Management; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)
A field experiment was conducted to determine some effects of the appropriateness of participative leadership styles on the core dimensions of climate. Climate is a construct that has received considerable attention in organizational research. The research on Climate has revealed a core set of issues or dimensions that appear to be useful for capturing employees' perceptions across all or most organizations. Proposed core dimensions of climate have included role stress or harmony in the work environment, job challenge and autonomy, leadership facilitation and support, and workgroup warmth, empathy and cooperation. I hypothesized that leadership style would affect employees' perceptions of these core dimensions of climate. The literature in psychology and organizational behavior shows significant agreement regarding the potential effect of leadership style on climate, but little empirical work has been conducted in this area. The particular leadership style I studied concerned the appropriateness of participativeness of leaders' decision making styles. I carried out a field experiment, using a two group pre- and post- experimental design. The experimental manipulation was a training program in appropriate participative decision making, with supervisors randomly assigned to a training or no training control group. Pre- and post- measures of the core dimensions of climate and decision making style were collected prior to and following the training. Appropriate participativeness in decision making (Vroom & Jago, 1988) was found to predict the three core dimensions of role stress, leadership facilitation and support, and workgroup cooperation, friendliness, and warmth. The quality of the supervisor-subordinate relationship, based on vertical dyad linkage theory, was found to contribute to the prediction of the core climate dimension of role stress. It was concluded that leadership style has an effect on employees' perception of some, but not all of the core dimensions of climate. Implications of these results for research and practice regarding climate and leadership were explored.

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