UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Organization Theory

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    The Impact of Earnings Manipulation on the Science and Practice of Strategic Management
    (2021) Gibbs, Ralph Anthony; Waguespack, David; Agarwal, Rajshree; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Strategic management research frequently seeks to explain variation in organizational performance using metrics such as accounting profits scaled by firm assets (ROA). Essay 1 addresses a concern with such accrual-based accounting methods—perhaps best illustrated by a large discontinuity in the distribution of ROA around zero for U.S. public firms—that operational and accounting practices will artificially inflate/deflate accounting profit. The essay establishes that such earnings management is common, introduces non-classical noise, and distorts our understanding of broad drivers of firm performance. It concludes with an analysis showing that an alternative performance measure, Cash Flows from Operations on Assets (OCFOA), offers a robust vehicle for checking results using accounting profits. Essay 2 addresses a core prediction of the behavioral theory of the firm—that a firm is more likely to engage in strategic change when its performance falls short of its aspirations. If a firm manipulates income to report above aspirations when otherwise it would have fallen short, this creates a theoretical tension—does the firm engage in strategic change or not? This study utilizes two instrumental variables for a firm’s capability to smooth earnings to analyze the linkage between earnings smoothing and strategic change. The results suggest that public firms actively smoothing earnings have a lower propensity to subsequently change the firm’s major resource allocations, and that avoiding reporting performance below aspirations is a mechanism through which this may occur.
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    Institutional Logics, Collective Actions and Development of New Technologies
    (2011) Jin, Byungchae; Kirsch, David A; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Technology development is an outcome of collective social processes among actors in different institutional fields. In the literature on technology development, there have been long debates regarding whether technology shapes social structure and order, or whether social forces determine the developmental trajectories of technology. From a series of studies, I seek to understand the social dynamics of technology development in order to address theoretical tensions, both theoretically and empirically. Three separate yet related studies together provide a theoretical model and relevant empirical evidence for the linkages among actors, institutional logics and technologies. In Chapter 1 I first attempt to theorize about how actors, including scientists, engineers and technology users, collectively shape technological evolution in the general technology context. Combining the two perspectives--institutional logics and collective actions, I develop a theoretical model that addresses how scientists and engineers, faced with multiple institutional logics, strategically respond to the multiple institutional logics, and how the different formation of institutional logics can systematically lead to different types of technology development. In the theoretical model, I discuss four distinctive social mechanisms of framing institutional logics--replacing, patching, sequencing, and reinforcing, and the relationships between the social mechanisms and the types of technology development. In Chapter 2, building upon the theoretical model proposed in Chapter 1, I empirically investigate the emergence and decline of electric and hybrid drives in the community of electric vehicle researchers from 1969-2009. Combining the perspectives of institutional logics and social movements, I argue that an institutional logic is a product of collective social processes among actors in different institutional fields, and that established logics play an integral role in shaping the differential development of new technology. Empirical findings suggest that environmental protests and economic recessions systematically influence technologists' incorporation of two institutional logics (environmentalism vs. industrialism), and that social cohesion among actors within each institutional logic tends to shape differential developmental trajectories of electric and hybrid drives in the community of electric vehicle researchers. In Chapter 3 I further explore the process through which actors respond to multiple and conflicting institutional logics, suggesting that actors can purposefully create new concepts and meanings, modify meanings of institutional logics, or reinforce existing meanings. While existing institutional work has suggested and empirically demonstrated that institutional logics shape cognitive and behavioral patterns of actors, it still remains unanswered as to how actors can mobilize existing and new logics--differential decoupling processes. To trace the processes of constructing meanings of institutional logics, I conducted an inductive study by employing keyword-based, computer-aided text analysis of research proceedings published by the international Electric Vehicle Symposium in 1969 and in 1994. From the analysis, I identify four social mechanisms of logic construction: clarifying, patching, expanding and reinforcing. Moreover, empirical findings suggest that social mechanisms of patching, expanding and reinforcing are closely related to the emergence of hybrid drive.
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    An Integrated Change Model in Project Management
    (2010) Cheung, Man; Cable, John H; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Organizations need to change constantly for their survival and success, and project management has been extensively used to implement organizational change. However, studies show only less than 20 percent of organizational change projects actually succeed. This may indicate the lack of a valid model for project managers to successfully implement and manage organizational change projects since what is currently available is a wide range of organizational change models that neither are in a project management context nor pay adequate emphasis on the people-side of change. Under these circumstances, this paper has attempted to build an integrated change model in a project management context. To construct such a change model, we integrates widely cited change models in the organizational change field and the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) (Prochaska, DiClemente, 1984, 1994) in the individual behavior change field with the project management process groups (PMI, 2008).
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    A Portrait of School District Crisis Management: Leadership Choices in Montgomery County during the Sniper Shootings of October 2002
    (2010) Porter, Brian Joseph; Mawhinney, Hanne B.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The actions of two assailants who shot and killed 10 people and wounded three others, including a student, in the region around Washington, D.C., in October 2002, provides the backdrop for a qualitative study of the emergency response by school district leaders in Montgomery County, Maryland. The study explores and describes the experiences of the district's superintendent and a group of leadership staff, including the author as a participant researcher, and two elected officials and a union president who contributed to the decisions and actions. A non-evaluative study, based on portraiture in the form of case study, the narrative report provides often minute-to-minute detail of the events of the case and a unique perspective of crisis management and decision making at the school district level. The study revealed aspects of the case regarding implementation of an emergency response plan, involvement of principals, management style, political extremes, and phases of the crisis. The study also illuminated targeted objectives for decision and actions, including a central focus on mental health and communications. The study reflects a subject area that is largely overlooked in the research of education leadership. Implications from the study are that school district leaders need specific training and experience necessary to manage a crisis, make decisions under crisis circumstances, and improve their performance through practice. The study identifies licensure for school district leaders as a way to attain a standardized level of competency in crisis management and decision making skills. The study also provides an entry point for further research in educational crisis management and decision making. In particular, the study explores a unique blend of research encompassing critical tasks in public leadership during a crisis, complex transformational processes among the components of a school district's social system, and expectations of high reliability in organizational environments that support mindfulness and expertise.