Robert H. Smith School of Business

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End date: 2019Subject: search.filters.subject.Business Administration, General

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    INDIVIDUAL LEVEL PREDICTORS OF EMOTIONAL LABOR STRATEGIES AND THEIR DIFFERENTIAL OUTCOMES OVER TIME: ROLE OF LEADER BEHAVIOR.
    (2010) Singh, Sheetal; Tesluk, Paul; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this longitudinal study, I evaluate the role of individual level cultural values of power distance, collectivism, and femininity in predicting individuals' emotional labor strategies. Additionally, I identify the differential effects of deep acting and surface acting on outcomes. I also test for the moderating role of leader behaviors on the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. I begin with a qualitative research phase to identify the leader behaviors that influence the relationship between emotional labor strategies and outcomes. Then I use a survey-based field study to test my model where I collected data from 198 individuals at time 1 and one month later at time 2. I also collected matching data on performance from their supervisors at both time 1 and time 2. Results demonstrate that individuals who are high on collectivism tend to engage in emotional labor and surface acting more than individuals who are low on collectivism. I did not find support for the hypotheses relating power distance and femininity with emotional labor strategies. Surface acting had a positive impact on emotional exhaustion and depersonalization at time 1 and time 2. Deep acting had a positive impact on job satisfaction at time 1 and time 2. However, deep acting had a negative impact on job performance at time 2. Several leader behaviors such as leader inclusiveness, empowering leadership, and leader positive emotional expression interacted with surface acting and deep acting to predict emotional exhaustion and satisfaction at time 1 and time 2.Psychological safety interacted with surface and deep acting to predict emotional exhaustion at time 1 and time 2. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.
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    ESSAYS IN INTERNATIONAL FINANCE
    (2010) Makaew, Tanakorn; MAKSIMOVIC, VOJISLAV; Business and Management: Finance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation consists of three essays on international capital flows. In the first essay, titled "Do small firms benefit more from foreign portfolio investment? Evidence from a Natural Experiment," I test whether an increase in the supply of foreign portfolio capital benefits small firms by using the Thai government's unique restriction on capital inflows as a natural experiment. The Thai government imposed a very stringent capital control on December 19, 2006, and then quickly abandoned it one day later. Although many other studies have been plagued with the difficulty of separating the impact of foreign capital from the impact of other concurrent events, this experiment helps me solve the time-series identification problem. My results suggest that foreign portfolio investment helps large firms the most, contrary to existing evidence, which finds a benefit in foreign portfolio investment for small firms. I also investigate the importance of other firm characteristics correlated with size, which includes a firm's exchange rate exposure, foreign ownership, and political connection. The next two essays are on the dynamic patterns of international mergers and acquisitions. In the second essay, I uncover key facts about international M&As by estimating a variety of reduced form models. I find that: (1) Cross-border mergers come in waves that are highly correlated with business cycles. (2) Most mergers occur when both the acquirer and the target economies are booming. (3) Merger booms have both an industry-level component (productivity shocks) and a country-level component (financial shocks). (4) Across over one million observations, acquirers tend to be more productive and targets tend to be less productive, compared to their industry peers. These facts are consistent with the neoclassical theory of mergers in which productive firms expand overseas to seize new investment opportunities, but not with the widely held views that most cross-border mergers occur when the target economies are in a recession or face a financial crisis. In the third essay, I construct a dynamic structural model of cross-border mergers and integrate the important facts above into the model. This dynamic structural approach allows me to quantify the effects of productivity and financial shocks on M&A decisions. In addition, this approach provides a proper analytical framework for conducting policy experiments. As an example of such analyses, I investigate the impact of President Obama's proposal on multinational corporation taxation. My simulation results suggest that the foreign operation tax has economically significant effects on productive firms and can be very distortionary for cross-border mergers.
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    THE IMPACT OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCES ON BUYER-SUPPLIER RELATIONSHIPS.
    (2010) Ribbink, Dina; Grimm, Curtis M; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In today's economy, an ever-increasing number of companies are dealing with partners from across the world giving rise to the need to understand the impact of cultural differences on business interactions. This dissertation uses two different approaches to investigate the impact of culture in buyer supplier relationships. The first study researches the effect of cultural differences in contractual buyer-supplier agreements using transaction cost as a theoretic lens. A large number of relationships translate into contracts between partners, but very few studies have investigated the effect of cultural differences on these written agreements: This research looks at the level of contract completeness and the option to renegotiate the contract as outcome variables. The study investigates the impact of cultural difference in buyer-supplier relationships using Hofstede's cultural dimensions. The main finding is that contract completeness increases as the cultural gap between the buyer and supplier widens. The results for individual culture dimensions on contract completeness are mixed. Cultural distance impacts the option of renegotiation but the individual dimensions fail to have an effect. Finally, asset specificity has the expected positive effect on the level of contract completeness and the option to renegotiate, while more frequent transactions result in lower levels of contract completeness and fewer options to renegotiate. Overall, these findings emphasize that cultural background is a factor in contractual buyer supplier relationships and need to be taken into account in global supply chain management. The second essay investigates the impact of cultural differences in the context of dyadic buyer-supplier negotiations. It looks at the moderating effect of culture. The study uses an experimental design to investigate these issues. In the simulation negotiation, participants, classified by their country of origin, are asked to take on the role of either a buyer or a seller. They negotiate prices and quality levels for three products. This study finds that cultural differences within the negotiation dyad reduce joint profits when compared to dyads of participants with similar cultural backgrounds. Cultural differences weaken the effect of trust and opportunism on joint profits. Overall, this study concludes that cultural differences as encountered in day-to-day business interactions in global supply chains impose greater challenges.
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    ROBUST REVENUE MANAGEMENT WITH LIMITED INFORMATION : THEORY AND EXPERIMENTS
    (2009) Lan, Yingjie; Ball, Michael O; Karaesmen, Itir A; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Revenue management (RM) problems with full probabilistic information are well studied. However, as RM practice spreads to new businesses and industries, there are more and more applications where no or only limited information is available. In that respect, it is highly desirable to develop models and methods that rely on less information, and make fewer assumptions about the underlying uncertainty. On the other hand, a decision maker may not only lack data and accurate forecasting in a new application, but he may have objectives (e.g. guarantees on worst-case profits) other than maximizing the average performance of a system. This dissertation focuses on the multi-fare single resource (leg) RM problem with limited information. We only use lower and upper bounds (i.e. a parameter range), instead of any particular probability distribution or random process to characterize an uncertain parameter. We build models that guarantee a certain performance level under all possible realizations within the given bounds. Our methods are based on the regret criterion, where a decision maker compares his performance to a perfect hindsight (offline) performance. We use competitive analysis of online algorithms to derive optimal static booking control policies that either (i) maximize the competitive ratio (equivalent to minimizing the maximum regret) or (ii) minimize the maximum absolute regret. Under either criterion, we obtain closed-form solutions and investigate the properties of optimal policies. We first investigate the basic multi-fare model for booking control, assuming advance reservations are not cancelled and do not become no-shows. The uncertainty in this problem is in the demand for each fare class. We use information on lower and upper bounds of demand for each fare class. We determine optimal static booking policies whose booking limits remain constant throughout the whole booking horizon. We also show how dynamic policies, by adjusting the booking limits at any time based on the bookings already on hand, can be obtained. Then, we integrate overbooking decisions to the basic model. We consider two different models for overbooking. The first one uses limited information on no-shows; again the information being the lower and upper bound on the no-show rate. This is appropriate for situations where there is not enough historical data, e.g. in a new business. The second model differs from the first by assuming the no-show process can be fully characterized with a probabilistic model. If a decision-maker has uncensored historical data, which is often the case in reality, he/she can accurately estimate the probability distribution of no-shows. The overbooking and booking control decisions are made simultaneously in both extended models. We derive static overbooking and booking limits policies in either case. Extensive computational experiments show that the proposed methods that use limited information are very effective and provide consistent and robust results. We also show that the policies produced by our models can be used in combination with traditional ones to enhance the system performance.
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    The Impact of Globalization on Inventory and Financial Performance: A Firm-Level and Industry-Level Analysis
    (2009) Han, Chaodong; Dresner, Martin E; Dong, Yan; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation investigates how globalization affects inventory and financial performance from both firm and industry perspectives. Drawing upon elements from classic inventory models, transaction costs, geographic economics, and international business and strategy literatures, this dissertation aims to contribute to the construction of a theory of global supply chain management through an empirical testing of hypotheses on the effects of global sourcing, exports and manufacturing offshoring (i.e., foreign subsidiaries) on inventory performance and financial performance, using data from multinational firms and U.S. manufacturing industries. Motivated by the lack of empirical research on inventory management in a global context, and an uncertain relationship between globalization and financial performance reported in the international business and strategy literature, the first essay examines how globalization affects firm financial performance directly and indirectly through inventory management. Globalization is further examined by a two-dimensional measure: global intensity and extensity. Due to increased uncertainties associated with global supply chains, globalization may significantly increase firm inventory levels. Even though manufacturing offshoring may benefit multinational firms through economies of scale and geographic diversification, escalating transaction costs and shrinking arbitrage opportunities may overwhelm benefits and lead to reduced financial performance. This direct-indirect effect model is tested using a large panel dataset of thousands of multinational firms over 1987-2007, collected from the COMPUSTAT global and segment databases. Essay 1 contributes to the supply chain management literature by providing a two-dimensional measure of globalization: foreign market penetration (depth) and geographic expansion (breadth), and may enhance our understanding of global supply chains. The second essay analyzes the impact of global inbound and outbound supply chains on inventory performance within the U.S. economy. This research argues that global activity (i.e., global sourcing and exports) has offsetting effects on domestic inventory levels: an increasing impact due to risk considerations and a decreasing impact due to cost pressure from rising inventory costs. According to location theory, rooted in geographic economics, and "new trade theory" on intra-firm trade, firms may be able to efficiently allocate inventories to low cost regions along their global supply chains. To the extent that allocative efficiency may only be realized once a certain level of global activity is reached, it is hypothesized that the impact of international trade on domestic inventory is inverted-U shaped. i.e., as globalization increases, inventory levels first increase due to the longer and more complex supply chains, then decrease as firms determine how to more efficiently allocate their inventory across borders. The hypotheses are tested using inventories at all three stages (raw materials, finished goods and work-in-process inventory) and industry operating data from U.S. manufacturers over the period 1997-2005. Regression results indicate a strong invert-U shaped relationships existing between import intensity (measured by imported raw materials as a percentage of industry total cost of materials) and raw materials inventory in days of supply, and between export intensity (measured by exported finished goods as a percentage of total value of industry shipments) and finished goods inventory in days of supply. Essay 2 makes two contributions: theoretically, it is the first effort to connect international trade with inventory performance; empirically, results based on all U.S. manufacturers over a recent nine-year period may provide a benchmark for management when designing global inventory strategy. In summary, this dissertation comprehensively investigates the impact of global supply chains on inventory performance and financial performance in the context of multinational firms and U.S. domestic manufacturers and hence is expected to enhance our understanding of global supply chain management theory and practices.
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    Impact of Leadership on Continued Participation in Online Groups
    (2008-11-20) Johnson, Steven L.; Faraj, Samer; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Online groups formed by volunteer members are increasingly recognized as sources of innovative ideas, as producers of information goods, and as a critical component for successful product marketing. Compared to formal organizations, online groups appear as anarchic collections of individuals largely devoid of formal authority. Yet online groups develop strong group norms, successfully generate information goods, and satisfy member needs--outcomes that seem impossible without some form of leadership by influential members. Research on open-membership voluntary online groups has consistently found that contribution to online groups is dominated by a small percentage of participants. The goal of this research is to better understand the role of leadership in online groups and to evaluate the impact of leadership in maintaining online groups by supporting continued participation intentions of existing members. I explored three related questions regarding leadership in online groups. First, does member interaction with group leaders contribute to continued participation intentions over and above a model based on past participation? Second, do shared context and direct communication with leaders impact continued participation intentions? And third, do group characteristics--group psychological safety, group size, and perceived number of leaders--moderate the relationship between group members and group leaders? I collected 535 survey responses from members of thirty-three different online groups (average of sixteen members per group) and also analyzed group communication history (a total of 135,477 messages). This cross-level analysis furthers our understanding of the relationship between interaction with group leadership, psychological safety, participation role intentions, and turnover intentions. I found that leadership in online groups is a determinant of online group outcomes. Online group leaders shape the group context, including psychological safety, which encourages or discourages participation. This study shows that leadership processes, group context, and differentiation among dimensions of participation intentions are all important considerations for further understanding of online groups.
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    Supply Chain Disruption Management: A Conceptual Framework and Theoretical Model
    (2008-11-06) Macdonald, John R; Corsi, Thomas M; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Severe supply chain disruptions have a great impact on the firm. They can cause loss of sales to customers and lead to changes in the design and strategy of the supply chain. This research works focuses on supply chain disruption management. It presents an overall conceptual framework and a theoretical model, highlighting the decision making process of disruption recovery. First, the literature concepts surrounding supply chain disruptions - risk management, mitigation, crisis management, supply chain resilience, supply chain security, business continuity planning, and sustainability - are defined and differentiated, since these concepts often have overlapping factors that can cause confusion. After defining each of these concepts and the latest research findings, a framework for understanding the relationships among the concepts is developed. Second, this framework reveals a gap in the literature surrounding the disruption recovery and decision making process. While an initial disruption management model can be built using factors from the literature, data are collected by conducting multiple interviews and analyzed using a structured grounded theory methodology to produce a more complete model. This also has the effect of building theory from which propositions are developed surrounding discovery of the disruption, recovery team composition, decision making, and others. These propositions can be tested empirically in future research.
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    Firm Decision Making Under Financial Distress: A Study of U.S. Air Fares and an Analysis of Inventories in U.S. Manufacturing Industries
    (2007-07-09) Hofer, Christian; Dresner, Martin E; Windle, Robert J; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation investigates the effects of firm financial distress on two key firm decision variables: sales prices and inventories. These analyses contribute to the Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm literature. Specifically, the feedback loop between financial distress, a result of poor past performance, and two firm conduct parameters, prices and inventories, is explored in great detail. The first essay is motivated by the ambiguity of prior research on the relationship between firm financial distress and prices. The extant economics, corporate finance and strategic management literatures differentially approach this relationship, and empirical research has found only limited, at times ambiguous support for any single theoretical contention. These theoretical perspectives are reviewed and an attempt is made to reconcile the apparent conflict by adopting a strategic contingency perspective that identifies in which way and in what instances firm financial distress may impact prices. The model is empirically tested using data from the U.S. airline industry. The results indicate that firm financial distress and prices are generally negatively related. Moreover, this effect is substantially stronger for firms operating under Chapter 11 protection than for firms approaching bankruptcy. It is further shown that the magnitude of the effect of financial distress on prices depends on firm factors such as operating costs, market power, and firm size, as well as on competitive characteristics such as market concentration and the financial condition of competitors. The second essay analyzes the impact of firm distress on firm inventories and investigates if this relationship is impacted by a firm's power relative to its upstream and downstream supply chain partners. Building on prior work in the economics field, this research is not only based on microeconomics theory, but also draws on inventory theory as well as on prior work on supply chain relationships. A comprehensive inventory estimation model is specified, and novel measures of inventory determinants and power are developed. The hypotheses are tested using panel data from the U.S. manufacturing industry. It is shown that distressed firms hold less inventory and that a firm's power within the supply chain will determine to what extent inventory ownership is reduced during times of financial distress. Implications for supplier selection and supply chain cooperation are discussed. In summary, this research significantly enhances researchers' understanding of why, how, and when firm financial distress affects prices and inventories.
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    Information Technology and Its Transformational Effect on the Health Care Industry
    (2007-04-25) Angst, Corey M; Agarwal, Ritu; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation examines the adoption of health IT by addressing the barriers to adoption from the perspective of multiple stakeholders. I examine three different phenomena using alternative methodologies and theoretical lenses. Essay 1: The Impact of Firm Characteristics and Spatial Proximity on the Diffusion of Electronic Medical Records: A Hazard Modeling Analysis. This study, positioned at the inter-organizational level, draws upon adoption and diffusion literature to predict the likelihood of EMR adoption by hospitals. I theorize that adoption is driven by factors such as the concentration and experience with complementary HIT and an environmental factor, spatial proximity. Using a hazard model fitted to data from a sample drawn from almost 4,000 hospitals, I find support for a positive relationship between IT concentration and likelihood of adoption. I also find that spatial proximity explains variance in adoption and that its effect diminishes as distance increases. Essay 2: Isolating the Effects of IT on Performance: An Empirical Test of Complementarities and Learning. An issue at the organizational level is whether benefits result from investment in HIT. I apply a knowledge-based lens to the examination of IT adoption and process-level value, incorporating the effects of learning occurring through complementary IT adoption. I test hypotheses using data from almost 400 nationally-representative hospitals matched with quality and financial performance data and find that learning associated with more experience with IT leads to superior performance. Essay 3: Adoption of Electronic Medical Records in the Presence of Privacy Concerns: The Elaboration Likelihood Model and Individual Persuasion. At the individual level, privacy concerns can inhibit the adoption of EMRs. I draw from literature on attitude change to develop hypotheses that individuals can be persuaded to support the use, and ultimately opt-in to EMRs, even in the presence of significant privacy concerns if compelling arguments about the value of EMRs are presented. Using a quasi-experimental methodology, I find that privacy concerns interact with argument framing and issue involvement to affect attitudes toward the use of EMRs. In addition, results suggest that attitude towards EMR use and CFIP directly impact the likelihood of adoption of EMR technology.
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    Strategic Behaviors and Market Outcomes: Two Essays
    (2007-04-19) Zou, Li; Dresner, Martin E; Windle, Robert J; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation is comprised of two essays related, broadly, to themes of competitive dynamics and economic consequences. In Essay One, "Many Fields of Battle: How Cost Structure Affects Competition across Multiple Markets," a conjectural variation model is developed to examine what role cost structure and product differentiation play in affecting the mutual forbearance outcome arising from multi-market contact. The analytical results show that the degree of collusion (as measured by the price level) enhanced through multimarket contact is greater when multimarket contact occurs between firms with similar production costs and undifferentiated products. This hypothesis is then tested using data from the U.S. airline industry. The empirical results provide support for the view suggesting that multimarket contact blunts the edge of competition between firms. Moreover, it is found that rival carriers with similar production costs are more likely to experience such collusion facilitating effects from multimarket contact than those with dissimilar production costs. The second essay in this dissertation is entitled, "A Two-Location Inventory Model with Transshipments in a Competitive Environment." In this study, an analytical model is developed to assess the impact of transshipments on inventory replenishment decisions and the implications for firm profitability in a competitive, uncertain market environment. To incorporate the competition between stocking locations, the analytical model developed in this paper uses a marketing variable, customer's switching rate, to measure the probability of an individual consumer choosing an alternative source of supply in the event of stockout. In such an environment, firms not only cooperate through the practice of transshipments but also compete for business. A number of interesting conclusions are drawn from numerical optimization results. For instance, it is found that when firms differ in market demand, small firms benefit more from transshipments than do large firms. In addition, it is shown that there is an inverted u-shaped relationship between transshipment price and the profit improvements that large firms gain through transshipments, whereas such benefits are monotonically decreasing with transshipment price for small firms. These findings provide several managerial implications with regard to the role of transshipment price in creating benefits for participating firms.