Robert H. Smith School of Business
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Item How does creativity occur in teams? An empirical test(2010) Jin, Sirkwoo; Shapiro, Debra L; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Organizations benefit when workteams produce more rather than less creativity. What actions in organizations help this to occur - on the part of team leaders and team members? This is the primary question that my dissertation aims to answer. More specifically, I hypothesize that team leaders' behaviors (e.g., transformational, empowering, and boundary-working behaviors) lead to team members' affective and cognitive experiences (e.g., positive group affective tone, team empowerment) that in turn lead to teamwork processes (e.g., information sharing and boundary-spanning among team members) that ultimately lead to team creativity. Thus, my dissertation attempts to explain how and why team creativity occurs. Results from 52 organizational R&D teams suggest support for these hypothesized relationships and for the theoretical model overall. I conclude by discussing my findings' implications for managers and management scholars interested in enhancing team creativity.Item 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.Item UNDERSTANDING CONSUMERS' ONLINE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL AND SEARCH: IMPLICATIONS FOR FIRM STRATEGIES(2010) Ramachandran, Vandana; Viswanathan, Siva; Lucas, Hank; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The growth of the Internet and other digitization technologies has enabled the unbundling of the physical and information components of the value chain and has led to an explosion of information made available to consumers. Understanding the implications of this new informational landscape for theory and practice is one of the key objectives of my research. My dissertation seeks to understand how firms can use their knowledge of online consumer search and information seeking behaviors to design optimal information provision strategies. The main premise is that consumers' online search behaviors are key to understanding consumers' underlying information needs and preferences. In my first essay I specifically focus on big-ticket, high-involvement goods for which firms essentially have sparse information on their potential buyers - making information reflected in consumers' online search very valuable to online retailers. I use a new and rich source of clickstream data obtained from a leading clicks-and-mortar retailer to model consumers' purchase outcomes as a function of the product and price information provided by the retailer, and find interesting differences for sessions belonging to customers classified as browsers, directed shoppers and deliberating researchers. Since consumers typically straddle online as well as traditional channels, the second essay in my dissertation examines how online information acquired by consumers affects their choices in offline used-good markets. Secondary markets characterized by information asymmetries have typically resorted to quality-signaling mechanisms such as certification to help reduce the associated frictions. However, the value of traditional quality signals to consumers depends crucially on the extent of the asymmetries in these markets. The online information available to consumers today may help bridge such asymmetries. Drawing upon a unique and extensive dataset of over 12,000 consumers who purchased used vehicles, I examine the impact of their information acquisition from online intermediaries on their choice of (reliance on) one such quality signal - certification, as well as the price paid. These findings will help firms to better understand how the provision of different types of online information impacts consumers' choices and outcomes, and therefore help them in designing better and targeted strategies to interact with consumers.Item ENTREPRENEURIAL SELF-EFFICACY AND THE SUCCESS OF SUBSEQUENT VENTURE STARTUP AFTER FAILURE(2010) Boss, Alan Dennis; Baum, J. Robert; Sims, Henry P; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Everyone experiences failure at some point in their lifetime. Entrepreneurs, especially, have a high incidence of failure, with estimates that over sixty percent fail within six years. Yet, a high percentage of failed entrepreneurs recover and persevere to start another business. Sometimes, they even become "serial entrepreneurs" who start many businesses. How do entrepreneurs recover from failure and have success? This research focuses on the failed entrepreneur, and I investigate aspects of how and why some failed entrepreneurs recover and start a new business. My research focuses on characteristics of the failed entrepreneurs themselves, and how certain attributes might differentiate between failed entrepreneurs who recover successfully versus those who do not. Based upon fundamental theories of human behavior and recent inquiries that have influenced the entrepreneurship literature, I draw upon research about entrepreneurs' personal competencies that stand out as predictors of venture persistence and success, specifically, (1) domain-specific self-efficacy (2) emotion regulation, (3) practical intelligence, and (4) self-leadership, to propose a path to recovery when failure occurs. I suggest that these areas of research may enhance our knowledge of how and why failed entrepreneurs recover from failure. In addition, I investigate how characteristics of the immediate context or environment support or discourage subsequent startup. I interview and survey failed entrepreneurs, beginning with a list of firms from a Bay Area business consulting firm that helps failed companies "work out" of their business. Other contact sources include small business development centers, personal contacts, university entrepreneurship centers, and two populations of healthcare workers in the southern United States. Results of this study include entrepreneurial self-efficacy fully mediating the effects of both practical intelligence and emotion regulation on subsequent venture success, as well as partial mediation of support from social contacts on success. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. Although research has been conducted on future success of successful entrepreneurs, as far as I can determine, no other academic researcher has attempted to understand and empirically demonstrate the future success of failed entrepreneurs.Item The effects of leadership and leader reputation on team performance(2010) Lorinkova, Natalia; Sims, Henry P; Pearsall, Matthew J; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The effects of two distinct types of leadership - empowering and directive - have remained under-explored, with research providing inconclusive results about their effectiveness in teams. The purpose of the current study was to shed some light on this ambiguity by exploring whether directive or empowering leadership is superior in predicting team performance for new teams, faced with a learning task. Additionally, this study attempted to explain the mediating mechanisms that might translate the effect of leadership on team performance, and to explore how leader reputation may act as an additional influence mechanism in teams. Results from 60 five-person teams, engaged in a team-based, decision making simulation, provided support for the positive effect of empowering leadership on team performance and some evidence for the unique role of leader reputation in teams led by a directive leader. Theoretical and practical implications conclude this study.Item 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.Item IT is Risky Business: Three Essays on Ensuring Reliability, Security and Privacy in Technology-Mediated Settings(2010) Anderson, Catherine Long; Agarwal, Ritu; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Today's interconnected technical environment creates unprecedented opportunities while simultaneously introducing risks. With economic, social and personal interactions increasingly occurring in technology-mediated settings new vulnerabilities are continually being introduced. In this dissertation, I develop 3 essays which seek to improve extant understanding of how organizations and individuals respond to such risks and manage the new vulnerability. The common thread underlying the studies is that the focal risk is inherently caused by the rapid digitization and dependence on information technology that has permeated economic and social activity. Essay 1 addresses the increasing dependence of organizations on the reliability of their information technology (IT) infrastructure. I draw on organizational reliability literature to classify IT infrastructure failures and theorize how collective mindfulness can change the way organizations respond to each type of failure. The results support the necessity of examining collective mindfulness at the level of its processes (versus using the omnibus measure) and provide insights into the value of collective mindfulness depending on the failure type. Essay 2 synthesizes research from information systems, communication, and psychology to form a conceptual model explicating the role played by type of information requested, the purpose for which it is to be used, and the requesting stakeholder in an individual's willingness to disclose personal health information. Further, the model incorporates the impact of emotion linked to one's health condition on willingness to disclose. Results show that emotion plays a significant role in the disclosure decision and suggest that contextual factors related to the requesting stakeholder and the intended purpose of use moderate the relationships between concern and trust on willingness to disclose personal health information. Essay 3 explores ways to minimize the perception that one is invulnerable to a security violation through an examination of the influence of message cues on computer user security-related optimistic bias and security behavior intentions. Results from experiment 1 confirm an interactive influence of self-view and risk domain frame (social or financial) on security-related intentions. Experiment 2 suggests an interactive relationship between self-view and goal frame on optimistic bias but that influence did not translate into similar changes to intentions.Item How Firm Resources and Behavior Impact Firm Performance: An examination of firm resources, competitive actions, and performance(2009) Major, David Lanier; Smith, Kenneth G; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I considered how firm resources, actions and performance may be interrelated. I tested the notion that resources both enable and interact with firm actions to impact performance. Drawing from resource-based and actions-based theory and empirical research, testable hypotheses were developed suggesting that a firm's resources may impact performance potentially in three ways - directly, mediated by actions, and in combination with actions. I examined 1) the extent to which firm resources and actions each directly predict variation in firm performance; 2) the extent to which firm resources predict variation in intervening actions and thereby predict variation in performance; and 3) the extent to which the product of resources and actions in combination predict variation in performance. With a combined dataset of 4,337 actions, gathered through the structured-content analysis of over 16,000 published news articles, and 980 model-years of resources and performance data collected from industry and government sources, 44 foreign and domestic automakers were analyzed over a study period from 1993 to 2000. I find empirical support for key components of their relationships. The analysis shows evidence that firm resources impact performance, both through and with firm actions.Item 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.Item 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.