College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Getting on the Same Page: How Leaders Build Trust Consensus in Teams and Its Consequences(2012) Fulmer, C. Ashley; Ostroff, Cheri; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Existing organizational research has demonstrated that team members' trust in leaders is positively related to a team's bottom-line outcomes. However, little is known about how collective trust in leaders develops among team members. To address this gap, the present study examines the effects of multiple emergent processes on the extent to which team members exhibit consensus in trust in their leader. In particular, it was proposed that the most important factors for the emergence, and the degree of consensus, of collective trust in leaders should have the same referent target as the collective construct (i.e., the leader) and concern behaviors that involve interactions between the leader and team members. Thus, the leader behavior and interactions variables of showing concern, leading by example, and monitoring were expected to exert stronger influence on the consensus in trust in leaders than leader attributes (ability and integrity) and team factors (open communication and demographic diversity). Further, the degree of consensus in trust in leaders was predicted to have both an independent and interaction effect with the mean level of trust in leaders in influencing team performance and voice behavior. Three waves of survey data were collected from teams with new leadership in a large academic military institution. Data from 719 team members from 105 teams were used to test these predictions by analyzing consensus concurrently and changes in consensus over time. The results generally supported the relative importance of leader showing concern and leading by example on the degree of consensus in trust in leaders in the concurrent model. For changes in consensus, leading by example was particularly important. In addition, while consensus was not independently related to the team performance and voice behaviors, it interacted with the mean level in influencing the outcomes in both the concurrent and change models. Taken together, the findings suggest that some leader behaviors are important for the development of collective trust or consensus in trust in leaders, and further suggest that consensus can act as a boundary condition for the effect of the mean level of trust in leaders on team outcomes. By focusing on the consensus in trust in leaders, this research begins to shed light on how consensus in trust develops among team members with respect to their leader and has implications for understanding trust, leadership, and emergence.Item Essays on Business Economics(2011) Sertsios Belmar, Giorgo T; Betancourt, Roger R; Phillips, Gordon M; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation consists of three essays, of which two are related. In the first essay I model the interaction between a franchisor and its franchisees. I examine how a franchisor uses the investment requirements she asks franchisees as a tool to reduce franchisees' underprovision of sales effort. Theoretically, I show that if the franchisor's reputation is highly important the franchisor asks for higher investment requirements when penalizing a misbehaving franchise is more difficult (weaker law enforcement) and when directly monitoring franchisees is more costly. In the second essay, I empirically test the theoretical predictions of the first essay using two datasets at the franchisor level. I measure weak law enforcement using the passing of state level good-cause termination/nonrenewal laws for franchise contracts and I measure monitoring costs using the number of states in which a franchisor operates. Using a database that contains information for 278 franchisors, before and after the laws were passed in some states, I find that the passing of the laws implied an incremental 4.7% increase in investment requirements for franchisors located in states where the laws were passed. Using a large database (10,047 franchisor-year observations), posterior to the passing of the laws, I find that franchisors located in states where good-cause termination/nonrenewal laws were passed ask for investment requirements 4.5% higher than franchisors located in states without such laws. Using both datasets I find evidence that franchisors that expand their operations to an additional state increase the average investment requirements they ask a prospective franchisee between 0.6-1%. The third essay, which is in conjunction with Gordon Phillips, empirically studies how financial distress and bankruptcy affects firms' choices of product quality and prices using data from the airline industry. We find that an airline's quality and pricing decisions are differentially affected by financial distress and bankruptcy. Product quality decreases when airlines are in financial distress, consistent with financial distress reducing a firm's incentive to invest in quality. In addition, firms price more aggressively when in financial distress consistent with them trying to increase short-term market share and revenues. In contrast, in bankruptcy product quality increases relative to financial distress periods.