Due to changes in workforce structure, household structure and the nature of jobs, today's working adults face the challenge of balancing their work and life. However, employees do not only passively react to the incompatible demands from work and life - they are active agents who make decisions about their own total life. For example, individuals make decisions about the amount of energy that they spend on work/life (WL) activities. Thus, I write three essays to understand the antecedents and consequences of employees' personal resource allocation decisions. In the first essay, I study the decision itself. That is, I identify and examine four profiles of employees' WL behavioral involvement. The studied behaviors include job behavioral involvement, organizational citizenship behavior, and life involvement. In Essay 2, I examine the antecedent of the behavioral involvement decisions – WL value, which is expressed as centrality, importance, and priority. Although an individual's behavior is argued to be directed by value, it cannot be fully understood without considering the context. Thus, I examine the influences of three external factors, including financial pressure, job demands, and perceived organizational supportive culture, on the value-behavioral involvement relationship. In Essay 3, I focus on the consequences of individuals being …

This dissertation extends our understanding of how rivalries are formed, what their antecedents are, and how and why they influence consumer choices. Furthermore, the psychological processes underlying the rivalry effects and the moderating effects of temporal focus are uncovered.

The primary focus of this research is explicating the role of emotion in IT post-adoption behavior. Studied in the context of intelligent personal assistants (IPA), a class of conversational artificial intelligence (AI), the first study integrates elements from computer science, communications, and IS disciplines. The research identifies two constructs vital for speech-based technologies, natural language understanding, and feedback, and examines their role in use decisions. This work provides guidance to practice on how best to allocate R&D investments in conversational AI. The second essay examines the IT continuance through the theoretical lens of the expectation-confirmation model (ECM), incorportating cognitive and emotional satisfaction into the ECM framework. Empirical testing of the model suggests that it offers additional clarity on IT continuance phenomena and provides a significant improvement to the explanatory power of ECM in the context of an emerging technology. The third essay is one of the earliest efforts to conceptualize and test a theoretical model that considers emotional attachment in IT continuance behavior. This essay develops a novel model to investigate this phenomenon based on emotional attachment theory, and empirically validates the proposed model in the context of conversational artificial intelligence systems. While the existing theories of IT continuance focus …

Performance-based contracting (PBC) redefines the relationships between suppliers and buyers and differs from traditional contracting approaches with its reward/payment scheme, emphasis on the performance outcomes, increased supplier autonomy, and transfer of risk and responsibilities to suppliers. Given the 70% of life cycle costs of products/systems reside in sustainment, PBC has led to substantial improvements in availability, maintainability, reliability, and thus total cost of ownership of systems/products. Though PBC has changed the way of doing business and its presence has increased across multiple industry, private and public sectors, for profit and not-for-profit, its implications on various aspects of logistics and supply chain management have been understudied. It is important to explore and establish evidence regarding these implications through academic rigor. Therefore, this three-essay dissertation aims to give some insight regarding structural and behavioral implications of PBC using a multi-method approach. Specifically, it (1) explores the relationship between PBC and supply chain resilience (SCRES), (2) examines the supplier goal commitment (i.e., motivation) in PBC, (3) proposes a mathematical model to find optimal contract length, periodic contract price and investment that concurrently maximizing supplier profit and satisfying buyer requirements. This dissertation offers theoretical and managerial contributions as well.

This research introduces the unique context of immoral inaction—situations in which consumers have the opportunity to engage in virtuous behaviors but opt against doing so. Through five studies I demonstrate that in such contexts, embarrassment—a negatively valenced self-conscious moral emotion evoked by the perception that one's behavior is worthy of judgment by others—interacts with the use of approach-motivated coping strategies to lead consumers to engage in prosocial compensatory behaviors. Though extant literature suggests that marketers seeking to evoke prosocial behaviors should employ communications and promotions framed to elicit consumers' guilt, such studies are based in contexts whereby individuals feel guilty and/or embarrassed because of something they have done, not for something they did not do. This research suggests that that the condition of immoral inaction serves to evoke a contrasting psychological mechanism that reverses these findings, making embarrassment a more effective driver of desired outcomes when marketers seek to promote overcoming past inactions. These findings are discussed in light of their implications for research and application.