The fundamental purpose of this dissertation is to determine the extent to which many of the corporations within the United States are implementing formalized planning processes. The conditions surrounding the corporation have caused the movement toward a more systematic approach to corporate planning since there appears to be no better substitute for a formalized planning process to help assure the survival and growth of the firm.

Co-creation is an emerging phenomenon that occurs when two or more parties work together to create value. Co-creation, which is a key component to service dominant logic, is present in business to business, business to consumer, and consumer to consumer processes. This dissertation will focus on the business to consumer (and consumer to business) co-creation relationship. Much of the current business to consumer co-creation literature is qualitative in nature, with quantitative work just now beginning to emerge. As such, there is still much about the phenomenon of co-creation that is not understood. When looking at co-creation in the context of brand management, even less is known. In today's age of digital interaction where consumers are gaining more power on a daily basis, practitioners and academics should understand the motivations for consumers to engage brands in co-creation and what the outcomes of these co-creation partnerships are. Because of this, the dissertation contains three essays with the purpose of (1) identifying the motivations for co-creation from consumer and brand perspectives, (2) exploring each of these motivators on their individual relationship to the outcome of co-creation, and (3) understanding how the perceived ability to influence a brand impacts the outcomes of co-creation. Essay …

Absorptive capacity plays an important role in the organizational adaptation process. Prior research on absorptive capacity focuses on its role in organizational outcomes such as financial performance, innovation, new product development, etc. Recently, scholars have called for research on factors that influence absorptive capacity. Because absorptive capacity plays a vital role in achieving organizational outcomes, it behooves us to improve our understanding of absorptive capacity and its antecedents to serve both researchers and practitioners. In this investigation, strategic thinking is posited to be a key antecedent of absorptive capacity. Capability theory suggests that strategic thinking is a metaphysical (higher order) capability that influences an organization's absorptive capacity. Combining this argument with Miles and Snow's typology of organizational adaptation process, it is posited that the relationship between strategic thinking and absorptive capacity can be clustered into different "groups." Prospectors, defenders, and analyzers, characterized in Miles and Snow's typology of firms are viewed as distinctive groups that exhibit different relationships between strategic thinking and absorptive capacity. Results from an empirical examination suggest that strategic thinking is positively related to absorptive capacity. The results also suggest that the relationship between these two constructs is different between these groups and that the strategic thinking …

Today's environment is filled with the proliferation of cyber-attacks that result in losses for organizations and individuals. Hackers often use compromised websites to distribute malware, making it difficult for individuals to detect. The impact of clicking through a link on the Internet that is malware infected can result in consequences such as private information theft and identity theft. Hackers are also known to perpetrate cyber-attacks that result in organizational security breaches that adversely affect organizations' finances, reputation, and market value. Risk management approaches for minimizing and recovering from cyber-attack losses and preventing further cyber-attacks are gaining more importance. Many studies exist that have increased our understanding of how individuals and organizations are motivated to reduce or avoid the risks of security breaches and cyber-attacks using safeguard mechanisms. The safeguards are sometimes technical in nature, such as intrusion detection software and anti-virus software. Other times, the safeguards are procedural in nature such as security policy adherence and security awareness and training. Many of these safeguards fall under the risk mitigation and risk avoidance aspects of risk management, and do not address other aspects of risk management, such as risk transfer. Researchers have argued that technological approaches to security risks are rarely …

Supply chain resilience refers to the capability of a supply chain to both withstand and adapt to unexpected disturbances. In today's turbulent business environment, firms are continually seeking to create more resilience within their supply chain through increased information communication technology use and enhanced business-to-business relationships. The focus of this dissertation is the investigation of how information communication technology creates resilience at the differing process levels of supply chain operations. Past research into information communication technology use within supply chains has often been conducted at the macro-level of supply chain phenomena. As such, there is still much to understand about how decision-makers interact with information communication technology at the micro-level of supply chain decision-making. A more in-depth, broad coverage of this interaction will provide both practitioners and academics a better understanding of how to leverage information communication technology in achieving supply chain resilience. To meet this aim, this dissertation contains three essays that re-orient conceptual thinking about supply chain phenomenon, explore how advances in information communication technology influence business-to-business relationships, and identify how information communication technology effects the decision-making of supply chain managers.

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? These are some of the fundamental questions that identity scholars have grappled with since the 1900s when researchers across multiple disciplines first began to theorize about the self, identity, and identification. While the benefits and consequences of singular identities has been largely studied, recent scholars have argued for the importance of multiple identity research, as multiple identities have become increasingly salient to individuals due to societal and organizational changes including globalization and technological advancements. An important phenomenon within multiple identity research is dual identification, of which I explore a specific type– identification with both one's organization and one's profession. Using a three-study, quantitative design spanning two industries, I studied the effects of dual identification and identity conflict on individual psychological outcomes, turnover intentions, and OCB engagement. Findings from these three studies, holistically, indicate that when individuals experience identity conflict between their organizational and professional identities, they experience negative outcomes. These negative outcomes – increased emotional exhaustion, psychological distress, and turnover intentions, in addition to reduced OCB engagement – have important ramifications for the individuals themselves and their organization. However, post-hoc results indicate that dual identification – through the main effects of …

Under the unifying theme of supply chain learning, this three essay dissertation extends scholarship by investigating these multi-tier relationships. Theory is emerged, grounded in data, gathered from functioning supply chains in an effort to provide scholars and practitioners with an increased understanding of the SCL phenomena. Essay 1, entitled "Supply Chain Learning: An Exploratory Literature Review" examines the current literature in an attempt to address the shortcomings and emerge areas that have been less explored and less understood. By exposing these areas of research opportunities using a grounded theory methodology, a framework was emerged allowing identification of the limitations of extant literature and providing a springboard for future research. This framework also allowed further investigation into the SCL processes and expansion of the current understanding by providing academia with a comprehensive review of the literature and revealing the shortcomings that exist related to SCL. Using the framework emerged in Essay 1, Essay 2 entitled "Toward Supply Chain Learning: A Focus on the Customers of Logistics Service Providers" explores the rationalization and cognitive processes of senior level executives of firms utilizing national or global supply chains. These respondents are directly engaged in creating, establishing and operating relationships with third party logistics …

Performance-based contracting (PBC) is an outcome-based product support strategy that provides efficient performance solutions for buyers. Suppliers under performance-based contracting are rewarded after achieving desired performance objectives. While current scholarship has deepened our knowledge of the benefits of PBC, the particular factors behind effective and efficient performance-based contracts (PBCs) are still vague. Thus, this dissertation will focus on essential dimensions for the successful PBC. There remains a great deal that is not understood about the success factors for effective PBCs. When looking at the critical criteria for the selection of suppliers in the context of PBC, even less is known. This dissertation contains three essays with the purpose of: (1) investigating the effect of supply chain collaboration and upfront investments on the benefits of the PBC; (2) exploring supplier selection criteria for successful PBC; and (3) examining the effect of contract length and fleet size on upfront investments for effective and efficient PBC. These three essays offer a solid foundation for theoretical and practitioner understanding for effective PBCs.

This manuscript includes an investigation of decision making in alternative modes of transportation in order to understand consumers' decision in different contexts. In essay 1 of this study, the motives for participation in situated ridesharing is investigated. The study proposes a theoretical model that includes economic benefits, time benefits, transportation anxiety, trust, and reciprocity either as direct antecedents of ridesharing participation intention, or mediated through attitude towards ridesharing. Essay 2 of this study, focuses on self-driving vehicles as one of the recent innovations in transportation industry. Using a survey approach, the study develops a conceptual model of consumers' anticipated motives. Both essays use partial least square- structural equation modeling for assessing the proposed theoretical models.

In this work, we focus on enhancing the efficacy of predictive modeling in operational management decision making in two different settings: Essay 1 focuses on demand forecasting for the companies and the second study utilizes longitudinal data to analyze the illicit drug seizure and overdose deaths in the United States. In Essay 1, we utilize an operational system (newsvendor model) to evaluate the forecast method outcome and provide guidelines for forecast method (the exponential smoothing model) performance assessment and judgmental adjustments. To assess the forecast outcome, we consider not only the common forecast error minimization approach but also the profit maximization at the end of the forecast horizon. Including profit in our assessment enables us to determine if error minimization always results in maximum profit. We also look at the different levels of profit margin to analyze their impact on the forecasting method performance. Our study also investigates how different demand patterns influence maximizing the forecasting method performance. Our study shows that the exponential smoothing model family has a better performance in high-profit products, and the rate of decrease in performance versus demand uncertainty is higher in a stationary demand environment.In the second essay, we focus on illicit drug overdose …

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.

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

Although suspected to be a widespread phenomenon, workplace favoritism is an under-researched area of study. Scholars have queried the effects of perceived favoritism on employee outcomes through only a handful of studies, and the majority of those studies have been conducted at private firms in Middle Eastern countries where tribalism (i.e., loyalty to one's family or social group) is conventional. Further, differences in conceptual definitions of favoritism and subsequent subdimensions have muddied the understanding of what elements are considered essential to each phenomenon. Finally, favoritism research lacks examinations of conditional indirect effects of favoritism on employee outcomes. Therefore, the purpose of this research is three-fold. The first aim is to develop a comprehensive, multidimensional measure of favoritism that will capture essential elements of the phenomenon that are specific to its subdimensions. Additionally, this study aims to increase our understanding of favoritism by examining the its indirect effects on job satisfaction, organizational commitment, counterproductive work behavior, and turnover intention through organizational justice, as well as explore differences in these effects among the supervisor's ingroup/outgroup members and among employees who vary in their perceptions of permeability to their supervisor's ingroup.

Drawing attention to an under-examined process during organizational socialization, we develop theory to explain how newcomers' new organizational roles and social identities become embedded. The process of identities becoming embedded is influenced by how an individual's preexisting identities interact with new organizational identities during socialization. Perceived harmony relationships among identities indicate if newcomers experience identities interacting in a positive or negative manner generally. Using a network perspective, we suggest that the identity embeddedness of new roles and identities are indicated by: degree centrality in an intrapersonal identity harmony network, perceived harmony with the network itself, and the perceived cost of lacking harmony with a focal identity. Newcomers are likely to be more satisfied and engaged with identities with greater embeddedness as well as find such identities more salient. Organizations can work to embed their employees' new identities through initiating identity work directed towards increasing harmony perceptions among the newcomers' new organizational identities and preexisting identities. Through helping individuals create harmony relationships among identities, organizations can improve socialization outcomes.

This research aims to investigate the (1) review effects on consumer decision making process, (2) effects of negative reviews on brand equity, and (3) consumers' likely response to a brand's request for reviews. The objective of the first essay is to investigate the nature of the relationship between skepticism and consumer decision making in an online behavior context. Its second objective is to know whether people's belief on their abilities or their hedonic principle moderates the relationship between a person's skepticism toward online reviews and their reliance on online reviews. The objective of the second essay is to explore whether negative online reviews that focus on service quality specific dimensions have a different effect on a service organization's perceived brand equity. Its second objective is to analyze the role of emotional contagion in the relationship between negative reviews related to various service quality dimensions and its effect on perceived brand equity. The main objective of the third essay is to know whether consumers are more likely to write an online review for a brand when the request comes from a higher equity brand. This essay also investigates how message trust and persuasion knowledge influence the relationship between a brand's request …

This dissertation research explores the factors that influence direct selling agents' sales performance and job satisfaction. In the direct selling channels, the agents not only sell the products to customers. They may concurrently perform a "distributor" role as a stand-alone entity composed of their own sales network. This dissertation research features two essays. The first essay investigates how direct selling agents' perceptions of control and sense of belonging relate to PO. This essay further explores how PO influences job performance and job satisfaction. Results suggest that perception of control and sense of belonging fuel PO. Furthermore, leader-member exchange mediates the relationship between PO and sales performance, as well as PO and job satisfaction in direct selling networks. The second essay introduces a new construct (relational incongruity) and discusses how complex sales environments and direct selling agents' organizational structures influence the relational incongruity in their organization and its ensuring effect on sales performance and job satisfaction. The results indicate that organizational complexity is positively related to relational incongruity. However, customer complexity has a negative impact on relational incongruity. Relational incongruity in direct selling agents' organizations has negative effects on job satisfaction but has no effects on sales performance. Epistemic curiosity undermines …

While some individuals experience their work as meaningful, others, with the same job, do not. The purpose of this dissertation is to answer the following question: Why do different individuals, with the same job, view the meaningfulness of their work in conflicting ways? I draw on terror management theory and generativity theory to answer this question by testing the relationship between death awareness and meaningful work. The bulk of academic work concerning meaningful work focuses on its outcomes and few scholars have explained the antecedents of meaningful work. This study aims to extend empirical work of the relationship between death awareness and meaningful.

Location-based ads are defined as any ads that are sent by an identified source to consumers' mobile devices when they are around the advertised product/store. Although mobile ad spending is said to have accounted for 68% of all digital ad spending in 2020, knowledge of how businesses can use mobile and location-based technology to reach their customers effectively is limited. Thus, the purpose of this three-essay format dissertation is to review the literature on LBA and identify the gaps in the literature and attempt to address a few of these gaps in the remaining two essays. The second essay tests an integrated model by examining the effects of the various retailer and consumer-controlled factors on two retail performances. In the third essay, we explore how LBA affects different dimensions of consumer-brand engagement. The results and findings provide important implications for retailers and brands to increase their performances.

Overall my dissertation work tries to capture a holistic view of the various complex interactions that occur in technology development, implementation, adoption and diffusion, in the context of three industries by examining issues that arise due to regulation of technology. Essay 1 focuses on the social media industry, which is in the early stage of the industrial life cycle, and is the foci of government attention for its ill effect on society. Results from the study (N= 647 employed adults in the US) supported hypotheses related to the antecedents and outcomes of platform utilization in the context of the three regulation dimensions. Essay 2 focuses on the automotive industry, which is in the growth stage of the industrial life cycle. Here the focus is on electric vehicles (EV) transitioning from the niches to the main market. Results from the longitudinal study (N = 429) support the moderating role of political activism on innovation capability of manufacturers and presence of ancillary services in the diffusion of different types of electric vehicles in the US market. Essay 3 focuses on the US healthcare industry, reflecting mature stage of industrial life cycle, yet also characterized with high cost and fragmentation of service. The …

In collective affect research, an assumption is often made that through processes such as emotional contagion and attraction-selection-attrition members will converge unto a shared group affective tone. While this assumption is not without warrant, a limitation of previous work on interpersonal emotional processes of individuals, individuals within dyadic relationships, or members within teams is the lack of examination into the varying perceptions individuals may form regarding these affective experiences. To examine the development and influence of these affective perceptions, we extend recent works from work group conflict literature to examine the influence of perception asymmetry when applied to affective interactions. Wherein, we describe a novel construct of Perception Asymmetry of Affect (PAA). PAA refers to the congruence (e.g.; low level of PAA) or incongruence (e.g.; high level) of perceptions of positive and negative affective experiences between two or more individuals. This paper explores the following questions: 1) does perception asymmetry of affect exist; 2) if so, what causes perception asymmetry between individuals and their groups, within dyads, and within groups. This article contributes to literature on collective affect by offering a detailed framework for an understudied phenomenon of diverging or asymmetric perceptions.

In this dissertation, I theorize on how gaslighting manifests in managerial and organizational settings. I discuss the process of gaslighting and how the use of various manipulation tactics manifests between people in organizations over time. I take three distinctive approaches to study this complex phenomenon. First, using a rich case study, I develop new theory to explain how one notorious child molester was able to sustain a career for decades while assaulting hundreds of children and young women. In doing so, I introduce the concept of gaslighting which previously has only been rigorously applied to intimate interpersonal relationships in domestic (e.g., at home) settings. In essay 2, I expand on the individual level theory developed in essay 1 to develop a more generalized theory of gaslighting in organizations. I situate gaslighting within a nomological net of related constructs and illustrate how gaslighting is a unique construct with different antecedents and consequences that occurs in organizations more often than it should. In my final essay, I build on one of the propositions developed in essay 2 and empirically test what antecedents are likely to influence whether or not a firm is accused of gaslighting on Twitter. Through doing so, I find …