Businesses today face intense international competition, a heightened pace of development and shortened product life cycles. As a result, many researchers recommend firms collaborate and partner with other firms to succeed. With over a decade of research examining alliances and inter-firm collaboration, we know a great deal about the benefits and outcomes firms realize through collaboration. An important gap exists, however, in our understanding of the effect of partnering firms on collaborative outputs. This study attempts to address this gap by examining the success of collaborative new product development outputs. The study was a quasi-experimental study using archival, time-series data. Hypotheses were tested at the project level, defined as the product output from the collaborative development effort. Predictors were developed at both the firm and dyadic levels. Several findings emerged from this research. The primary finding is that roles of alliance partners impact which capability and capital benefits accrue. Firms functioning as a publisher benefit from increases in relevant experience. Firms functioning as a developer benefit from working in areas in which they have experience, but largely to the extent that the developer also generalizes their capabilities. One implication emerging from the capability findings suggests a need for configurational capability …

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of determining the predictors, correlates, and consequences of job satisfaction in a university library. A managerial model was constructed for the purpose of providing an overall framework of analysis. It was hypothesized, in the managerial model, that organizational effectiveness in any organization is linked closely to the concepts of job satisfaction and employee satisfactoriness. These two concepts, in turn, are closely related to managerial behavior.

One of the newest organizational developments in the junior college world is the multicampus junior college system. The purpose of this study was to determine whether there is a difference in the understanding of authority relationships between chief district administrators and chief campus administrators in multicampus junior college systems. This information should be valuable to junior college administrators who are now, or will be, faced with the problem of clarifying this authority relationship in daily activities and future planning. The semantic differential was the measuring instrument used in this study. Its use required that a questionnaire be developed to include functions to be differentiated against a set of corresponding bi-polar adjectives. The functions selected were evaluated by several individuals experienced in multicampus junior college administration. The nine pairs of bi-polar descriptive adjectives selected were from general adjectives previous factorial studies showed to have high factor loadings on either the evaluative, potency, or activity dimensions of connotative meaning.

This study is an examination of the hypothesis that selected contemporary American novels offer vivid illustrations of modern problems and practices of management as seen in business and industry. Too often, university management courses treat management processes as isolated cases in limited and static settings. Novelists, on the other hand, treat these same processes in a broader context and often deal quite subtly and perceptively with everything from the mammoth corporation to the single proprietorship. Students proposing to become businessmen, therefore, should benefit from this novelistic perspective so frequently overlooked.

This work collected four years of financial data from an employee-owned firm and a traditionally-owned firm from the same industry. The data were then organized to provide measures of three dimensions of corporate performance: (1) employee turnover, (2) productivity, and (3) profitability. Based upon a review of the literature, employee stock ownership plans (ESOP) are reported to enhance corporate performance after their adoption. Additionally, ESOPs are purported to perform better than traditionally-owned companies. This dissertation developed hypotheses to ascertain whether or not the particular ESOP used in this study conformed to these expectations. The first set of three hypotheses was tested using multiple regression techniques to determine if the ESOP experienced a reduction in turnover, an improvement in productivity, and an increase in profitability following its conversion to employee-ownership. The results of the regressions found that there was no incremental significance. There was no improvement noted in the performance of the ESOP firm. Another component of this investigation was to determine whether improvements in corporate performance were temporary or permanent phenomena. This portion of the research was rendered superfluous when no improvements were available for analysis. The final question that was examined was whether the ESOP would demonstrate better performance …

The problem with which this study is concerned is that of determining and analyzing the problems of human resources created in Iran. These problems are rooted deeply and stream from Iranian history, culture, and social environment. The main purposes of this study are three. The first is to determine and analyze problems of human resources created in Iran, including social environment, education, and employment. The second is to study and evaluate the manpower policy of Iranian economic development. The third is to apply human resource development in planning, educating, training, and developing the human resources required for the economic development of Iran. Based on the reports and recommendations of the three research groups, a detailed plan and strategies are written to develop Iran's human resources.

Prior research has examined entrepreneurial businesses spatially located in the physical or offline context; however, recent radical information and technological breakthroughs allow entrepreneurs to launch their businesses completely online. The growth of the online business industry has been phenomenal. Predictions for worldwide online sales estimate it to reach $2 trillion in 2016. Virtual entrepreneurship refers to the pursuit and exploitation of opportunities via virtual platforms. Web 2.0 cybermediaries offer web-based platforms that function similarly to traditional intermediaries in a virtual setting and minimize barriers to entry for virtual entrepreneurial firms. The use of such cybermediaries with increasing success suggests an implicit shift in the dominant logic that typically underpins the functioning of entrepreneurial firms operating in the physical world. In this relatively uncharted territory, marked by a focus on profit, cooperation, collaboration and community, three ideal-type institutional logics i.e. Market, Corporation and Community, blend together. It is posited that a Virtual Entrepreneurial Logic guides the norms, behaviors, and practices of entrepreneurial firms operating via these virtual platforms. This raises the question whether the blending of three ideal-type logics leads to the existence of different antecedents of performance. A business model antecedent addressing the economic dimension, a community antecedent addressing the …

Leadership has attracted a significant amount of scholarly attention in the past few decades. However, most research and theory contributions are to a great extent limited to accounting for leadership practices in the West (Littrell, 2002). This study is designed to develop an effective leadership model that works in the Chinese context. Paternalistic leadership, a dominant leadership style in an Eastern business environment, is compared with transformational leadership, a dominant leadership style in a Western business environment. The notion of transformational leadership was developed under the tutelage of Bernard Bass (1998). Transformational leadership is found to be compatible with collectivistic values (Walumbwa & Lwwler, 2003) and is believed to be appealing and generalizable to Chinese leadership situations (Chen & Farh, 1999). Other researchers have found that within Chinese organizations, leader behaviors are quite distinct from transformational leadership, referring to this leader style as paternalistic leadership (Redding, 1990; Cheng, 1995). The questions are asked, “Transformational or paternalistic leadership, which one is more effective in Chinese organizations? Is one type of leadership superior to the other one in the Chinese culture?” To answer these questions, a model is proposed to clarify the mediating effects of trust and harmony on the relationship between …

Since their introduction to the United States from Japan in the 1980s, inter-organizational cooperation practices between buyers and suppliers have provided lower costs, shorter development and production cycles, and higher levels of quality and productivity. Many studies of interorganizational cooperation have relied on transaction cost economicsframeworks,which ignore cultural differences. Few studies have analyzed inter-organizational cooperation in Mexico, a less-developed country (LDC) with a cultural and industrial environment differentfromthe U.S. This study is concerned with the influence of interorganizational trust, individualism and collectivism (indcol), and the superordinate goal ofjust-in-time/total quality management (JIT/TQM) on inter-organizational cooperation.