Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University

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The culture of an organization constitutes the environment into which information systems (IS) practices take place. Despite the importance of culture in the organizational theory and management literature, this topic has received little attention in the IS area. The culture of an organization can be looked at from different angles. In addition to the usual view of culture, the integration view, two other perspectives have been identified in the literature: the differentiation and fragmentation perspectives. While the integration perspective focuses on the "assembling" role organizational culture is normally said to play, the differentiation perspective highlights important differences among groups of people in the organization and the fragmentation perspective includes the notion of ambiguity and uncertainty in the conceptualization of culture. This study uses organizational stories as a way to investigate the culture of an organization and as a way to better understand IS practices. It uses simultaneously the three organizational culture perspectives in order to get a broad picture of the cultural context surrounding IS practices. More specifically, the objective of this interpretive study is to investigate three research questions related to (1) the nature of the stories told and the themes that they carry, (2) the functions that these stories play in the organization, and (3) the relationships between themes and IS practices. Using an in-depth case study strategy, stories and their interpretations were collected from a software-development company using primarily semi-structured interviews. The results emphasize the bias resulting from the use of the integration perspective as the only way to look at the culture of an organization. This bias had a profound impact on the literature; it helped shape the identification of important organizational actors, the definition of stories, and the conceptualization of their functions. In this study, a broader conception of "significant stories" is given along with a broader range of functions that stories may fulfill. Finally, the results highlight the importance of cultural elements in understanding the general context surrounding IS practices and explore in more detail two very contemporary IS activities: implementing team reorganization (change) and managing outsourcing relationships.

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<p>This dissertation focuses on understanding how negative externalities affect managerial decisions, specifically, the resource allocation and pricing in competitive environments.</p><p>We first study optimal allocation and pricing on a network of competing buyers. Buyers have private information about the value of an item being sold (such as franchise contract, good, service). Furthermore, buyers place a premium on obtaining the item exclusively, i.e., if no competitors obtain the item at the same time. We show that the seller limited to offering posted price contracts should inflate the price in order to maximize revenues and capture the value buyers put on exclusivity. However, posted prices are not revenue-maximizing and there are theoretical barriers to discovering generic optimal allocation and pricing schemes, stemming both from mechanism design theory and computational complexity theory. We present an easy-to-implement hybrid auction-pricing procedure which revenue-dominates posted prices and is optimal in a full competition setting.</p><p>We next turn to a different type of negative externalities in which a buyer faces a possibility of losses, thus suffering a negative externality, due to scarce resource being allocated to competitors. We show that the existence of such negative externalities among market participants competing for a scarce resource allows for emergence of the no-allocation equilibrium with positive revenues for the seller. A monopolist selling K indivisible items to a large number of competing unit-demand buyers who face negative externalities whenever their rivals get the items, can exploit these negative externalities. If the number of buyers is large enough, the no-allocation equilibrium emerges: no items get allocated, yet buyers still pay the seller to avoid a potential exposure to negative externalities. We provide conditions on the magnitude of externalities and on the level of buyer competition that yield optimality of the no-allocation equilibrium.</p><p>Finally, we consider the setting where the scope of negative externalities is limited. A revenue-maximizing monopolist is selling a single indivisible good to buyers who face a loss if a rival buyer obtains it. The rivalry is modeled through a network, an arc between a pair of buyers indicates that a buyer considers another buyer its rival, and the magnitude of the loss is the private information of each buyer. First, given a network, we characterize the optimal mechanism. Second, we show that revenues depend on the network structure. Thus, in applications where it is possible, the monopolist might consider designing not only the mechanism but also the network (if not fully, at least partially). Third, we provide solutions to this joint network and mechanism design problem. Specifically, we determine revenue-maximizing rivalry networks (which in turn induce optimal mechanisms), and show that they are independent of distributional assumptions on buyers' independent private loss values, provided virtual values are bounded from zero. We achieve these results under different restrictions of how the monopolist can affect the network. When rivalry is symmetric, matchings are optimal (with at most one path on three vertices). However, asymmetric competitive relationships among buyers generate higher revenues than symmetric ones. The optimal asymmetric networks are characterized by (i) every buyer having at least one rival, and (ii) the existence of a buyer not considered a rival by anyone.</p> / Dissertation

Moral hazard lending at the Certified Development Company (CDC) level involves the origination or authorization of loans to businesses in riskier industries through risk free funds provided by the sale of SBA agency debentures. This study analyzes the performance and lending behavior of CDCs between 2001 and 2007 to determine if they engaged in moral hazard lending. Of particular interest is the determination of changes in lending behavior after competitive restrictions on CDCs were eliminated on November 11, 2003 (SBA's fiscal year 2004), and a comparison of lending behaviors between the different sizes of CDCs. It should be noted that there is no existing literature on this subject, and this paper begins the debate on the market structure of the CDC industry. Because of this fact, banking literature that explores moral hazard lending was used to develop justification and guidelines for the empirical research. This study analyzes loan losses by NAICS industry code to determine which industry sectors pose the greatest risk and then compares these results to the existing and proposed loan portfolios of CDCs to determine if certain groups of CDCs engage in riskier lending practices. Based on management reports provided by the SBA for the operations of CDCs at five different size levels (tiers), and data on loan authorizations for proposed future loans, the results indicate a significant difference in lending behavior that can be attributed to the size of the CDC. Smaller CDCs have a significantly higher proportion of loans to industry sectors with historically higher loan losses. Moreover, these smaller CDCs have higher actual losses and loan delinquencies, and their future loan portfolios as determined by new loan authorizations are skewed toward businesses in riskier industry sectors. As such, this study finds that smaller CDCs are engaging in moral hazard lending. While the study did not reveal a change in lending behavior after competitive restrictions on CDCs were eliminated in 2004, future results may change when data from additional years is obtained and analyzed.

This research examined how perceived risk moderated the effect of a corporation's reputation for quality and corporate social responsibility, two attributes whose meanings have been the subject of ongoing interest in the current business-to-business literature. Relationships among the levels of perceived risk (high/low) and strength of CR argument for quality and CSR are hypothesized, and integrated into a Research Model. In order to test and validate the model, the data was collected from a total of 102 commercial and municipal fleet vehicle managers who provided evaluations of biodiesel suppliers with respect to their reputation for quality and corporate social responsibility. The fleet vehicle manager's evaluations (n=102) of biodiesel suppliers were analyzed and empirically tested using structural equation modeling. On a practical level, this research develops insights related to the utilization of CR-attributes in high and low perceived risk contexts. On a theoretical level, previous research (Dowling & Staelin, 1994; Balmer & Greyser, 2006) was extended to demonstrate that industrial buyers also respond to higher levels of perceived risk by relying on different types of available information related to corporate reputation. This study will report on the results of experiments that manipulated the level of perceived risk, one for each attribute (i.e. quality and CSR), in a novel and technically complex purchase decision.

This research study examines moral maturity levels against age, gender, race, and education levels of a Pittsburgh-based company that has more than 250 employees. The sample includes a widely diverse employee population of males and females of various ethnicities. The sample also includes employees who work in various positions ranging from clerical positions to management level positions. Potentially, each of these employees will be confronted with ethical dilemmas at sometime in their daily work environment. This dissertation will examine the moral maturity levels of the survey participants and the impact of age, gender, race, and education. This research study uses the Defining Issues Test (DIT), which is one of the most widely used instruments in the field of moral psychology and is known for its overall reliability and objectivity.

The purpose of this study is to investigate job satisfaction among employees with relation to their manager's leadership style in a commercial clinical laboratory environment. Healthcare services particularly laboratory testing, is an integral aspect of delivering quality patient care. It is estimated that laboratory testing has an impact on greater than 70% of medical decisions. However, the clinical laboratory sector provides the fewest amounts of jobs in the healthcare industry. This is in part due to the use of robotics as an integral part of laboratory operations to improve output while reducing costs. However, the use of technological advancement such as robotics in the clinical laboratory may reduce staffing which may directly affect employee job satisfaction (Sweeting, 2002). This study attempts to predict employee job satisfaction using two previously developed surveys which are considered reliable and valid instruments of measure, namely, the Abridged Job Descriptive Index / Abridged Job in General Scale (AJDI/AJIG, Bowling Green State University, 1997) and the Leader Effectiveness and Adaptability Description-Self survey (Hersey et al., 1996). The independent variables for this study were the Hersey and Blanchard Situational Leadership styles and the dependent variable was job satisfaction. Hypotheses were developed to test the study's theoretical model and statistical techniques (ANOVA) were used to test the study's hypotheses. This study supported the null hypotheses with findings that there was no difference between the overall employee job satisfaction levels for those employees reporting to managers exhibiting any of the four leadership styles as stated in Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership Model.

This research examined the effect of goal orientation on organizational commitment and intent to leave among a group of employees. This study also focused on a particular subset of employees. This group, employees who have returned to either complete their education or obtain another degree, appeared to be an identifiable subgroup because their educational endeavors mark them as different from their colleagues who are not engaged in such pursuits. There is considerable research on the nature, characteristics and components of organizational commitment, on the way it affects behaviors in organizations and in the ways that certain organizational events have on employees' organizational commitment. While the concept of organizational commitment and its relationship to other workplace behaviors has been widely studied, there is little empirical information on a relationship between goal orientation and organizational commitment or intent to leave. Thus, an examination of goal orientation in relation to organizational commitment and intent to leave can add to the depth of understanding of the ways in which these concepts manifest themselves in employees. Additionally, this research examined the relationship between the college enrollment status of a group of employees and these constructs. The survey used in this study combined three scales in order to measure organizational commitment, goal orientation and intent to leave. In general, there was little or no distinction noted between those enrolled and those not enrolled in relation to the many of the constructs examined. However, the relationship between affective commitment and enrollment status, normative commitment and enrollment status and intent to leave and enrollment status were statistically significant. Additionally, those enrolled reported a higher level of intent to leave than did those not enrolled. The results for goal orientation were inconclusive. An implication is that those enrolled may have begun to distance themselves from their current organization or job. Another implication is that management support of employee education efforts may affect organizational commitment and intent to leave. Additional research on the strength and impact of goal orientation on organizational behavior is needed.