<p> Downsizing is common place in today's business world. Economic conditions and dynamic markets force companies to constantly evaluate their bottom line and work toward leaner operations to create better financial returns and organizational sustainability. As a result, downsizing or reductions-in-force have morphed from being occasionally used tools with `last ditch effort' stigma and association to commonplace, every-day options of the corporate strategy toolbox. </p><p> Focusing upon the overarching theme of organizational shock and understanding voluntary turnover post-downsizing, this study attempted to determine to what extent transitional change services offered to employees during times of organizational shock (such as downsizing) affect employees' feelings of commitment toward the organization and/or their intent to leave the organization. Survey data was collected from individuals employed by pharmaceutical companies having downsized within the last 5 years. The results were analyzed to determine whether the variables of organizational commitment and the sub-types of organizational commitment normative, continuance and affective commitment as well as intent to leave were impacted by the amount of transitional change services offered by their downsizing organization. </p><p> It was determined via data analysis results that whether services were offered or not, and regardless of the amount of services offered, those retained by the organization provided responses undifferentiated from those provided by respondents who were severed. In total, these results indicate despite the level of services provided, organizations post-downsizing are staffed with employees that may share the same reduced level of organizational commitment as those having been let go from the company. In sum, these findings demand consideration as to whether large scale organizational investment in transitional change services during a downsizing is a worthwhile endeavor at all.</p>

Chapter One, introduction and research methodology. Chapter Two presents a review of the research domain and the parent literature related to the research problem. The foundation theories, entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship education literature is reviewed with the research boundaries stated. The theoretical and practical foundations are laid and the research hypotheses are introduced. Chapter Three describes the pretest-posttest experimental research methodology employed to test the hypotheses. Chapter Four discusses the results and Chapter Five concludes the thesis with the data analysis, the research’s limitations, and a summary of the research’s contributions to practice and knowledge including suggestions for future research.

Chapter One, introduction and research methodology. Chapter Two presents a review of the research domain and the parent literature related to the research problem. The foundation theories, entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship education literature is reviewed with the research boundaries stated. The theoretical and practical foundations are laid and the research hypotheses are introduced. Chapter Three describes the pretest-posttest experimental research methodology employed to test the hypotheses. Chapter Four discusses the results and Chapter Five concludes the thesis with the data analysis, the research’s limitations, and a summary of the research’s contributions to practice and knowledge including suggestions for future research.

Chapter One, introduction and research methodology. Chapter Two presents a review of the research domain and the parent literature related to the research problem. The foundation theories, entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship education literature is reviewed with the research boundaries stated. The theoretical and practical foundations are laid and the research hypotheses are introduced. Chapter Three describes the pretest-posttest experimental research methodology employed to test the hypotheses. Chapter Four discusses the results and Chapter Five concludes the thesis with the data analysis, the research’s limitations, and a summary of the research’s contributions to practice and knowledge including suggestions for future research.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4524. Adviser: John C. Dencker. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 116-128) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2478. Adviser: Reginald J. Alston. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-130) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Sport Management, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1417. Adviser: Larry Fielding. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 19, 2007)."

This dissertation investigates whether differences in organizational innovation amongst health care providers can explain the huge variation in costs and outcomes. I specifically consider two facets of organizational innovation: the deployment of information technology and the relationships between hospitals and physicians. In the first chapter, I investigate IT adoption in a service setting by considering the impact of electronic medical records (EMRs) on the length of stay and clinical outcomes of patients in US hospitals. To uncover the distinct impacts of EMRs on operational efficiency and care coordination, I present evidence of heterogeneous effects by patient complexity. I find that EMRs have the largest impact for relatively less complex patients. Admission to a hospital with an EMR is associated with a 2\% reduction in length of stay and a 9\% reduction in thirty-day mortality for such patients. In contrast, there is no statistically significant benefit for more complex patients. However, I present three additional results for complex cases. First, patients returning to the same hospital benefit relative to those who previously went to a different hospital, which could be due to easier access to past electronic records. Second, computerized order entry is associated with higher billed charges. Finally, hospitals that have a high share of publicly insured patients, and hence a bigger incentive to curb resource use, achieve a greater reduction in length of stay for complex patients after EMR adoption. In the second chapter, co-authored with Robert Huckman, I investigate the role of process specialists in guiding customers through such complex service transactions by considering the management of patients admitted to U.S hospitals. Traditionally, a patient's primary care physician has been in charge of his or her hospital admission. Over the past decade, however, there has been a steady rise in the use of hospitalists - physicians who spend all their professional time at the hospital - in managing inpatient care. Using data from the American Hospital Association and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS) database, we find that hospitals with hospitalist programs achieve reductions in the risk-adjusted length of stay of inpatients over the time period 2003 to 2010. The effect is strongest for complex patients who have a higher number of comorbidities. Our findings support the view that process specialists such as hospitalists are particularly beneficial for complex transactions that entail a greater degree of coordination. In the final chapter, I document the positive relationship between consolidation in the health care industry and technology adoption. I propose several mechanisms that could explain the association between the adoption of electronic medical records and greater hospital-physician integration. I show that the positive correlation between technology adoption and hospital consolidation has been increasing over time. I show that hospitals located in concentrated markets are more likely to adopt electronic medical records and to use hospitalists. Moreover, for a limited set of hospitals, the quality of management is positively associated with the adoption of electronic medical records and the use of hospitalists. / Business Economics

This dissertation examines when and how unexpected distractions stimulate or disrupt the creative process. Specifically, I argue that these distractions could introduce useful information and initiate a cognitive break that stimulates a fresh look at the creative task while allowing unconscious thought to process acquired information. Unexpected distractions are, however, disruptive once the new information, relevant or not to the creative task, prompts cognitive overload—the moment in which required cognitive resources exceed available cognitive resources for information processing. The creative process implicates two cognitive sub-processes, divergent thinking and convergent thinking, which influence the novelty and feasibility of the creative product, respectively. Divergent thinking, which is the process of generating new ideas, likely reaps the aforementioned benefits of unexpected distractions, but only until cognitive overload occurs, after which point additional distractions disrupt the forming of new ideas. On the other hand, convergent thinking, the process of deriving the best idea, should suffer from any level of distractions. First, the convergent process profits less from the unconscious associative processing of acquired information. Second, convergent thinking demands information that is directly related to the selected idea or the context in which that idea will be implemented, rendering information transmitted by unexpected distractions mostly irrelevant. Irrelevant information is particularly cognitively taxing and prone to cause cognitive overload. In the lab and online, I found an inverted u-shaped relationship between the frequency of unexpected distractions and the output of divergent thinking (operationalized as the novelty of generated ideas) and a negative relationship between the frequency of unexpected distractions and the output of convergent thinking (operationalized as the feasibility of selected ideas). I also found support for the first relationship and partial support for the second relationship using field data from an IT company in Thailand for which I developed measures for evaluating novelty and feasibility in software work. I discuss the implications of these findings for the literature on creativity, cognitive processing, and group brainstorming. / Organizational Behavior

The contemporary executive career looks different from the “company man” era of post World War II. At that time, executives rose almost exclusively within a single firm, learning the business over many loyal years of service. Since the 1970s, firms have progressively relied more on external markets for filling its leadership ranks. As a result, the value of executives has become increasingly defined by capabilities portable across organizational settings. External markets have less information about executive abilities compared to incumbent employers, which strengthens the influence of externally observable signals of quality on executive career opportunities and compensation. Across three studies, this dissertation empirically explores how external markets value executive human capital attributes. In particular, this work focuses on how external markets differ from incumbent employers and explores implications for executives building their careers across multiple organizations.