Individuals commonly fail to document their current experiences such that they often forget about these experiences altogether. In the context of learning, for example, experts may have difficulty remembering the experience of being inexperienced, making it difficult for them to help and train novices. Across three chapters, I explore the personal and interpersonal benefits of rediscovery—the process of revisiting past experiences that are non-salient or inaccessible in the moment. In the first chapter, I test whether individuals understand the benefits of rediscovery for themselves. Using a time capsule paradigm, I demonstrate that rediscovering past experiences, particularly ordinary ones, generates more interest and curiosity than expected. Whereas the first chapter focuses on the benefits of rediscovery at the individual level, the second and third chapters explore the interpersonal benefits of rediscovery. In the second chapter, studies with interns and medical students demonstrate that relative to relying on memories of past experiences, rediscovering these experiences (e.g., by reading their past accounts of these events) better equips individuals to understand and advise those with less experience. In the third chapter, a study of expert guitarists reveals that rediscovering the experience of inexperience enables experts to better relate to novices, helping them give advice that novices rate as more helpful and encouraging. / Organizational Behavior

This dissertation is a study of customer relationship management theory and practice. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategy whereby companies build strong relationships with existing and prospective customers with the goal of increasing organizational profitability. It is also a learning process involving managing change in processes, people, and technology. CRM implementation and its ramifications are also not completely understood as evidenced by the high number of failures in CRM implementation in organizations and the resulting disappointments. The goal of this dissertation is_ to study emerging issues and trends in CRM, including the effect of computer software and the accompanying new management processes on organizations, and the dynamics of the alignment of marketing, sales and services, and all other functions responsible for delivering customers a satisfying experience. In order to understand CRM better a content analysis of more than a hundred articles and documents from academic and industry sources was undertaken using a new methodological twist to the traditional method. An Internet domain name (http://crm.fiu.edu) was created for the purpose of this research by uploading an initial one hundred plus abstracts of article~ and documents onto it to form a knowledge database. Once the database was formed a search engine was developed to enable the search of abstracts using relevant CRM keywords to reveal emergent dominant CRM topics. The ultimate aim of this website is to serve as an information hub for CRM research, as well as a search engine where interested parties can enter CRM -relevant keywords or phrases to access abstracts, as well as submit abstracts to enrich the knowledge hub. Research questions were investigated and answered by content analyzing the interpretation and discussion of dominant CRM topics and then amalgamating the findings. This was supported by comparisons within and across individual, paired, and sets-of-three occurrences of CRM keywords in the article abstracts. Results show that there is a lack of holistic thinking and discussion of CRM in both academics and industry which is required to understand how the people, process, and technology in CRM impact each other to affect successful implementation. Industry has to get their heads around CRM and holistically understand how these important dimensions affect each other. Only then will organizational learning occur, and overtime result in superior processes leading to strong profitable customer relationships and a hard to imitate competitive advantage.

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the foreign direct investment location decision making process through the examination of non-Western investors and their investment strategies in non-traditional markets. This was accomplished through in-depth personal interviews with 50 Overseas Chinese business owners and executives in several different industries from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand about 97 separate investment projects in Southeast and East Asia, including The Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Taiwan, and Mainland China. Traditional factors utilized in Western models of the foreign direct investment decision making process are reviewed, as well literature on Asian management systems and the current state of business practices in emerging countries of Southeast and East Asia. Because of the lack of institutionalization in these markets and the strong influences of Confucian and patriarchal value systems on the Overseas Chinese, it was suspected that while some aspects of Western rational economic models of foreign direct investment are utilized, these models are insufficient in this context, and thus are not fully generalizable to the unique conditions of the Overseas Chinese business network in the region without further modification. Thus, other factors based on a Confucian value system need to be integrated into these models. Results from the analysis of structured interviews suggest Overseas Chinese businesses rely more heavily on their network and traditional Confucian values than rational economic factors when making their foreign direct investment location decisions in emerging countries in Asia. This effect is moderated by the firm's industry and the age of the firm's owners.

Accounting students become practitioners facing ethical decision-making challenges that can be subject to various interpretations; hence, the profession is concerned with the appropriateness of their decisions. Moral development of these students has implications for a profession under legal challenges, negative publicity, and government scrutiny. Accounting students moral development has been studied by examining their responses to moral questions in Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT), their professional attitudes on Hall's Professionalism Scale Dimensions, and their ethical orientation-based professional commitment and ethical sensitivity. This study extended research in accounting ethics and moral development by examining students in a college where an ethics course is a requirement for graduation. Knowledge of differences in the moral development of accounting students may alert practitioners and educators to potential problems resulting from a lack of ethical understanding as measured by moral development levels. If student moral development levels differ by major, and accounting majors have lower levels than other students, the conclusion may be that this difference is a causative factor for the alleged acts of malfeasance in the profession that may result in malpractice suits. The current study compared 205 accounting, business, and nonbusiness students from a private university. In addition to academic major and completion of an ethics course, the other independent variable was academic level. Gender and age were tested as control variables and Rest's DIT score was the dependent variable. The primary analysis was a 2x3x3 ANOVA with post hoc tests for results with significant p-value of less than 0.05. The results of this study reveal that students who take an ethics course appear to have a higher level of moral development (p=0.013), as measured by the (DIT), than students at the same academic level who have not taken an ethics course. In addition, a statistically significant difference (p=0.034) exists between freshmen who took an ethics class and juniors who did not take an ethics class. For every analysis except one, the lower class year with an ethics class had a higher level of moral development than the higher class year without an ethics class. These results appear to show that ethics education in particular has a greater effect on the level of moral development than education in general. Findings based on the gender specific analyses appear to show that males and females respond differently to the effects of taking an ethics class. The male students do not appear to increase their moral development level after taking an ethics course (p=0.693) but male levels of moral development differ significantly (p=0.003) by major. Female levels of moral development appear to increase after taking an ethics course (p=0.002). However, they do not differ according to major (p=0.0 97). These findings indicate that accounting students should be required to have a class in ethics as part of their college curriculum. Students with an ethics class have a significantly higher level of moral development. The challenges facing the profession at the current time indicate that public confidence in the reports of client corporations has eroded and one way to restore this confidence could be to require ethics training of future accountants.

Abstract not available.

In today's fast pace society, analysts are expected to make quick educated decisions out of very complex situations. This is not an easy task to achieve but, if equipped with the proper decision tools, it can be effectively accomplished. Cognitive Maps have been commonly used in the past for this purpose but they lack a certain precision. Recently the use of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) has been proposed as an alternative for representing and analyzing complex systems that create outcomes that are not always easily definable. This thesis will introduce its readers to this versatile decision analysis tool and its many uses in a diversity of fields. More precisely, it will help analyze and determine how Internet transforms relationships between car parts suppliers and automobile manufacturers. With the help of the Car Internet Research Program (CIRP), 17 semi-structured interviews of executive heads belonging to upstream suppliers in the automotive sector were considered as means of this research. Summarized and analysed through the help of FCMs, these exchanges give an approximate picture of the state of current events in the automotive industry, more precisely in regards to supplier and manufacturer connectivity issues.

The purpose of this research is to propose a leadership model for Chinese enterprises which could be suitable to the current diverse and changing environment in China. The Chinese business environment is under extraordinary pressures and its organizations face many challenges including integration into the global market. In the face of these challenges, it is very important to enhance the competitive position of Chinese organizations. A critical aspect of such an enhanced position is the leadership and management of Chinese businesses and enterprises. The current ideal leadership behaviors in contemporary China appear to be quite different from the more traditional style since leaders are challenged by a changing business environment driven by global dynamics and changing skills and expectations in the workforce. Chinese managers and leaders have more opportunities to be exposed to and draw from Western advanced managerial theories since China has largely opened itself to the world. Chinese leadership behaviors are none-the-less sculptured by Chinese customs, and leaders still carry on some traditional ways that reflect their culture. This study examines descriptions of preferred Chinese leadership behavior generated from an elite group of Chinese MBA students, themselves having been leaders in modern Chinese businesses. It proposes a leadership model which combines old and new styles together in a way designed to improve not only productivity and performance but also the relationship and connection with followers in order to lead Chinese organizations to success.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is an internet application that allows a group of internet users to share their files and computing resources. P2P traffic was tremendously increased to an estimated value of 70% of broadband traffic with a special nature that directly impacts the Telecom industry. Accordingly, the Telecom business has become very interested in finding solutions to identify and control P2P traffic. This research focuses on developing a practical P2P traffic classification using data mining techniques and the information available in the TCP/IP header. We captured internet traffic, pre-processed and labeled them, and built several models using a combination of different attributes for various sizes of record files. We built the models based on neural network and decision tree techniques. Successful models were then subjected to a more stressful test using different ratios of P2P/Non-P2P in the training data set. We observed that the accuracy of the classification increases significantly when we take into account the source and destination IP addresses. We concluded that source and destination IP addresses depict information about the "community of peers". Based on this observation, we recommended that the classifier needs to be implemented within the administrative domain of the individual service provider's network, and continuously updated to ensure that new communities of peers are detected, while old communities of peers are not penalized after they stop using P2P applications. The proposed classification is based only on information in the IP layer, eliminating the privacy issues associated with deep packet inspection.

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) are attracting much attention these days as core tools for process management. A BPMS consists of several modules including Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), which evaluates the performance of processes. Although measuring the performance of business processes is based on organizational goals and the impact of processes on such goals is an important aspect of the process evaluation, most of the existing BPMS do not offer appropriate capabilities. Several process improvements and quality methodologies have also been around for some time. Most of them, however, are based on statistical and management tools that are not integrated with current technologies including BPMS. In other words, the management and quality disciplines have not yet evolved to take full advantage of current technologies that can enhance process improvement efforts. One of the pitfalls here is the failure to use the information generated by different information systems dispersed across the organization to evaluate the impact of processes on their goals. In this thesis, we use the User Requirements Notation (URN) in a methodology for evaluating business processes against organizational goals. Although URN enables the modeling of processes and goals, its process monitoring capabilities need enhancements and we will address this issue by extending URN. In addition, we propose a methodology that exploits the new capabilities of URN for process analysis and improvement. Unlike other quality methodologies, the methodology and supporting tool proposed are capable of using different sources of information to measure the performance of modeled processes and evaluate their impact on the goal models. The new capabilities and their benefits are illustrated through examples from the healthcare domain.

Using a sample of 215 managers, this study investigated the role of supervisor affective trust as a mediator between organizational citizenship behaviour and willingness to provide mentorship (psychosocial and career support). Subordinate OCB directed at the supervisor and toward the organization (civic virtue) were investigated. The results showed that supervisor affective trust acted as a mediator between OCB and willingness to provide psychosocial support. The results suggest that an employee seeking psychosocial support from his/her supervisor should build affective trust by engaging in citizenship behaviour directed at the supervisor.