Employee Job satisfaction remains one of the top critical concerns amongst organizations globally. With technology disruptions and the transformation of industry landscapes, top-performing organizations constantly evolve to gain or maintain a competitive advantage in their industries; organizations rely on their workforce commitment to a shared mission. As industries evolve and increasingly become more competitive globally, specifically in the US, organizations must invest in HR personnel and allocate budgets to identify effective strategies to maintain worker satisfaction which in some identified industries directly correlates to workplace performance. Singh defines the job satisfaction phenomenon as an emotional response closely related to an individual's sense of contribution in his/her workplace (Singh et al., 2019). To measure the antecedence of job satisfaction, the constructs of leadership empowerment and organizational culture are used to set the perimeters of this research. This paper reviews the literature regarding the confines of the phenomenon and the identified constructs of leadership empowerment and organizational culture. The findings in the literature draw implications for (1) organizational appeal to recruitment, (2) Employee retention, and (3) increased workplace productivity. This exploratory qualitative study looks into existing research on the job satisfaction phenomenon via consensus on popular literature on the subject. It uses these findings and best practices to drive further insights by conducting research via the survey on participating subjects and case studies to supplement the findings. / Business Administration/Accounting

The rapid development of technology and the associated new challenges such as cybersecurity risk triggered the rise of new digital upper echelons such as Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) or Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs). However, there is a lack of theoretical understanding and rigorous empirical examination regarding the impacts of emerging digital upper echelon roles on firm performance. This dissertation develops three essays that examine the rising digital upper echelons’ implications for firm innovation, cybersecurity strategies, and governance.The first essay examines the antecedents of CISO presence on the TMT and its consequences for firm innovation. We conduct a longitudinal empirical analysis using a unique dataset of S&P 1500 firms from several secondary sources. Our study shows that a firm's appointment of a CISO in TMT is positively influenced by the CISO presence in TMT of industry peers and their data breaches. Importantly, we find that CISO presence in TMT increases firms' innovation on average. The presence of a CISO in TMT with more experience in the same industry as the focal firm has a stronger effect on innovation, while CISOs in TMT with more experience in other industries only increase innovation when the firm's industry is not very turbulent. We also found that CISOs in TMT with a business or IT education have a stronger positive impact on firm innovation. This research is the first to assess the impact of CISO presence in TMT on non-security outcomes. We shed new light on the drivers of why firms appoint a CISO to TMT and how CISO presence in TMT impacts firm value beyond the security function. Our findings also provide managers with a nuanced understanding of how CISO backgrounds impact innovation and provide guidance for hiring CISOs who align with the firm's information management and innovation goals. The second essay focuses on how competing incentive systems (e.g., compensation) shape digital upper echelons and non-digital upper echelons impact on the firm's disclosure of data breaches in SEC fillings and the moderating role of board members' cybersecurity intensity on upper echelon members’ disclosure. We draw on the agency theory to develop a theoretical model considering the divergent priorities and goals of the digital and non-digital upper echelons involved. We conducted a longitudinal analysis of public firms that have experienced data breaches. Results demonstrate that increased digital upper echelons' compensation will lead to timelier SEC data breach notifications, whereas increased non-digital upper echelons' compensation will have the opposite effect. Board cybersecurity intensity weakens the positive impacts of digital upper echelons' compensation but amplifies the negative impacts of non-digital upper echelons' compensation on notification timeliness. Hence, our findings counter the view that cybersecurity experience on the board speeds up reporting of data breaches by upper echelons. This study also delineates the differences on incentive systems between digital and non-digital upper echelons in SEC data breach notifications. Our results provide managerial implications on how to incentivize firms to disclose data breaches in SEC in a timely manner. The third essay compares two different reporting structures of CDOs and CISOs: within-group reporting structure (i.e., report to IT heads) versus across-group reporting structure (i.e., report to non-IT heads). Since reporting structure needs to be aligned with firm strategic visions, we examine (1) how CDOs’ reporting structure and digital transformation jointly affect firm performance, and (2) how CISOs’ reporting structure and security awareness jointly affect firm performance. We conducted a longitudinal analysis using a unique dataset collected from multiple sources. Our results demonstrate that compared with within-group reporting structure, CDOs reporting to non-IT heads weakens the positive relationship between digital transformation and the firm’s prospective performance (i.e., market-to-book ratio of assets). However, CISOs reporting to non-IT heads weakens the negative relationship between security awareness and the firm’s retrospective performance (i.e., operational incomes). Overall, our results highlight the advantages of CDOs’ within-group reporting structure and CISOs’ across-group reporting structure. This research contributes to our understanding of how CDOs’ and CISOs’ reporting structure aligns with firm strategic visions in shaping firm performance. Our findings offer implications to business managers on designing reporting structures and governing emerging IT executives. Overall, this three-essay dissertation enriches our understanding of the impacts of rising digital upper echelons and effective ways to govern these emerging top management roles. / Business Administration/Management Information Systems

Market Orientation and Customer Experience are both constructs that belong to the world of business. It has now become necessary for universities to also embrace these business concepts in order to remain relevant and competitive, given the vast changes in Higher Education landscapes globally. Previous studies have looked at the relationship between Market Orientation and Customer Satisfaction. However, Customer Experience has not been identified as an antecedent to Market Orientation. This exploratory study posits that it is Customer Experience that influences Market Orientation at Higher Education institutions. Customer Satisfaction alone does not provide opportunities for students to be co-creators of their educational experiences. Thus, the objective of this study was to determine whether focusing on Customer Experience rather than just evaluating Customer Satisfaction levels can be a greater source of information to guide Market Orientation objectives and its implementation. The theoretical frameworks that guided the conceptual model of this study were the ResourceBased View and the Service-Dominant Logic theory. A cyclical relationship between Market Orientation and Customer Experience was proposed, with the nexus of this relationship being the concept of co-creation. A mixed methods convergent design approach was applied to collect data at a University of Technology in South Africa. The focus was on the postgraduate master's programme, and both research supervisors and master's students were part of the study sample. During the quantitative phase, data was collected via online surveys from 151 research supervisors, using purposive convenience sampling. Twenty-four master's students were interviewed using the critical incident technique method during the qualitative phase. Descriptive statistics together with Exploratory Factor Analysis were used to analyse the quantitative data, whilst qualitative data was coded and categorised into positive and negative incidents inductively in order to analyse the content to derive themes. The quantitative results and qualitative findings were merged to establish whether the results converged, augmented, differed, or were contradictory. The major contribution of this study is a cyclical model rather than a sequential model, where a positive relationship between Customer Experience and Market Orientation is possible, contingent on the institution's ability to promote co-creation initiatives amongst its key stakeholders. This study's findings reflect, that the stronger the level of Market Orientation practiced by supervisors, the more likely it is that the student experience would be positive, and the greater the impact on students' customer satisfaction levels. Co-creation initiatives vii between the university and all its stakeholders, especially students, were viewed as enhancing this relationship. This study reaffirms the roles of the institution, academics/employees and students in building and designing the customer experience at Higher Education institutions. The knowledge contribution of this study was the focus on Customer Experience and Market Orientation in the context of a developing country like South Africa, among others, given its unique economic, social and cultural structures. Furthermore, this study advances the importance of institutional reputation and research service experience in promoting a conducive environment that supports timely output of postgraduate students who can transfer their knowledge and skills into sectors of the South African economy. The methodological contribution of this study was the validation of the UNIVERSITY-I-MARKOR in the context of the developing world, highlighting the specific dimensions of Market Orientation that needed to be stimulated to enhance the student experience and the quality of the services provided by Higher Education institutions. Notably, areas for possible future research considerations were highlighted by this study.

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