Management of regional rural banks

State road transport corporations

Management and organizational pattern

public sector fertiliser industry

Evaluation of industrial projects in India and Sudan

The use of Information Technology (IT) in the delivery of Human Resource (HR) services a traditionally laborious, paper-intensive operationis spearheading a revolution in the way personnel services are delivered. Based on a thorough review of practitioner and academic research literatures, this dissertation studies the determinants of assimilation for the following HR Information Technologies (HRITs): (1) HR functional applications; (2) Integrated HR software suites; (3) Interactive (or Automated) Voice Response systems; (4) HR intranets; (5) Employee Self-Service applications; (6) Manager Self-Service applications; (7) HR extranets; and (8) HR portals. The assimilation of HRITs is operationalized through a multidimensional variable, HR Technology Intensity (HRTI), that includes information on the assimilation stage of the technologies used in the firm, as well as on the penetration with which they are being used. Using a Diffusion of Innovations perspective, four sets of factors are hypothesized to influence HRTI: Environmental Factors (more specifically, Environmental Turbulence), Organizational Factors (Top Management Support and Uniqueness of HR Practices), User Department Factors (HR Innovation Climate, HR IT-Absorptive Capacity and HR-Technology Champion), and IS Department Factors (HR IS Resource Availability and HR-IS Relationship). The latter are theorized to mediate the relationship between the User Department factors and HRTI when the Locus of Responsibility for HR-Technology includes at least partially the IS function a moderated mediation functional form (James & Brett, 1984). Data from 155 HR Executives from firms in Canada and the United States were collected using an Internetbased survey, yielding a response rate of 21.3%. No consequential differences were found among country sub-samples. Hierarchical regression analyses offered support for the hypotheses concerning the relationship between HRTI and Top Management Support (an Organizational Factor), and HR Innovation Climate (a User Department Factor). Moderated mediation analyses also substantiated the hypothesis linking HR Innovation Climate and HRTI by way of HR-IS Relationship when the Locus of Responsibility for HR-Technology includes the IS function. Finally, an alternate dependent variable (the Sum of Percentage Penetration of IT for HR) offers converging support for the analyses linking predictor and independent variables. Implications, limitations of this investigation, and suggestions for future research conclude this dissertation.

Scholars in a variety of disciplines, including organizational theory, strategic management, and economics, have devoted substantial attention to the question: why are some firms more innovative than others? It has been largely accepted that when the knowledge base of an industry is both complex and expanding and the sources of expertise are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in networks of inter-organizational collaborations than individual firms. Strategy researchers have recently begun to explore how inter-firm networking affects organizational innovation performance, and reported intriguing yet conflicting findings. Drawing perspectives from strategic alliance, social networks, and technology innovation, I proposed an integrative framework to investigate the combined effects of a firms network centrality and structural hole on organizational innovation performance. Furthermore, I examine the innovation performance both in terms of innovation rate and innovation value. I conducted a longitudinal study on a population of firms from 1990 to 1999 in pharmaceutical industry (SIC 2834). The results of the study indicate that: 1) Network centrality helps a firm to increase its rate of innovation, and structural hole helps to improve its value of innovation, while both effects are non-linear. 2) Network centrality positively moderates the relationship between structural hole and innovation value. 3) Structural hole negatively moderates the effect of network centrality on innovation rate. The joint effects suggest that firms with advantageous network positions are more capable of making wise technology selections and focusing their efforts on innovations of greater value.

This dissertation examined the effects of social influence on employees perceptions of organizational support (POS). An important characteristic of POS is that it reflects an employees subjective evaluation of the treatment he or she receives from the organization. Employees interactions with their coworkers, then, may have an important influence on their POS. As a result, the development of POS may be a social process rather than solely an intrapsychic one. However, the majority of POS research has focused on how an individual employees personal experiences with an organization affect his/her POS and largely ignored social factors. To address this gap in the literature, I argue that advice ties between employees will be related to similarity in POS because they serve as a source of social information. Friendship ties, on the other hand, will result in similarity in POS because they are utilized for social comparison. Finally, role model ties will result in similarity in POS because employees learn from the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of others they respect and admire. In addition, I explored the differential effects of strong and weak ties and muliplex versus simplex ties on similarity in POS. My expectation was that strong ties and multiplex ties would be more influential than weak ties and simplex ties. Finally, I explored the effects reciprocated and non-reciprocated ties with the expectation that reciprocated ties would be more highly associated with POS because they are characterized by information sharing. Social network methods were utilized to test hypotheses among 93 admissions department employees at a university in the eastern United States. Results indicated that when reciprocated ties were considered, employees tended to have POS that are similar to those of their strong role model ties, strong advice-role model ties, and strong friend-advice-role model ties. However, when reciprocity was not a requirement for strong ties between employees, only strong friend-advice-role model ties were related to similarity in POS. This pattern of results suggests that strong, multiplex ties in which two-way information sharing occured were more likely to lead to similarity in POS. Implications were drawn from these findings, and suggestions for future research were made.

Although entrepreneurs of promising start-ups (Bhide, 2000) usually started their venture without novel ideas, deep experience, high credentials, or ample resources, the companies they eventually built represent the majority of fast-growing, privately held businesses (e.g. Inc. 500 companies) in the United States, which have significantly contributed to job creation and the growth of the economy. Instead of conducting extensive prior planning and research, promising start-ups depend on the lead entrepreneurs capabilities of making good decisions as it goes. Meanwhile, the start-up process and the cognitive studies of entrepreneurial rationality have been increasingly recognized as holding the central place in entrepreneurship research. Despite their clear practical and theoretical importance, current literature does not provide a comprehensive framework of the start-up process of promising start-ups, which can explain the ongoing interactions between entrepreneurs and the market, and the role played by the entrepreneurs rationality in this process. To pursue this objective, this dissertation proposes that entrepreneurial discovery is the process of promising start-ups adaptation and learning, where entrepreneurs through their actions influence how the market will react and what they will learn from it, dynamically shaping the market process. It makes two major methodological improvements on existing research: 1) it uses lead entrepreneurs close observation of the entirety of actual start-up process as data; 2) it borrows analytical methods from cognitive science to study entrepreneurial discovery as a knowledge-based problem solving process where entrepreneurs knowledge base becomes the most critical factor in determining their behavioral outputs and influencing their sensory inputs. The results indicate that behavior for effective entrepreneurial discovery is compelled by multiple principles, whose applications converge to a common underlying pattern among promising start-ups. Besides breaking new ground in its methodology, this dissertation contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by being the first to explicate the many facets of the rationality of entrepreneurial discovery as principles of behavior that can not only give the most complete and detailed explanation currently available of the unfolding of entrepreneurial discovery, but serve as the basis to guide practicing entrepreneurs behavior and to evaluate and improve entrepreneurship education and learning.

This dissertation investigates the cognitive processes businesspeople use to resolve ethical dilemmas. I assert that to accurately represent the ethical decision making process, it is necessary to move beyond ethical decision making models that rely solely on rational choice and utility theory. I develop a behavioral model of ethical decision making that extends and improves upon existing models in two ways. First, I apply dual-process cognition theories to account for the fact that not all decisions are made in a deliberative and effortful manner (which I call deep choice). At times decisions are made based on intuition, heuristics, stereotypes, and other non-deliberative processes (which I call shallow choice). Second, I include the influence of emotions on the ethical decision process. Many managers attempt to remove emotions from the workplace, but emotions influence the decision process and must be acknowledged in a descriptive ethical decision making model. A key observation stemming from this revised model is that the ethical considerations of an action may not be actively evaluated in a decision, but may instead be bundled with a shallow choice. This makes it critical to understand how organizations can influence the creation, content, and use of shallow choice. A discussion of ethical choice necessarily involves a dialog regarding the methods used to evaluate the quality of the ethical decision. I critique the current measurement instruments and suggest five guideposts to help overcome the duality of the need to apply universal principles and the necessity to respond to the particular situation when resolving an ethical dilemma. I clarify and explain dual-process cognition and the proposed model by using them to explain trust formation in organizations. I also apply the model to describe how managers cope with the time pressure that is so prevalent in business today. I suggest workers engage in ethical satisficing, that is, they accept solutions that surpass some minimal ethical threshold, but which do not represent the most ethical response available. I also establish a foundation upon which a theory of ethical satisficing can be built. Lastly, I discuss implications of the proposed model and future research opportunities.