Withdrawal behaviors such as absenteeism, tardiness, turnover intention, and employee disengagement adversely affect organizations, costing billions of dollars annually. However, there is limited research on the best practices for minimizing the effects of employee withdrawal. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore best practices leaders need to mitigate the effects of withdrawal behaviors on organizations. The social learning theory (SLT) served as the conceptual framework for this study. Ten participants were interviewed, including 4 healthcare leaders and 6 health service workers from a correctional facility nursing department in the Southeastern United States. Scholars have indicated that correctional healthcare personnel exhibit high levels of employee withdrawal including absenteeism and turnover. Data from semistructured interviews were analyzed and compared with training and disciplinary policy statements for methodological triangulation. Several themes emerged including a need for leadership engagement, staff accountability, and an organizational culture that discourages withdrawal behaviors. The findings may contribute to the body of knowledge regarding best practices that leaders can utilize to diminish adverse effects withdrawal behaviors have on organizations. Information derived from this study might contribute to social change by decreasing the expense of employee withdrawal behaviors on citizens and reallocate taxpayer resources to appropriations necessary for public inpatient mental health treatment facilities.

Businesses that can retain junior executives as part of a succession plan are likely to outperform companies that struggle to fill senior executive positions. The purpose of this correlational study was to create a focus for organizations facing competition for candidates to fill critical vacancies as a generation of senior executives retire. The study population consisted of junior executives working in the United States energy industry. This study was grounded in Burns' transformational leadership theory, which holds that leaders can increase the motivation, morale, and performance of followers to enhance their leadership to work toward organizational goals. The study research question examined the relationship between junior executives' perceptions of senior executives' transformational leadership styles, junior executives' job satisfaction, and junior executives' turnover intentions. Data were collected using an online survey (N = 492) and analyzed using correlational analysis. Multiple linear regression results showed a statistically significant negative correlation between junior executives' perceptions of senior executives' transformational leadership styles, junior executives' job satisfaction, and junior executives' turnover intentions. Business leaders might benefit from considering the concepts identified to implement strategies designed to retain skilled and experienced junior executives to maintain continuity and momentum of strategic efforts. Application of the findings of this study may lead to increased stability for employees and reduced turnover costs for businesses resulting in positive social change for individuals, organizations, and communities.

The field of clinical laboratory science is experiencing a critical shortage of qualified professionals. Because health care practitioners depend on the results of laboratory tests to help diagnosis and treat patients, it is important to address the current and future shortage in the laboratory workforce. There is limited research on factors affecting the turnover intentions of clinical laboratory employees. Accordingly, the research questions for this study examined the effect of burnout (BO) and organizational commitment (OC) on the turnover intention of laboratory employees in Florida. A cross-sectional survey design was used to examine the relationship between BO and OC on turnover intentions. Data were collected from licensed clinical laboratory directors, supervisors, technologists, and technicians using the following scales: demographic questionnaire, Maslach Burnout Inventory - General Survey, and Organizational Commitment Questionnaire. Linear regression and ANOVA were used to examine the relationships between these variables. The response rate was 18.4% (N = 184). Among clinical laboratory employees in Florida, the findings revealed significant predictive relationships between BO and turnover intention, OC and turnover intention, age and BO, and work shift and OC among clinical laboratory employees in Florida. Potential implications for positive social change from this study include reducing turnover among laboratory employees by allowing laboratory managers to create strategies that will reduce BO and increase OC, and thus decrease turnover intention.

Discussion of the artist statement and critique.

Brand crisis could threaten a company with declining public trust and decreased brand reputation (Greyser, 2009). When confronting with a crisis, the organization should respond immediately and properly so that the crisis can be stopped from escalate into a catastrophe (Davies and Walters, 1998). Crisis type can be divided into the victim, the accident or the intentional clusters according to perceived responsibilities the company should shoulder. Based on these factors, the company should select the most appropriate response strategy or a combination of different response strategies to address the crisis situation. In other words, a match between crisis type and response strategy is effective for companies to survive crisis situations (Cheong and Morrison, 2008). Food-related crisis tend to become rampant in recent years and require more in-depth studies. In the face of a food-related crisis, the affected company are compelled to communicate with both internal and external stakeholders, including employees, stockholders, retailers, suppliers and consumers to manage and survive the crisis (Massey, 2001). There are four options for companies in a product-harm crisis to choose from: denying the defect, involuntary recall, voluntary recall and improvement campaign (Souiden and Pons, 2009). This study took the issue of Blue Bell ice cream recalls as an example of product-harm crisis for case analysis and proposed three different kinds of strategies or hypotheses based on the Image Repair Theory (Benoit and Pang, 2008) covering the denial, evasion of responsibility, reducing offensiveness of events, corrective action and mortification aspects.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / An in-depth, longitudinal study of the speech and oral language development of eight infants with a profound hearing loss who receive early interventions focused on developing their auditory, speech and oral language capacity is presented in this thesis. Infants were tracked for two years, during the period when they are changed from a hearing aid to a cochlear implant. All infants in this study had their hearing loss identified early and were fitted with hearing aids between 1 and 7 months of age and received their cochlear implant between 8 and 16 months of age. They attended a number of different auditory-verbal early intervention programs (depending on where they lived) all of which focused on developing speech and language skills through listening. Attendance at their particular early intervention program at least once a week was in addition to weekly attendance the Sydney Cochlear Implant Centre for therapy and audiological services. A broad range of measures has been used to track the infants’ acquisition of oral language skills, including measures of communicative intention, pre-speech and speech development, and oral language development. Despite a wide range of individual differences across the group of infants, the results suggest some general trends. In the area of communicative intent most infants followed typical development patterns in terms of both the types (e.g. requesting, answering etc) and forms (gestural, vocal, verbal) used, but they showed delays in their frequency of usage of these types and forms. For speech development the infants demonstrated typical speech skills by 18-months post-cochlear implantation in the areas of consonant inventories, severity of phonological involvement (speech intelligibility) and phonological process development, but they showed delays in vowel and consonant acquisition. Finally, for language development the infants were delayed relative to typical development at 18 months post-implantation. The findings support and extend previous studies which have demonstrated the benefits of early intervention for communication development in infants with hearing loss (Calderon & Naidu, 2000; Mayne, Yoshinaga-Itano & Sedey, 2000; Moeller, 2000; Yoshinaga-Itano & Apuzzo, 1998). However, the delays in the oral communication skills of the infants in the current study suggest that more intensive long-term intervention is required if the infants are to attain typical oral speech and language development. The findings capture the complexity of early oral language development, which has been lacking in previous studies of infants with significant hearing loss, receiving a cochlear implant (Dettman, Briggs, & Dowell, 2005; Houston, Ying, Pisoni, & Iler Kirk, 2003; Schauwers, Gillis, Daemers, De Beukelaer, & Govaerts, 2004). The present data also provide some limited support for earlier implantation, that is, before 12 months of age, as the infants made little progress in oral language development while using hearing aids. The reduced amount of auditory signal available to them prior to implantation may be the determining factor in their inability to follow typical rates and patterns of development. However, rates of development with the implant were not straightforward and further research on this population is needed. Universal neonatal screening programs for hearing loss will potentially provide a larger population of early identified infant for future research. This will create the opportunity for large scale, prospective, longitudinal, studies examining the acquisition of speech and oral language development. Limitations of this study, tracking the early stages of speech and language development over a two year period are identified. Future studies are needed to follow the infants for a longer time to determine if their rate of development is sufficient for them to catch up in areas of delay and maintain their performance in areas where they match their typically developing peers.

Professional operatic singing can be performed technically for practice and rehearsal, or with heightened emotion through intention to communicate with an audience. Previous studies of respiration in operatic singing have not taken into account the professional performer�s ability to differentiate at will between rehearsal and performance modes of singing. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the differences between singing �with intention to communicate� (as if performing) and singing �technically� (as if in rehearsal). The hypothesis is that this specified change of condition would change the respiratory patterns employed by the singers. Estimation of respiratory patterns was obtained using magnetometers. Performance singing was labelled �IC� (intention to communicate). Rehearsal singing was labelled �T� (technical) and also included �TL� (technical loud) and �TS� (technical soft). Each of the five singers performed two tasks (a free choice aria in Italian, and a set song). Only intra-subject analysis was used. One thousand and one breaths were analysed. These were then matched, so that only complete musical phrases (sung six times by the same singer) were compared with each other. Seven hundred and sixty-two matched phrases were analysed in this way. Measured variables were initiation lung volume (ILV), termination lung volume (TLV), the amount of lung volume expired (LVE), %VC released per second (Flow), the expiratory time (Te), and inspiratory time (Ti). Sound pressure level (SPL) was measured. This study also examined the ability of experienced listeners to distinguish between the T and IC performances from DAT recordings. Findings show that in comparison with T singing, IC singing used more air, with a greater percentage of vital capacity expired per second, but without a simple association with sound pressure level or expiratory time. Listeners were able to distinguish IC from T performances, demonstrating a perceived difference in the quality of the vocal output. These results demonstrate that performance intention to communicate, compared to rehearsal, results in a measurable difference in respiratory parameters, and therefore needs to be specified in future research.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-80).

Bulk food exist in various kind of food, can be purchased by individual needs and quantities required, customer in Taiwan still stick to bulk food and the way sales. Recent year, many problems have revealed the bulk food safety issue. Therefore, Department of Health enacted bulk food labeling regulation in 2009 to clarify what information to be revealed, and has advocating the information to consumer about how to choose bulk food. The government hopes to increase the consumer knowledge and avoid food hazard. We can tell that knowledge must be an important part in decision procedure of food purchasing, but a few of research concern this issue. Hence, in this research product knowledge and other variables are discussed and selected to form research model. This research also discovered the bulk food safety situation unprecedentedly, gives an overview to readers. The goals of this research are find the mediator effect within involvement, perceived quality and repurchase intention and the moderator effect of product knowledge between the relationships of perceived quality and repurchase intention. Samples of 973 collected through questionnaire survey, tested the hypotheses by regression analysis. The result showed the three variables did have partial mediator effect. And the moderator effect was confirmed, product knowledge will weakened the relationship, implied the bulk food safety information advocacy would help to change the customer decision. Based on the result, suggestions are as followed: government should keep on educating consumer to establish proper food decision criteria; bulk food producer and distributor should improve the information reveal and food quality control spontaneously, to win customers¡¦ perceived quality and increase purchase.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 124-135).