Over the past decade, outsourcing has emerged as an imperative for competitive success in modern organizations. Yet, the high failure rate of outsourcing initiatives suggests that despite the significant opportunities available through outsourcing, several organizations remain unprepared for the transformation that it brings. My dissertation, “Essays on the Organization and Value of Outsourcing Relationships,” identifies governance strategies that maximize the strategic value of outsourcing investments and estimates the size of governance effects by analyzing the contribution of efficient governance to an increase in shareholder value of the outsourcing firm. The first two essays, “An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Information Capabilities Design on Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Performance” and “An Empirical Analysis of the Contractual and Information Structures of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Relationships,” focus on business process outsourcing (BPO), the fastest growing segment of the outsourcing market. In particular, the first essay emphasizes the information intensive nature of BPO to posit that performance heterogeneity across BPO relationships is a function of the fit between the information requirements and information capabilities of the relationship. The design of information capabilities extends contract design that addresses incentive conflicts to include design of the information structure comprising relational processes and technologies that address cognitive conflict between the participant firms. The second essay demonstrates complementarities between the contractual and information structures to emphasize that their joint assessment is necessary to enhance the explanatory power of extant theories of organization. These results have important implications for how BPO relationships must be designed and managed to realize strategic value. The third essay in my dissertation, “Outsourcing Discount or Paradox? A Comparative Analysis of the Long-Term Abnormal Stock Returns and Operational Performance Gains across Outsourcing Contracts,” estimates the extent of this strategic value by assessing the longterm abnormal stock returns to the hundred largest outsourcing initiatives implemented between 1996 and 2005. I find that transaction cost economizing outsourcing decisions yield significantly higher abnormal returns. The results imply the need to exercise caution in initiating outsourcing initiatives and emphasize that value chain scoping and management are important sources of comparative advantage in the modern firm. / text

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Scholars have repeatedly demonstrated the positive benefits of high-quality leader-member exchange (LMX) for employees and organizations alike. Although some research has examined outcomes of differentiation of LMX relationships within teams, there is scant research into the way in which the combination of LMX and LMX differentiation (LMX-D) interact at the leader-level in the workplace hierarchy and the trickle-down effects these leader relationships have on subordinates. Moreover, no research has examined the potential buffering effect that subordinate team LMX may have on leaders who are experiencing the desire to withdraw from the organization as a result of the combination of their leader-leader exchange (LLX) relationships and the LLX differentiation (LLX-D) they perceive on their own leader teams. Thus, the present study sought to combine LMX and multilevel leadership theories to examine the effects of these leader-level exchange relationships on turnover intentions (TOI) for both individuals in leader-member dyads. Results suggested stronger negative relationships between LLX and TOI for both leaders and members when LLX-D is lower. However, examining this relationship at the leader-level when accounting for subordinate team LMX mean suggests that high-quality LMX relationships with the team members supervised by the leader attenuates the negative relationship between LLX and leader TOI. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed, including the importance of the relationship of LLX, LLX-D, and team LMX mean on employee attitudes at multiple organizational levels.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This research explores what roles nonprofits play in political representation by applying the concept of the representational role to nonprofits. The representational role consists of representational focus and style. Representational focus shows those whom nonprofits aim to serve: members, constituents, or the general public. Representational style denotes the ways nonprofits advocate for their focal groups: the delegation, trusteeship, and educational styles. The survey and regression analysis results demonstrate that nonprofits serving their members are most likely to convey their members’ voices directly to policy makers: the delegation style. In contrast, nonprofits advocating for their constituents are likely to pursue what they independently identify as the interests of their constituents: the trusteeship style. Finally, nonprofits speaking for the general public are most likely to work toward educating the general public: the educational style. These results suggest that nonprofits play different roles in political representation, depending on the types of their focal groups.