Lean strategy deployment (LSD) provides a means to create lasting value at reduced cost; yet most LSD efforts fail to attain sustainable improvements. The current study sought to gain an understanding of how leaders in oral healthcare manufacturing setting in the northeastern region of the United States can apply self-efficacy and leadership commitment during an LSD. Using Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy this qualitative phenomenological study examined the lived experiences and perceptions of 15 mid-to-senior level managers, concerning the use of self-efficacy and leadership commitment during a lean strategy deployment (LSD). The key findings resulted in 10 emergent themes. The top 3 highly regarded themes that emerged from this study were: (1) committing to a lean strategy deployment, (2) communicating lessons learned/changes, and (3) bringing the best out of employees. LSDs are not easy to implement. Many companies attempt to carry out lean activities and many of these same companies fail to have successful results. To be effective, leaders should focus on creating sound practices and give more attention to the human behaviors and leadership characteristics needed to support eliminating barriers and creating a lean culture.

Abstract  Linnaeus University – Campus Kalmar School of Business and Economics Leadership and Management in International Contexts (60 credits)  Title: Transformational Leadership in the Chinese Culture – A Quantitative Study on the Impact of Transformational Leadership on Chinese Internet Companies’ Performance.  This research aims to study how transformational leadership affects organizational performance and the mediation effect of employee voice behaviour. A quantitative research method and a deductive research approach were used for this research study, where theoretical concepts were developed. Several hypotheses were derived as means to test the existing theories regarding research variables. The data in this research was collected through a 384 completed online survey questionnaire from employees of the top ten listed Chinese internet companies. Various statistical techniques, including Pearson correlation analysis, linear regression analysis, and mediation effect testing, were implemented to provide evidence for hypothesis testing. The statistical analysis results indicate that a particular dimension of transformational leadership positively impacts Chinese internet companies’ performance, and employee voice behaviour has a partial mediation effect in this relationship.

Preventable medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. Healthcare leaders must consistently promote the delivery of quality and safe care of patients to reduce unnecessary errors and prevent harm. The purpose of this case study was to explore human resource strategies for improving organizational performance to reduce medical errors. The study included face-to-face interviews with 5 healthcare clinical managers who work within a multifaceted health system in the Midwestern region of the United States. Complex adaptive systems theory was used to frame this study. Interview notes, publicly available documents, and audio recordings were transcribed and analyzed to identify themes regarding strategies used by managers to find effective ways for improvement. Four themes emerged: addressing seminal/never events, ongoing training programs, communication/collaboration, and promoting a culture of safety and quality. Results may directly benefit healthcare managers by facilitating successful strategies to reduce preventable medical errors through education, feedback, innovation, and leadership. Implications for social change for healthcare managers include continued training, building a culture of safety, and using collaborative and communicative efforts while making contributions to the best practices within healthcare organizations to reduce the likelihood of medical errors.

Poor employee performance has a negative effect on business profitability. Some telecommunications executives lack strategies to improve supervisors' performance. The purpose of this single case study was to explore the leadership strategies telecommunications executives use to improve supervisors' performance. Utilizing the behavior engineering model, data consisted of semistructured interviews with 10 purposefully selected telecommunications executives in the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Maarten who have successfully improved supervisors' performance. Five themes emerged from the thematic analysis of interview data and business archived performance reports: need for implementing communication and team activities; need for providing bonuses, incentives, and rewards; adopting goal setting and performance appraisals; promoting training; and the required autonomy to work. All the telecommunications executives used communication, meetings, team activities and bonuses, incentives, and rewards as strategies for improving supervisors' performance. Eighty percent of the participants used goal setting and performance appraisal and training while 60% of the respondents used autonomy to do work as strategies for improving supervisors' performance. The findings from this study might contribute to social change by providing telecommunications executives with more knowledge to achieve business sustainability. With improved business performance, telecommunications executives will provide job opportunities to the people in the local community and support community leaders with provision of social amenities. The local community will adopt technology to enhance their quality of life.

The study focuses on key characteristics that affect diversity management (DM) in the United States. Developing effective strategies to support and enhance workforce diversity is a competitive business advantage as diverse workforce economic and social contributions outpace homogeneous workgroups. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the strategies that service organization leaders (diversity practitioner-leaders) use to develop DM programs to support competitive business advantage and sustainable growth. The general systems theory and DM framework were the lens that guided the study. Five diversity practitioner-leaders from service organizations with business operations in the northwestern region of United States were interviewed. Participants responded to open-ended interview questions. Data collection processes included validating and triangulating the information gathered from participants via transcript review and use of archival business documents and peer-reviewed sources. Following the thematic data analysis, major themes emerged that include linking diversity programs to business goals, educating and creating diversity awareness, and implementing diversity reporting and accountability. Findings revealed strategies that diversity practitioner-leaders could use to enhance workplace DM practices and support sustainable business growth. The study findings could help organizational leaders to affect positive social change by building diverse, welcoming, and all-inclusive workplace cultures, whereby all employees can strive to achieve their full potential, thus improving employee engagement and productivity. As workplace diversity improves, employees' engagement and productivity increases as well as their socioeconomic contributions.

Implementing effective leadership strategies in management of information systems (MIS) can positively influence overall organizational performance. This study was an exploration of the general problem of failure to lead effectively in the current knowledge-based economy and the resulting deleterious effects on organizational performance and threats to continuing organizational viability. The specific problem was the lack of understanding regarding the interaction of leadership processes with MIS functions and the impact on organizational success. Managers' and employees' lived experiences of leadership in small- to medium-sized enterprises were explored, as well as how those experiences influenced the organization's adaptive responses regarding technology and performance in the knowledge-based economy. The complexity theory of leadership was applied as the theoretical foundation for this study. A phenomenological methodology was used. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed through open coding to identify emergent themes from the data. The themes were leaders motivate employees' positive work-related behaviors, effective communication skills ensure accessibility and efficiency of the organizational information system, and leadership practices influence business productivity. This study contributes to social change by providing insights for managers and employees regarding effective strategies for working as teams and networks via the use of nontraditional leadership theory, which promotes company sustainability by demonstrating the benefits of responding to the changing economy.

The growing lack of confidence in public companies arises from the recent accounting scandals and corporate collapses, which have been attributed to the consequences of separation of ownership and control in modern firms. Agency theory predicts a conflict of interest between managers and shareholders that leads to agency costs and weak performance. This study used agency, stakeholders', and stewardship theories as the theoretical framework and multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between corporate governance mechanisms and organizational performance in nonfinancial firms listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. The results of the study could help clarify understanding of corporate governance to managers, investors, and regulators who seek to understand how corporate governance impact firms' performance. In this study, corporate governance mechanisms included board independence, audit committee independence, board size, number of board meetings, and executive compensation. The data were collected from the firms' published accounts on their websites and on the archives of the Nigerian Stock Exchange for a period starting from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2015. The measures of financial performance in the study were return on assets, return on capital employed, and Tobin's Q. The study found a positive but not statistically significant relationship between corporate governance mechanisms and financial performance. This study has implications for positive social change by showing managers and other stakeholders of firms how a good corporate governance system assures investor confidence, employee loyalty and commitment, the reduction in conflict of interest and agency costs, and a strong financial performance.

[pt] Esta pesquisa empenhou-se em aprofundar a compreensão da influência, associações e efeitos da liderança transformacional, liderança instrumental e da qualidade da relação líder-liderado (leader-member exchange – LMX) no desempenho efetivo no trabalho. O estudo propõe e investiga associações entre os estilos de liderança transformacional e instrumental e a qualidade da relação entre líderes e seus liderados, bem como o impacto desses estilos de liderança e do LMX no desempenho de funcionários. As hipóteses foram testadas através da análise de regressão multivariada, com dados de 310 colaboradores de uma empresa brasileira privada de médio-porte do segmento médico-hospitalar com mais de sete décadas de tradição no mercado nacional. Verificou-se a influência complementar dos estilos de liderança transformacional e instrumental sobre a qualidade da relação líder-liderado (LMX) e desta última com o desempenho efetivo observado, através de métricas objetivas aplicadas no acompanhamento do desempenho dos colaboradores. Esta pesquisa contribui com os demais estudos sobre o tema, porque aprofunda o entendimento sobre o fenômeno da liderança, suas implicações práticas e teóricas para a gestão organizacional, além de fortalecer a literatura acadêmica nacional contemporânea. / [en] This research endeavored to deepen the understanding of the influence, associations and effects of transformational leadership, instrumental leadership and the quality of leader-member exchange (LMX) on effective performance at work. The study proposes and investigates associations between transformational and instrumental leadership styles and the quality of the relationship between leaders and their subordinates, as well as the impact of these leadership styles and LMX on employee performance. The hypotheses were tested through multivariate regression analysis, with data from 310 employees of a medium-sized private Brazilian company in the medical-hospital segment, with more than seven decades of tradition in the national market. The complementary influence of transformational and instrumental leadership styles on the quality of the leader-member relationship (LMX) was verified, as well as the effects of the latter on effective performance as observed through objective metrics applied to monitor employee performance. This research contributes to other studies on the subject, because it deepens the understanding of the phenomenon of leadership, its practical and theoretical implications for organizational management, in addition to strengthening the contemporary national academic literature.

Most organizations today understand the valuable contribution employees as people (rather than simply bodies) provide to their overall performance. Although efforts are made to make the most of the human in organizations, there is still much room for improvement. Focus in the reduction of employee injuries such as cumulative trauma disorders rose in the 80 s. Attempts at increasing performance by addressing employee satisfaction through various methods have also been ongoing for several years now. Knowledge Management is one of the most recent attempts at controlling and making the best use of employees knowledge. All of these efforts and more towards that same goal of making the most of people s performance at work are encompassed within the domain of the Human Factors Engineering/Ergonomics field. HFE/E provides still untapped potential for organizational performance as the human and its optimal performance are the reason for this discipline s being. Although Human Factors programs have been generated and implemented, there is still the need for a method to help organizations fully integrate this discipline into the enterprise as a whole. The purpose of this research is to develop a method to help organizations integrate HFE/E into it business processes. This research begun with a review of the ways in which the HFE/E discipline is currently used by organizations. The need and desire to integrate HFE/E into organizations was identified, and a method to accomplish this integration was conceptualized. This method consisted on the generation of two domain-specific ontologies (a Human Factors Engineering/Ergonomics ontology, and a Business ontology), and mapping the two creating a concept map that can be used to integrate HFE/E into businesses. The HFE/E ontology was built by generating two concept maps that were merged and then joined with a HFE/E discipline taxonomy. A total of four concept maps, two ontologies and a taxonomy were created, all of which are contributions to the HFE/E, and the business- and management-related fields.

Research Summary Despite a plethora of studies, the moderating effects of contingency factors regarding the relationship between corporate planning (CP) and organizational performance (OP) remain open to discussion. Our meta-analysis analyzes 183 independent study samples, 84 of which are examined for the first time. We expand on previous meta-analyses by correcting for measurement error and dichotomization, and we use moderation analyses and meta-analytical regressions to explain heterogeneity in these studies. We find evidence for the moderating effects of task interdependence and uncertainty avoidance as contingency factors. Unexpectedly, we identify an interaction of the measurements of OP and CP with uncertainty avoidance. Our results provide new insights into the relationship between CP and OP. Management Summary Managers who may doubt whether planning is still fruitful in turbulent times obtain a clear answer from our study: Yes, it is. CP is definitely correlated with OP. The effect sizes are stable over time and for different types of planning. However, the effect of CP on performance depends on the organizational context. Manufacturing firms benefit more than nonmanufacturing firms, and larger firms benefit more than smaller firms. Organizations in countries with high uncertainty avoidance show larger effects in relation to those in countries with low uncertainty avoidance. Finally, organizations facing high environmental uncertainty show higher effects of CP than organizations in more stable environments. However, the identified effects are conditional on the type of measurement of performance and CP.