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Research about Libyan female leadership is scarce. This thesis is the first qualitative study to explore, describe and explain the experiences and perspectives of Libyan female leaders in senior positions, within the Ministries of Education and Health. It introduces a deep study, rich in information which reflects the female leadership phenomenon that has been never done before in the Libyan context. A qualitative methodology, semi-structured interviews and a narrative approach were selected. This provided the researcher with a deep insight into the individual's stories. This research also used Multifactor questionnaire as a supporting instrument. One of the contributions of this thesis is its investigation of the role of `Glass Ceiling', `Glass Cliff concepts among Libyan female leaders. Both concepts in practice work slightly different, because of the Arabic concept of Wasta. Wasta relates to social relationships can have a negative impact making the glass ceiling harder to break and glass cliff more risky. However it can also have a positive impact making the glass ceiling more easily breakable and glass cliff less risky. A further contribution is the application of a feminist and constructiyist research philosophy which currently appears to be unique in Libyan studies. In addition, this thesis illustrated the support of Islam and Libyan leader Muammer AlGaddfi for women. This makes Libya different from other Arabic and Muslim countries. This thesis challenged the perception in Western literature that Arabic women are invisible in many Arabic countries; by providing evidence of senior women leaders and their experiences or voices being recorded. The Libyan female leaders stated that they tend to apply different leadership styles which could be interpreted as being in the transactional transformational distribution and authentic leadership traditions. Concepts of power, leader -manager differences, situations such as family circumstances and national cultures were explored to help the researcher to interpret and understand the stories of Libyan female leaders.

In my dissertation I propose three counterintuitive social mechanisms to alleviate the risk that collective production will fail to maintain participant involvement and respond to demand. My first study, based on a panel dataset of edits and views of articles in the English Wikipedia, shows that, although collective production lacks a price-like mechanism to estimate demand for the goods it produces, consumers’ contributions act as such a signal to expert producers. In the second paper I examine the theory that collective production participation is greatest when social norms of collaboration are obeyed. Using a large panel dataset of production networks and normrelated behavior in Wikipedia, I show that social norm infringement is not completely detrimental to participation because norm enforcement increases the likelihood that the beneficiary producer continues participating. In my third paper, I rely on interviews with experienced Wikipedia producers to examine whether producers’ ties to non-participants in collective production increase the likelihood of turnover, and whether producers’ embeddedness in collective production reduces turnover risk. Surprisingly, I find that producers with networks rich in ties to non-producers and with a task-oriented approach to collective production are those least likely to stop participating.

Public policy efforts to curb obesity often adhere to a rational actor model of human behavior, asserting that consumer behavior will change provided proper economic incentives, nutritional information, and health education. However, rigorous academic research related to such questions remains limited in scope and appears inconclusive as to the success of such economic and cognitive interventions. In contrast, research in social psychology and behavioral economics suggests that decision making is partially based on heuristics, or rules of thumb, and susceptible to powerful cognitive biases. External cues can subtly influence decision making in powerful ways. In this paper, after discussing existing policy efforts and their limitations, we use concepts from behavioral decision theory to design interventions related to different psychological domains in hopes of providing a more complete understanding of consumer dietary decision making. We move beyond traditional cognitive methods, namely the provision of nutritional information and economic incentives, to suggest the value of other cognitive, affective, social, and environmental influences in shaping food choices. Over a 21-month period, we tested 9 interventions in a point-of-purchase field study at a hospital cafeteria, focusing on the healthfulness of beverage purchases and chip purchases. Information, in the form of novel, reinforcing health messages, had the most consistently beneficial effect on the healthfulness of purchases. Traffic light colored-nutritional labeling, affect-based cues (smiley faces and frowny faces), and environmental changes including grouping items together based on level of healthfulness ("grouping by healthfulness") and pairing an unhealthy item with a healthier alternative ("healthy substitute pairing") also affected choices. Messages related to social norms had no effect on purchases. Our work adds to existing consumer behavior research and helps to inform health policy of additional cognitive factors and biases that must be taken into account when designing interventions and which can, indeed, be leveraged to influence dietary behavior. This is the first study of which we know to test the relative effects of this number and variety (economic, cognitive, affective, social, and environmental) of theory-based behavioral nudges on food choice in one setting.

In this dissertation, I present a grounded exploration of some processes and mechanisms through which internal ambiguity helps groups adapt to—and thus cope with—external ambiguity and an unpredictably changing environment.

In this dissertation, I integrate research on role-based coordination with concepts adapted from the team effectiveness literature to theorize how minimal team structures support effective coordination when people do not work together regularly. I argue that role-based coordination among relative strangers can be interpersonally challenging and propose that team scaffolds (minimal team structures that bound groups of roles rather than groups of individuals) may provide occupants with a temporary shared in-group that facilitates interaction. I develop and test these ideas in a multi-method, multi-site field study of a new work structure, called pods, that were implemented in many hospital emergency departments (EDs) and were sometimes designed to function as team scaffolds.

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published_or_final_version / Management Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

<p> This study examined the influence of personal networks on the career decision-making of African-American professional women through the lens of social cognitive career theory. A review of the career development literature shows growing interest in social networks, both online and face-to-face, and their relationship to individual career development. While research has been conducted on the career development of African-American women, the network research on African-American women is relatively scarce (Combs, 2003; Young, 2013). Combs (2003) noted that informal socialization activities impact career advancement and that few studies have examined the intersection of race and gender on informal networks. This study sought to address that gap. Furthermore, research on the influence of personal networks on the career decision-making of African-American women could both add to the network literature on African-American women and have implications for the career counseling of African-American women.</p><p> The primary research question addressed in this study was: What is the relationship, if any, between informal personal networks and the career decision-making of African-American professional women? A basic qualitative study was conducted with semi-structured interviews serving as the primary method of data collection. Ten African-American women with at least ten years of professional experience and a minimum of two career decision points were purposefully selected for this study.</p><p> Data was analyzed using coding and thematic analysis to understand and interpret the meaning that each participant construed from their experiences with career decision-making and their personal networks. Themes emerged in four primary areas: (1) the career decision-making process, (2) the composition of the participants' personal networks, (3) the influence participants' personal networks had on their career decisions, and (4) key learnings. Based on the findings, conclusions and recommendations for future research and practice are presented.</p>

In this dissertation I analyze the financial behaviors of public and private nonprofit higher education organizations in the U.S. from 1980 to 2010. The three analyses examine organizational change in the financial behaviors of these institutions and the effects of two sources of organizational interdependencies, stakeholder influence and competition, on college and university spending. I use a variety of quantitative methodological approaches to present evidence that highlights the need to integrate internal aspects of organizations including mission, internal decision making structures, and cross-subsidization practices into existing open system explanations of organizational behavior and change. Furthermore, empirical investigations of competition in two markets reveals the importance of understanding the market and resource context when evaluating the effects of market conditions, like competition, on organizational behaviors. The results from the analysis of organizational change demonstrate discontinuities in how two dimensions of financial behaviors--revenue and spending profiles--change over time, highlighting the loose coupling between these two dimensions and a discontinuity in how they change over time. The analysis of the economic influence of stakeholder groups reveals that their influence, while significant, weakens substantially between 1986 and 2010. The results also point out limitations of resource dependency and stakeholder theories of organizational behavior. These theories have limited explanatory power in the context of multi-revenue and multiproduct organizations, like colleges and universities, where cross-subsidization is utilized; unless a stakeholder is able to constrain how the funds are used within the higher education organizations. Results from Chapter 4 support my argument that competition alters the incentive structures that guide resource allocation decisions within higher education organizations. This analysis also showcases how the effects of competition and market conditions vary across sectors and markets, indicating a need for additional research on competition in multi-revenue and multiproduct organizations like colleges and universities.