With the supply of talented employees for the predicted available jobs around the world declining, employee retention and voluntary turnover have jumped to the forefront of HRD practitioners’, as well as senior managers’, strategic initiative. By 2008, demographers predict that 76 million baby boomers will be eligible for retirement. The generations that followed these individuals, born between 1946 and 1962, are not numerically adequate to fill the vacancies that these retirements will create. A growing concern exists that the expected annual growth in the number of eligible employees will be outpaced by economic growth predictions. While employee retention and employee voluntary turnover have received considerable scholarly attention, few research studies have examined the phenomenon in a professional sales arena. No investigation to date has tracked employee voluntary turnover and retention over a 14-year longitudinal wave as was the focus of this study. This population study examined employee retention of a Fortune 500 North American industrial automation manufacturer’s professional sales force over a 14-year period. It focused on personal characteristics, work characteristics, and human resource development (HRD) intervention factors influencing employee voluntary turnover. The results suggest that training and development participation contributes more significantly to employee retention than salary and job title promotions to the firm’s ability to retain sales professionals. The theoretical underpinnings associated with these findings reinforce the importance of human capital theory, social identity theory, expectancy theory, and distributive justice theory. They also suggest that employee retention should be included in calculations that measure the return on investment for training and development interventions. Further, these results that emerged from comprehensive data mining suggest that a structured training and development program embeds aspects of employee socialization that can influence a professional sales employee’s tenure in the organization. Formal training can serve to socialize the employee into the organization, thus, deepening the effect of social capital theory to build normative organizational commitment, a mediator of employee retention. This effect appeared to be more significant for non-Caucasian sales professionals who remained in the organization when included in a structured sales training program.

Agency theory, which discusses the conflict between agent and principle, was developed by Jensen and Meckling in 1976. Owing to the separation of ownership and management, shareholders and management authority have agency relationship. The one reason that shareholder hand in company affairs to management authority is that management authority has better management ability. Another reason is that shareholder cannot handle by himself for some reasons and must hand in to other people. Management authority has the advantage of information and they also seek for their own interest. But these behaviors may damage shareholder¡¦s right and agency problems occur in the situation. Agency problems occur not only between shareholder and management authority but also between management authority and lender in a company with debt. Shareholders often supervise management authority more strictly and make more rules to confine management authority in order to reduce agency problem or protect their own interest. But these actions disturb management authority when management authority is full of ambitions and endeavor. If agency problems between shareholder and management authority cannot be solved properly, it will make company operate abnormally and damage the nation¡¦s economic further. On the contrary earning forecast can reduce information asymmetry. If management authority can disclose earning forecast voluntarily, it is helpful to reduce the agency problem and the information asymmetry between shareholder and management authority. The article assumes management authority disclose earning forecast voluntarily in order to get shareholder and debtor¡¦s trust in this point of view and use firm size¡Bfree cash flow¡Bleverage as the proxy of agency cost. In this research we find that the more debt the company have, the higher voluntarily the company discloses earning forecast. It is the same as we expect. But free cast flow is not significant. When firm size is bigger, the management authority is less voluntary to disclose earning forecast. The result is contrary to the view of agency problem.

Reducing high lost ratio of voluntary interpreters can save cost of recruiting and retraining for Taroko National Park¡¦s headquarters. The subjects of the study are the 114 voluntary interpreters in Taroko National Park. The methodologies applied here are, questionnaire and observation. The purpose of the study is to understand the relationship between the motivation of the voluntary interpreters and the job satisfaction of the voluntary interpreters to salve the problem of high lost ratio of voluntary interpreters. The findings of the study are as follows: 1.the motivation is mainly "self-growth". 2.the motivation will be changed with personal character and time passing by. 3. the factors influencing the voluntary interpreters¡¦ job satisfaction are "show loving care and support", "communication and co-operation", "responsibility and training". These factors will effect total satisfaction of voluntary interpreters. According to the findings of the study, proposes the headquarters of Taroko National Park how to provide relative courses, rich the content of work, and pay close attention for voluntary interpreters.

The voluntary turnover behaviors exist for a long time, especially the increasing crew voluntary turnover behaviors in recent years. Due to the important effect upon the future of businesses, it¡¦s necessary to understand the behaviors thoroughly and completely. Previous studies focused on how the voluntary turnover behaviors work. However, employees who play in the formal or informal group perform different crew behaviors. By interviewing nine groups, which left their job in the past two years ever, we try to sketch the outline of the group relationship and the crew voluntary turnover behaviors in the businesses. Finally, we analyze the transcriptions and explore the relevance about the group relationship and the crew voluntary turnover behavior.

Purpose – The purpose of this thesis is to identify the determinants of voluntary disclosure of intellectual capital in a Swedish context in 2013. Research design – The thesis is a quantitative, cross sectional study. The data is collected from firms’ annual reports using a disclosure index developed by Bukh et al. (2005). The data was analysed using ANOVA, Mann Whitney U-test and Pearson’s’ r. Findings – The drivers of voluntary disclosure in a Swedish context are industry type, age and size. There was no significant relationship found between ownership concentration, leverage and profitability and the amount of voluntary disclosure. Contribution – There has been a limited amount of research performed on Swedish companies and voluntary disclosure. This study contribute trough mapping the disclosure situation in Sweden. The study also offers an insight to the situation the year before the new directive (2014/95/EU). Value – This paper gives a recent depiction of the disclosure situation in Sweden. The thesis has a more extended theoretical framework than previous studies and interpret the result with four different theories.

Voluntary work - why? There are many people who work as volunteers within different organizations and we have chosen to study an organization that aims to help women and girls around the world. The members give their time and dedication in order to give other people a better life. The purpose of the study is to examine the factors that motivate people to join the organization. When we heard about the organization the first time we wondered if the volunteers were there to help others, or to have something to do for themselves. We chose to conduct a survey of the selected organization and have grouped the results according to different factors. One grouping is how long they have been members. Another is if there is a difference between two groups, where one is more comitted to voluntary work in their own neighborhood compared to those who are not. We have used altrusim, egoism and motivation as key concepts för understanding and analyzing our results. We have come to the conclusion that there are differences between different groups of why they are in this organization. One of the main reasons for all groups is that they truly want to help women and girls around the world. The social aspects of being in a group, to be on activities was not as high on the list as we first anticipated.

Behaviour is often neglected when modelling vaccination policies. This thesis shows the importance of incorporating behaviour in vaccination models of the impact of vaccines on disease dynamics. This thesis consists of three projects pertaining to voluntary vaccination in a network setting. The first project focuses on the effectiveness of voluntary ring vaccination under the presence of imitation. The contacts of a single index case vaccinate when symptoms first appear. We assume the contacts are unable to transmit infection to one another; however, we assume they are able to share their vaccination strategies. Under the presence of strong imitation, the effectiveness of voluntary ring vaccination becomes unpredictable. The second project focuses on the impact of personal experiences on voluntary influenza vaccination in a uniform network. Vaccination behaviour is based upon past infection and vaccination experiences, which creates a feedback loop between incidence and behaviour. Long-term memory acts as a stabilizing factor; however, long-term memory also decreases perceived vaccine efficacy. Vaccines conferring slowly waning immunity decrease vaccination coverage, leading to sporadic outbreaks in the absence of non-influenzal influenza-like-illness (niILI). Our results show evidence of vaccination strategy correlations being formed in the absence of imitation through past experiences. Allowing niILI to be mistaken for true influenza breaks up the strategy correlations, while stabilizing dynamics. The final model focuses on vaccination strategies targeting superspreaders, with the option of distributing economic incentives. We take a more psychological approach to influenza vaccination behaviour, where transmission of influenza occurs on an empirically based network. On average, superspreaders view the vaccine to be less effective; however, superspreaders still find vaccination more appealing because they are at a greater risk of becoming infected. The incorporation of behaviour leads to superspreader strategies to become less effective due to policy resistance; neglecting behaviour can lead to an overestimation of reduction of incidence. Public health officials should be concerned about the policy resistance and decreased perceived vaccine efficacy among superspreaders. The effectiveness of the vaccination or control policies could be diminished by the presence of behaviour, even when pro-active preventative measures are implemented by public health. / Ontario Graduate Fellowship, Ontario Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology

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In the absence of Canadian legislation this thesis conducts an exploratory study of the regulations Canadian extraction companies (mining and oil and gas) have implemented to control private security in developing countries. It focuses on discerning what private security policies extraction companies have in place and whether companies have adopted voluntary regulations such as the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights. For this study a survey was conducted of almost all extraction companies listed on the TSX and TSX Venture Exchange. Publically available documents, such as company websites, codes of conduct, annual reports, and corporate presentations, were analyzed to determine what regulations companies have in place. The data indicates that regulation of private security is mainly limited to Canada’s largest extraction companies and that private security is usually a small portion of a company’s overall corporate social responsibility policy. This research also reviews incidents of human rights abuses committed by private security personnel working for Canadian extraction companies over the last ten years. Incidents are drawn from media outlets, NGOs, and academic articles. These cases help illustrate the challenges Canadian companies face employing private security personnel on the ground.

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