Although Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are potential value-creation opportunities, why they tend to occur in waves is a mystery to scholars and managers alike. Most models of M&A waves are unilevel, reductionist, and Gaussian, whereas wave patterns are arguably multi-level, emergent, and non-normally distributed. Using complexity theory, I interpret waves as emergent expressions of a self-organized critical ecology of firms conceptualized as a complex adaptive system. My observation that aggregate U.S. M&A waves from 1895 to 2008 are power-law-distributed lends support. The view that waves are self-organized critical phenomena, similar to earthquakes and avalanches, facilitates integration of prior wave theories. I then employ process-tracing to generate a historical narrative of the Great Merger Wave of 1898-1903, from which I obtain a robust process for waves consistent with a CAS interpretation of these phenomena: (1) a privatizing, market-expanding and financially innovating transportation network generates (2a) laissez-faire regulation, (2b) economic competition, and (2c) financial arbitrage, leading to (3) a burst of consolidation. My process explanation explains the power laws emergence, and may help to understand better the process dynamics of M&A waves.

How does a leading firm sustain its competence-based advantage in a competitive landscape against threats of imitation and substitution? In high-velocity competitive markets, an inherent tension arises when firms wish to prolong the value of their technological competencies, while rivals seek to make those competencies obsolete. These markets are characterized by continuous technological change, fickle customers, and frequent shifts in the competitive landscape. Firms must continually update their innovative competencies that are recurrently targets of imitation and substitution, and managers face challenges in discerning the appropriate competencies their firms should commit to and which they should avoid, resulting in the difficulty of setting straightforward strategic goals for the firm. Looking in the hard disk drive industry from 1987 to 1999, I empirically show that leading firms knowledge disclosure of core technologies has a positive effect on the probability of laggards imitating the leader. Moreover, I show that after leading firms disclose, they introduce next-generation products sooner and prevent laggards from quickly introducing their next-generation products. Thus, I suggest that a leading firms knowledge disclosing activities can shape the competitive landscape by influencing rivals scope of search for innovation opportunities. Namely, leading firms can prolong their established competencies by disclosing knowledge on their innovations by promoting imitation and delaying or preventing substitution.

This dissertation comprises two essays on earnings forecasting accuracy. Chapter 2 focuses on how management forecasting accuracy is affected by managers behavioral biases over time and Chapter 3 addresses how analyst portfolio design choices affect cross-sectional differences in analyst forecasting accuracy. In particular, Chapter 2 examines how CEOs overconfidence and their exhibited self-serving attribution biases affect how they adjust their future earnings forecasts when they receive feedback concerning their prior forecasts. I find that overconfident CEOs respond to feedback by improving their future forecasting accuracy, but they do so more slowly than their less confident peers. I also find that overconfident CEOs learn to improve their future forecasting accuracy only when feedback is less ambiguous in the form of forecasting errors. In contrast, managers who are less confident respond to both less ambiguous forecasting errors and more ambiguous market feedback concerning their prior forecasts. Chapter 3 examines analysts supply chain coverage portfolio design and their forecasting accuracy. I define the relation between a firm and one of the firms major customer firms as a supply chain relation. Further, I define an analyst who issues forecasts for both the firm and one or more of the firms major customers in the same year as a supply chain analyst. I classify all firms followed by the supply chain analyst into one of the three categories in a given year: focal firms, i.e., firms for which the analyst also covers one or more of the firms major customers, major customers of a focal firm for the analyst, and other firms which include all remaining firms in the analysts portfolio. I find that analysts who follow both a focal firm and one or more of the firms major customers issue significantly more accurate earnings forecasts for both the focal firm and the firms major customers than the same analysts issue for other firms in the analyst portfolio. I also find that these analysts are more accurate in their forecasts for the focal firm and the firms major customers than other non-supply chain analysts following the same firm, but not the firms supply chain. I show that the superior forecasting accuracy for supply chain analysts for both the focal firm and the firms major customers is achieved at the cost of reduced forecasting accuracy for other firms in the analyst portfolio. In explaining the relative importance of forecasting accuracy for the firms in the analyst portfolio, I find that focal firms and the firms major customers are more likely to generate more profitable trading commissions and operate in an industry segment that has a greater number of other peer firms than other firms in the same analyst portfolio. This evidence is consistent with earlier studies and suggests when analysts have stronger incentives to generate trading commissions from the stock of a firm, the analysts are more likely to spend effort to acquire more precise information about the firm (Hayes, 1998). When covering the firms supply chains helps analysts produce more precise information about the firm, analyst forecasting accuracy improves accordingly.

My dissertation consists of two essays that focus on the construct of work calling. In Essay 1, I investigate the construct of calling specifically, focusing on the moderating role of context. Researchers have struggled to define the nature of calling and have proposed different conceptualizations of calling, ranging from a religious and transcendental view to a more secular integrative view. In my essay, I review the extant literature by comparing and contrasting different conceptualizations of calling. Empirically, two primary research questions are addressed: (1) How does calling influence the following three categories of outcomes: work attitudes, emotional exhaustion and task performance? (2) How does task and social context moderate the relationship between calling and its outcomes? Data for this study was collected from 268 teachers and aides from 68 child care centers. Results indicate that individuals with stronger calling have positive work attitudes. In addition, results support the moderating role of discrete organizational context features. In Essay 2, I contribute to the extant theory on calling by examining the affective link between calling and two forms of emotional labor, surface acting and deep acting. Specifically, I examine the role of emotional labor in mediating the relationship between calling and its outcomes. Data for this study was collected from 195 teachers and aides from 42 child care centers. Findings indicate that calling is positively related with emotional performance and negatively related with emotional exhaustion. Further, results show that calling is positively associated with emotional labor, and in particular, is positively related to deep acting and negatively related to surface acting. Further, both surface acting and deep acting mediate the relationship between calling and its outcomes.

My dissertation consists of three essays on the dark side of teams. My first essay presents a model of social capitals influence on team member conformity and deviance. First, I propose that social capital within a team facilitates the creation of team mental models. Second, I propose that the saliency of team mental models, due to the strength of an organizations culture, the level of bureaucracy within an organization, and the level of justice from an organization, influences team members to conform to or deviate from team norms and larger normative standards (e.g. organizational norms). Lastly, I propose that conformity (deviance) increases, maintains, or decreases social capital across organizational levels. Using 209 team members representing 51 teams in 13 organizations, my second essay helps explain the positive associations found in prior research between the level of deviance within a group and the level of deviance of individual group members. I find that individual expectations of deviant team member behavior partially mediate this relationship, while shared expectations of deviant team member behavior within a team partially mediate the relationship between the level of deviance within a team and individual expectations of deviant team member behavior. I also find that one dimension of social capital positively moderates the relationship between shared expectations and individual expectations. Using a sample of 1,708 team members in 292 team-based establishments, my third essay examines the relationship between team member stress, and team autonomy in the form of team decision making, team leader appointment, and team responsibility. I also examine the relationship between stress, and intrateam interdependence in the form of team member interdependency and team-based job rotation. I further examine whether the relationships between team design and stress are mediated by team member job demands and job control. I find that an increase in job demands indirectly mediates the positive relationships between team decision making and team responsibility, and stress. I also find that a decrease in job demands indirectly mediates the negative relationship between team-based job rotation and stress.

Previous research has highlighted the importance of trust in enabling the purchase of goods/services through the Internet. However, other researchers have theorized and shown that distrust, a distinct construct that is related to trust, should also be considered when studying trust (Duestch 1960, Luhman 1979, Gurtman 1992, Sitkin & Roth 1993, Lewicki et al. 1998). Because trust has been cited to be critical for e-commerce, it stands to reason that its related, yet negative counterpart, distrust should be at least as important and potentially more critical in some contexts. It is important to determine what antecedent conditions may increase the amount of distrust felt by the individual, and how these conditions can be mitigated. This dissertation proposes an experiment to test two research questions. First, this study explores novel antecedents of distrusting beliefs that go beyond the disposition to distrust, which has been the main focus of distrust research in IS. Second, building on the ambivalence work by Cacioppo & Berntson (1994) and Priester & Petty (1996), this study proposes that as a negative attitude towards action, distrust may interact and negate intentions when the buyer also feels similar levels of trust, as a positive attitude. Finally, the research methodology and analysis are outlined along with potential contributions for this study.

This dissertation consists of two essays investigating the labor market for CEOs who have developed a reputation for being a turnaround specialist. Turnaround specialists are managers who have developed reputations for having skills and experience in reversing the fortunes of financially distressed and underperforming firms. In the first essay I examine the economic consequences for firms that hire CEOs who, prior to being hired, have acquired a reputation for being a turnaround specialist. Abnormal returns around announcements that turnaround specialists have been hired as CEOs are significantly positive and more than 6 percentage points larger than the returns associated with announcements of other CEO successions. Significant differences exist in the attributes of firms that hire turnaround specialists as CEOs versus firms that hire others as CEOs in ways consistent with several hypotheses that I develop. Specifically, firms that hire turnaround specialists face a higher probability of distress, lower profit rates, and lower pre-succession stock returns than firms that hire others as CEOs. Firms that hire turnaround specialists reduce operating scale and show significant improvement in operating performance on average, indicating that the turnaround specialists reputation is commensurate with their abilities and managerial style. In the second essay I examine the initial compensation contracts of turnaround specialist CEOs. After controlling for other factors that are associated with managerial compensation, I find that turnaround specialist CEOs earn significantly more total compensation than other newly appointed outside CEOs. Additionally, turnaround specialist compensation is more sensitive to firm performance than that of other newly appointed CEOs, contrary to the notion that career concerns of managers would serve as substitutes for explicit incentive contracts. Turnaround specialists receive a lower proportion of fixed cash compensation and a higher proportion of equity-based incentives than other CEOs, which is consistent with theories that predict incentive compensation comes at a lower cost to successful managers and has higher benefits for firms operating in distress.

Individuals have more opportunities than ever before to present themselves in public using social networking sites (SNSs). These sites allow users to make self-presentations by creating online profiles, containing text, photos, or videos, about themselves and their activities. While individual users generate these presentations, millions of individuals can potentially access them over many years. From the perspective of organizations developing these SNSs, the more people, the broader range of people, and the greater interaction among the people that use them, the more sustainable it is. However, individuals tend to live segmented lives and often develop different self-presentations depending on the audience. Maintaining one or multiple presentations is possible offline as long as the audiences are separate and little opportunity for interaction exists. Online, tension can form between boundary-blurring expansion and boundary-preserving development of SNSs. This dissertation seeks to develop better understanding of how boundaries blurred by SNSs affect impressions formed of job candidates. To examine the issue, two studies were conducted, one exploratory qualitative and one experimental. The first study investigates whether, how, and why SNSs are accessed to obtain information about candidates. The second study develops and tests a model of how characteristics of the SNS environment affect impression formation and subsequent hiring decisions. Both studies found that SNSs can have both benefits and detriments for the job candidate by influencing the impression formed by a professional.

Brand partnerships are increasingly common as the cost of developing new products and brands is expensive in terms of both monetary outcomes and potential negative spillover effects to existing brand and products in a firms portfolio. This dissertation explores how the risk associated with such brand partnerships can be reduced. In the following three essays brand partnerships in the form of brand acquisitions and co-brand arrangements are explored. Essay 1 focuses on brands joining together through brand acquisitions and the impact on firm value in terms of cumulative abnormal stock returns is used as the outcome variable of interest. In both Essay 2 and 3 co-brand arrangements are explored and the impact on consumer recall and evaluation is the outcome of interest. In all cases, managerial insights are provided to help improve the decision making process of forming such a partnership.

The wide spread usage of Internet has shaped the era of digital economy. US. Department of Commerce has proposed a framework of digital economy, which illustrated the upcoming of Internet has led to e-Commerce and enterprise organization change, and has created significant impact on the society. In October, 1999 US Census Bureau proposed the definition of digital economy and related major concepts, including e-Business infrastructure, e-Business, e-Commerce, and computer-mediated networks. These four constructs were employed to define and evaluate digital economy. Among other importment constructs, e-Business will play an important role in the digital economy. Many countries are eager to learn about e-Business and its impact, but the measurement of e-Business is still in the stage of infancy. What is currently available is mainly focused on evaluation related to e-Commerce and computer-mediated network. Reaearch survey is targeted on retail behavior over Internet, inshort of evaluation in which enterprise is the major objective. Based on the literature survey, this research addressed two differend aspects such as country and enterprise, and established evaluation framework for readiness of the country and e-Business of the enterprise respectively. The case research methodology was employed government and enterprise of Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Mainland China, and Maylaysia were selected as the research target. The purpose is to evaluate the impact of e-Business on the enterprise in Asian Pacific region. The main conclusion derived from the case analysis are stated as follows: 1. In addition to the implementation of information technology, the important e-Business object should be the creation of e-Business model to escalate the competive advantage of the enterprise. 2. In addition to the building of IT infrastructure and sounding business environment, the government should actively provide help for SME in order to upgrade the competitiveness of the whole country. The results of this reaearch can provide reference for understanding the impact of e-Business, which might help government and enterprise to cope with the change brought by e-Business.