Nonprofit organization leaders increasingly encounter social burdens and financial difficulties, jeopardizing ongoing success and organizational sustainability. The purpose of this single-case study was to explore revenue diversification strategies used by 3 leaders of a small nonprofit organization in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States through the conceptual lens of modern portfolio theory. Data were collected via in-depth semistructured interviews, and member checking was used to facilitate accuracy, consistency, and integrity. Methodological triangulation included a document review and analysis of financial statements, tax returns, strategy objectives, the organizational website, social media, and nonprofit data reports. Data from documents and interviews were manually coded, and themes were identified using thematic analysis. Six themes emerged related to process strengths and opportunities for improvement including capitalizing on a mission-driven workforce; using a systematic strategic planning process; building relationships with partners, suppliers, and collaborators; integrating performance measures to areas of importance; and developing and implanting systematic methods to assess customer satisfaction and workforce engagement. The findings from this study might contribute to positive social change by providing revenue diversification strategies and the supporting processes that leaders of small nonprofit organizations can use to enhance existing services, expand community programs, and create ongoing organizational success.

Many financial leaders lack strategies to make the timely fiscal reporting needed for business to obtain profitability, competitive advantage, and sustainability. The purpose of this single case study was to explore successful strategies used to complete efficient closing cycles to evaluate performance and support business decisions. The conceptual framework for this study was process improvement and the theory of constraints. Data were collected from semistructured interviews with 5 purposively selected leaders; data were supplemented with information from the organization's website and print materials. Financial leaders who had developed successful strategies to complete timely financial statements were selected to participate in the study from a U.S. healthcare organization. Data were analyzed using Yin's 5-step approach, which included examining, categorizing, tabulating, creating a data display, and testing the data. Transcript review validated that emerging themes were in alignment with participant experiences. Four major themes emerged from data analysis: provide training and professional development, promote teamwork, engage in effective communication, and use information technology. Social change implications include potential process improvement in hospitals that could provide insight into specific system processes that contribute to the rising cost of global healthcare. Financial leaders achieving increased profitability through process improvement could enable administrators to make financial contributions to their communities, expand to new markets, and create new employment opportunities.

Investing in employee engagement is beneficial to ensuring an organization's ability to sustain and improve productivity and performance. The purpose of this single case study was to explore effective leadership strategies leaders used to increase employee productivity. The population for this study were 6 bank leaders from Mississippi with a minimum of 5 years of experience implementing effective strategies to increase employee productivity. The conceptual framework for this study was Bass's transformational leadership theory. Data were collected using semistructured interviews, observations, and a review of company documents. The data analysis process involved Yin's 5-step approach, methodological triangulation, and member checking to identify common patterns, develop themes, and verify data for accuracy. The 4 emergent themes in the study were lead by example, encourage, promote teamwork, and implement rewards. The findings indicated that bank leaders improved employee productivity using transformational leadership by maintaining active employee engagement, communicating clear goals, and building positive leader-employee relationships. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential for leaders in the banking industry to improve employee engagement, which may lead to a higher level of employee performance and commitment, reduced turnover, and enhanced organizational profitability. Organizations that are profitable can help stimulate the local economy by contributing earned profits to the community in areas such as schools, housing development, and community centers.

Healthcare administrators have regarded employee motivation and performance as significant factors because of the challenges with employee disengagement, which may decrease patient satisfaction and profitability for healthcare organizations. The number of available jobs within healthcare continues to increase at a high rate, while the total hires within the healthcare industry decreased from 2.9% in December 2014 to 2.7% in January 2015. Motivation in the workplace is a continuous concern for organizational leaders, more specifically for the health care industry. Based on Vroom's expectancy theory, the purpose of this single-case study was to explore the motivational strategies healthcare organizations' leaders could implement to improve the performance of entry-level medical service employees. Data collection consisted of direct observation and semistructured interviews of 4 leaders and 22 entry-level medical service employees at a health care organization in the Piedmont Region of North Carolina. Data analysis included the use of multiple sources of data collection, along with the use of member checking with interview transcripts, which allowed triangulation and verification of the themes derived from the interview data. The 2 main themes revealed were workplace motivation and organizational leadership, which affects employees' performance and organizational effectiveness. Business leaders in organizations may use the findings of this study to increase employee organizational commitment, which could improve the U.S. health care industry turnover rates. Social change implications include the importance of the need for leaders to develop effective motivational strategies for motivating employees.

Thesis (MBA) --University of Limpopo, 2010 / Small, Medium and Micro-Enterprises (SMMEs) as vehicles of growth, innovation and social transformation, are important categories of businesses which must be nurtured and harnessed by the South African authorities. This should enable them to quickly and effectively adapt to the challenges of globalization thereby benefiting the economy. The importance of SMMEs to the South African economy has already been acknowledged by government. Despite the growth in venture capital funding, access to funding remains a problem for small enterprises, in particular for empowerment groups in South Africa. In most surveys among small enterprises, the provision of concessionary finance comes out as one of the most urgently felt needs. Indeed extensive research reveals that access financing is one of the several important factors that are critical for business survival and growth while other factors are market access and lack of financial management skills. South Africa’s financial sectors have always been reluctant to provide comprehensive services for the fragmented, risk-prone and geographically dispersed small enterprises sector. Evidence of management skills and business knowledge are indications of how well an entrepreneur can perform important tasks and activities related to the eight functions of a business, which are: general management, operations, finance, purchasing, human resources,marketing, administration and external relations. One of the major hurdles that face entrepreneurial endeavours is the shortage of financial management skills. South Africa shows a grim picture of the skills gap. SMMEs become the hardest hit as the entire commerce sector forages for the scarcest skills. Small enterprises have been victims of instances of developing their employees only to lose them to bigger firms offering more lucrative incentives and currently SMMEs in South Africa’s expanding construction sector are losing the fight in the battle for scarce skills. Although government has tried to put in place policies and institutions with the aim of improving the accessing of finance by small business owners, their success has been minimal. It is, therefore, imperative that management capability and financial management acumen be regarded as key to accessing funding by the entrepreneurs themselves, and the parties involved in supporting and promoting them. It is important to bear in mind that training in entrepreneurial skills without training in business skills will not ensure optimal results. A combination of training to develop entrepreneurial skills and business training is most effective in preparing and developing successful entrepreneurs. Therefore, this study is an assessment on access to financial management services by SMMEs in Thohoyandou Business Centre, as funding has a bearing on the economic development and sustainability of SMMEs. The research wanted to establish if the SMMEs in Thohoyandou Business Centre had access to financial management services support and, if they have, are the SMMEs ready to receive these financial management services? The study revealed that the SMMEs do not possess financial management skills neither do they have access to financial management services although most of them acknowledged that there is a need for these skills for the success of their businesses. The lack of requisite bookkeeping and financial management skills results in most financial institutions being unwilling to provide funds to this sector, resulting in entrepreneurs relying on their own sources of finance which are limited as shown in the study. Management capability strengthens the financial capacity of SMMEs. Financial institutions are prone to be favourably biased towards SMMEs who can demonstrate eloquence in areas such as financial management (including basic bookkeeping), marketing and technology upgrading. It is recommended that government and other facilitators incorporate simplified components into their training packages to cover such areas as bookkeeping and compilation of business plans

Thesis (MPA) --University of Limpopo, 2005 / This research has attempted to investigate whether there were proper financial controls at Bankuna High School of the Ritavi Circuit in the Tzaneen Area of the Limpopo Province of the Republic of South Africa. The researcher has, after an extensive evaluation of data arrived at some conclusions and he had made a few recommendations. The researcher is of the belief that the results of this research can be applied in most former historically disadvantaged African schools. Also this study can help Provincial Departments of Education in their future training on Financial Management for poor African schools.

In this dissertation, I focus my research on some of the economically significant and current open problems in international finance, specifically the relationship between Credit Default Swaps (CDS) on sovereign debt, the importance of fundamental dyadic distances on the initiation and completion of cross-border mergers and acquisitions, and the impact of domestic and transnational terrorism on cross-border mergers and acquisitions. In the first essay, we study the relationship between sovereign debt ratings and the information contained in CDS spreads regarding the credit risk of the reference entity. Using data for 54 countries over a twelve-year period, we find that the variation in average sovereign ratings in a given year can be explained by average CDS spreads over the previous three years. In a horse race between CDS spreads and sovereign ratings, we find that CDS spread changes can predict sovereign events while rating changes cannot. In the second essay, we study how dyadic distance influences the initiation, completion, and duration of cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Using a sample of 173,616 cross-border deals announced between 1970 and 2016, we find evidence that cross-country cultural, institutional, geographical, religious, and language differences, all play a deciding role in the initiation of mergers and acquisitions. The completion of acquisitions is independent of cultural factors, but largely depends on differences in economy size, language, religion, and bureaucracy of the acquiring and target countries. Finally, the duration of deals is influenced by idiosyncratic factors only. In the third essay, we study whether incidents of domestic and transnational terrorism impact the propensity of firms to acquire cross-border firms. We adopt a theoretical model to show that high levels of terrorism in the target countries are associated with lower cross-border acquisition flows. Empirically, we exploit the exogenous variation induced by differences in genetic diversity, ethnic fractionalization, and religious fractionalization between acquirer and target countries. Our results show that an target from a country with lower terrorist incidents than the acquirer country are associated with more cross-border mergers and acquisitions.

The literature on short selling documents substantial evidence that short sellers are generally informed investors (e.g., Diamond and Verrecchia, 1987; Asquith and Muelbrook, 1996). This dissertation investigates three specific implications of informed short selling for a firm and its investors. The first essay investigates if short selling discourages managers from pursuing over-optimistic projects by reducing equity market timing. By conditioning short selling on firm overvaluation, this essay shows that short selling reduces managerial equity market timing and increases leverage. This moderating impact of short selling is more pronounced in smaller firms and those with low institutional ownership or higher intangible assets. Furthermore, the results show that board independence facilitates the above effect of short selling which helps protect shareholder interests. The second essay investigates if board independence reduces informed short selling prior to earnings announcements. This essay estimates short sellers’ correct prediction of the direction of unexpected quarterly earnings through Logistic regression and finds that short sellers’ correct prediction decreases in firms with independent boards relative to firms with non-independent boards. Furthermore, this effect is more pronounced in firms with CEO duality and large board size. The quasi-natural experiment using the exogenous shock to board independence from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, provides further support to our hypotheses. The third essay provides Sell recommendations by examining pre-announcement short selling of firms ahead of their earnings announcements. The methodology makes Sell recommendations for firms with the highest short position prior to their quarterly earnings announcement. The post-announcement raw, excess, and abnormal returns of firms having the Sell recommendations are statistically and economically significant for multiple-holding periods showing the methodology’s significant trading strategy implication. This dissertation significantly contributes to short selling, governance, capital structure, and investment literature.

Bakgrund: Hållbarhetsaspekterna har blivit allt mer omdiskuterade i dagens samhälle. Därför är det viktigt för företag att visa sitt engagemang i dessa frågor. Användningen av ekonomistyrning möjliggör att verksamheter mer framgångsrikt uppnår hållbara mål. Tidigare studier har däremot visat att det finns en brist på mätsystem och praktiska exempel av verksamheters användning av ekonomistyrning för att uppnå hållbara mål. Syftet: Syftet med studien är att öka förståelse för hur ekonomistyrning används för att kunna identifiera utmaningar för kommunala bolag vid ekonomistyrning för att uppnå hållbara mål. Metod: Denna kvalitativa studie utgår från det hermeneutistiskt tolkningsperspektiv med en abduktiv ansats. En fallstudie har genomförts på Hyresbostäder i Norrköping AB genom dokumentstudier och semistrukturerade intervjuer. Slutsats: Studien visar att direktiven från Norrköpings kommun är otydliga och misslyckas att förklara hur, varför och vem som ska uppnå målen. En utmaning för Hyresbostäder är att bidra till allmännytta och agera på affärsmässig grund, vilket kan leda till motsägelsefulla målsättningar. Det finns även begränsade resurser och en intressekonflikt som leder till en obalans mellan hållbarhetsaspekterna. / Background: Sustainability aspects have become increasingly debated in today's society, so it is also important for companies to show their commitment to these issues. The use of financial management enables businesses to more successfully achieve sustainable goals. Previous studies have, however, shown that there is a lack of measurement systems and practical examples of municipal companies use of financial control to achieve sustainable goals. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to increase understanding of how financial control is used to identify challenges for municipal companies in financial control to achieve sustainability goals. Method: This qualitative study is based on a hermeneutical perspective with an abductive approach. A case study has been carried out at Hyresbostäder in Norrköping AB through document studies and semi-structured interviews. Conclusion: The study shows that the directives from the municipality of Norrköping are unclear and fail to explain how, why and who should achieve the goals. A challenge for Hyresbostäder is to contribute to public benefit and act on a commercial basis, which can lead to contradictory objectives. There is as well limited resources and a conflict of interest that leads to an imbalance between the sustainability aspects.

Extensive research exists regarding invasive alien plant species including impacts to native ecosystems and efficacy of control methods on public lands and river corridors. Many studies have identified the need for more research regarding the social implications of invasive alien species management. More specifically, additional research is needed regarding the impacts of invasive alien plant management on the Colorado Plateau to river-based recreation experiences. It is important for public land management agencies like the National Park Service to understand recreation-based stakeholders’ knowledge, norms, and preferences toward managing prevalent alien plants like tamarisk. For this study, 330 river users were questioned about their knowledge of tamarisk and preferences for tamarisk management on the Green and Colorado River corridors of the Colorado Plateau. Results show that a majority of river users want tamarisk to be removed. The tamarisk control methods investigated in this thesis were also evaluated by respondents as acceptable. The methods evaluated to be the most acceptable were the cut-stump method and the use of tamarisk leaf beetle, while prescribed fire and the use of a machine to mulch tamarisk were found to be less acceptable. The use of chainsaws to perform the cut-stump method was found to be acceptable in both the Green and Colorado River corridors. This thesis concludes with a summary of findings and implications for land managers and future research.