The purpose of this study was to explore how employees' reflect organizational identification strategies in their everyday talk at a big-box retailer. Previous studies on organizational identification have mostly been organization-centric, focusing on the strategies organizations employ to induce employee identification. This study fills this gap by exploring the employee side of the identification process. Using ethnographic methods, the researcher conducted complete participant observation and textual analysis to understand how employees reflect, mock, and/or rebel against the organization's identification strategies in their narratives and rites. This study used a three phase approach to gain a deeper understanding of how employees used everyday discourse to reflect their connection with an organization. In Phase I, complete participant observation and informant interviews were conducted during the 2011-2012 holiday season at a big-box retailer, Big Alpha. Data were coded using thematic analysis. The second phase consisted of textually analyzing organizational artifacts to determine how Big Alpha employed organizational identification strategies. In the last phase, participant observation and informant interview data were compared to the strategies found in Phase II to determine what identification strategies employees reflected in their everyday talk. Findings indicate that employees enact specific identification strategies that reflect identification and disidentification. Additionally, employees utilized the tactic of espoused shared values, indicating their identification with their work group more than with Big Alpha. This study extends organizational identification theory by revealing specific five new tactics and one new strategy that employees use that connect them or disconnect them from the organization. This study also extends research on temporary workers as findings indicated that seasonal, part-time, and college student workers may not perceive themselves as having "real jobs." Finally, this study found that there may be a worker class system that influences the extent to which employees may or may not identify with the organization. These findings suggest practical implications and areas of future research.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The investigatory findings of the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia accident investigation boards are analyzed and evaluated relative to one another, with the goal of determining if there are lessons applicable to organizations that manage technically complex programs. An analysis is conducted of the recommendations from the Challenger investigation and NASA's actions taken to correct problems in the organization. The effectiveness of both the recommendations and NASA's response in terms of preventing the Columbia accident are examined. In the intervening years between the Challenger and Columbia several unofficial analyses of the Challenger accident and investigation have been published. The findings of these independent works are presented in order to determine any relationship to the Columbia accident and the subsequent Columbia investigation. The investigation of the Columbia accident and Challenger accident are compared to determine if any of the investigatory findings indicate that there were common factors in the accidents. An evaluation of the NASA organizational structure and culture is conducted. The impact of the culture on implementing the changes recommended after Challenger and relationship to the Columbia accident and investigation is examined. These analyses and examinations result in several conclusions and recommendations applicable to organizations that manage technically complex programs.

This qualitative case study was designed to explore how mentors in a formal mentoring program perceive their experience. The study is based upon the following assumptions: (1) mentors have experienced challenges; (2) mentors have had positive experiences in a mentoring dyad; (3) mentors will share their experiences; (4) the organization evaluates mentoring efforts by analyzing the mentees’ outcomes only; and (5) the organization offers support to the mentor. The site for the study was a global retailer located in New York, New York that had a formal mentoring program. The primary sources of data were: in-depth interviews with 19 former mentors, a focus group, and a document review. Mezirow (1990) proposed a process that one undergoes in a transformative learning event. In his model, individuals must have a dialogue with trusted others for support as they examine their prior roles. Therefore, it can be assumed that having a mentor could be instrumental in one’s transformative learning experience (Brookfield, 1987). Daloz (2000) proposed that for a transformative learning event to occur, there must be “the presence of the other, reflective discourse, a mentoring community, and opportunities for committed action” (p. 112). These concepts provided a construct for analysis and synthesis of the research findings. Although this study sought to examine how mentors perceived their role, a key finding revealed that participants were motivated by the desire to gain visibility. This impetus shaped their experience greatly. Further, the findings identified three categories of mentors: (1) those who accepted the role to appease management and possessed no desire to be a mentor, hence termed the Disgruntled: (2) those who were invested to the organization and had a desire to help others, and thus are Believers; and (3) those that were invested in the relationship, but had personal agendas for being in the role, called the Politicos. The primary recommendation from this study is that human resources need to be thoughtful in how they structure and monitor the mentoring dyad. This includes allowing participation in the program to be voluntary, providing training, and checking in with each member throughout the duration of the engagement.

Employee turnover continues to be discussed as an outcome in Human Resources (HR), but comparatively few studies have examined the relationship between turnover as the independent variable and institutional outcomes. Although the call to HR practitioners has often been made over the past 20 years regarding the importance of tying HR programs and measures to institutional goals, there has been limited reporting of such initiatives among higher education institutions, which typically focus on student outcomes equally or more prominently than financial outcomes. While the HR Analytics field has been growing and there is a robust community of academics involved in data analysis of organizations, the field in Higher Education is still in its development stages. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to test whether employee turnover in various iterations can be a statistically significant predictor of (a) student completion rate, and (b) aggregate organizational external research funding. The study also tested whether such measures can be established by strictly using current institutional “legacy” data, as opposed to gathering any data that are not currently collected or available from normal business operations. Reviewing these questions through a theoretical framework of general systems theory and using student data, employee data, and financial data of a single higher education institution, this study was designed for the HR practitioner to review the use of models to predict whether employee turnover statistics are meaningful in explaining operational goals of an organization that are not financial. Six years of data (2006-2011) from a single higher education institution were used in the analysis. The sample subject group comprised students enrolled in various Master’s degree programs across 10 academic departments at the University. The analysis was conducted using ordinary least squares regression and via binomial logistic regression. Other forms of analysis were considered as part of the review. Overall, findings suggested that employee turnover (operationalized as employee instability rate) is statistically significant in models that predict student completion rate. Furthermore, employee turnover is statistically significant in models that predict the University’s external research funding levels (operationalized as indirect cost recovery statistics reported annually).

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop and empirically test a theoretical model of international school headship transitions in order to identify potential sources of unwanted turnover. Anecdotal evidence from the past two decades suggests that the short tenure of international school heads (average = 3.7 years, Benson, 2011) is unwanted by international schools, a result of up to 70% of heads either volunteering to leave their schools prematurely, being fired, or failing to have their contracts renewed. This qualitative multi-case study dissertation analyzes the experiences of twelve second-year international school heads guided by the use of a theoretical framework grounded in the literatures of leadership and governance in international schools, non-profit organizations, U.S. school districts, and charter schools in order to determine the factors that heads identify as affecting their transitions to work and life abroad. Findings from this study suggest that the headship transition process proceeds in three phases, with heads identifying specific factors affecting transition experiences at each respective phase. Organizational recruitment and selection, contract negotiation, and personal motivation affect heads during the acceptance phase, or the period between the job search and formally accepting an offered contract to become a head of school. Work transition supports (realistic job previews), relocation supports (i.e. locating housing and medical care), and work role spillover (i.e. exiting one job while preparing to entry another) impacts heads during the anticipation stage between hire and their first day on the job. Managing board relations, personal/familial satisfaction in living abroad, and unforeseen incidents (i.e. illness or civil strife) affects heads during the adjustment phase in the first year on the job. This dissertation contributes to the limited literature concerning leadership and governance in international schools while extending the more robust education leadership and expatriate adjustment literatures.

Creativity often involves combining existing ideas and knowledge in novel ways. As such, individuals’ access to diverse information and knowledge via social networks has been considered an important determinant of creativity. In this dissertation, I propose another factor to explain why some individuals are more likely than others to generate creative ideas: their ability to bridge disconnected cultural frames inside their organization. I draw on the cultural holes argument (Pachucki & Breiger, 2010) that cultural frames are connected through the persons that employ them (DiMaggio, 1987), and disconnections between cultural frames (i.e., cultural holes) can inhibit the exchange of ideas and knowledge among individuals. Thus, I conceptualize organization’s culture as a cultural network where the nodes represent the cultural frames its members use and the connections between two nodes represent the overlap of their users. I argue that while cultural holes inside an organization can present barriers for the exchange of ideas and information for those that do not share cultural referents, they also create opportunities for generating novel ideas for those that can bridge them. Bridging cultural holes, or cultural brokerage, enables individuals to utilize a wider range of information that is available, and recognize opportunities and combinations of information that others may not be able to see. The heart of this dissertation is this notion that individuals’ position in the cultural network and the patterns of cultural frames they use affect the diversity of information and knowledge they can process and as a result, their ability to generate creative ideas. In Chapters 3 and 4, I test this theory in two very different contexts: (1) an e-commerce company located in South Korea; and (2) two executive MBA groups at a U.S. university. I employ novel methods for measuring individuals’ use of culture and map out the cultural networks as well as the cultural holes inside the organizations. In both studies, controlling for social network brokerage and cultural fit, I find that cultural brokerage leads to the generation of creative ideas. More specifically, individuals who use loosely connected cultural frames were more likely to generate creative ideas compared to those that use cultural frames that are cohesively connected. In Chapter 5, I explore the question of who becomes cultural brokers with data collected from the two studies introduced in Chapters 3 and 4. I find both personal and contextual factors that are associated with cultural brokerage. Overall, these findings provide insight into how individuals’ different use of their organization’s culture affect the diversity of information they can utilize inside the organization and as a result, their ability to generate creative ideas.

What makes an innovator famous? This is the principal question of this dissertation. I examine three potential drivers of the innovators’ fame – their social structure, creativity and identity. My empirical context is the early 20th century abstract artists in 1910-25. The period represents a paradigmatic shift in the history of modern art, the emergence of the abstract art movement. In chapter 2, I operationalize social structure by an innovator’s local peer network. I find that an innovator with structurally and compositionally diverse local network is likely to be more famous than the one with a homogenous local network. I find no statistical evidence for creativity as a link between social structure and fame. Instead, the evidence suggests that an innovator’s creative identity and access to promotional opportunities are the key drivers of her fame. In Chapter 3, I find that the creativity identity resulting from an innovator’s creative trajectory can lead to obscurity despite early fame and acclaim. The drastic change in the nature of a producer’s output can dilute her identity and cost her her niche. In combination with her peer network characteristics, these dynamics can mean obscurity even for talented and prolific innovators. In chapter 4, I undertake a large-scale analysis of the relationship between creativity and fame. Using a novel computational measure for the novelty of the artists’ works, I explore how their creativity and fame evolve over 1905-2000 in five markets. I find no statistical evidence for a positive relationship between creativity and fame; in fact, the statistical evidence is in favor of a negative relationship between creativity and fame through several time periods. The results suggest that creativity (measured by expert or machines) is not a driver of fame. In effect, it further supports the conclusions of chapter 2 and 3.