Melbourne Business School - Theses
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ItemExploring the utilisation of business-to-business corporate hospitality in Australia(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemWorkforce gender diversity : is it a source of competitive advantage?(University of Melbourne, 2009)Research on workforce diversity at the organizational level gained momentum in the 1990s. Alternative forms of the diversity-performance relationship, derived from different theoretical perspectives, have been studied over the past 18 years. However, the results of these studies have been inconsistent. Based on contrasting theories, this research tests competing predictions of the gender diversity-performance relationship at the organizational level. These competing predictions are: a positive linear relationship derived from the resource-based view of the firm, a negative linear relationship derived from self-categorization and social identity theories, and a U-shaped curvilinear relationship derived from the integration of the resource-based view of the firm with self-categorization and social identity theories. Moreover, this research tests the moderating effects of two contextual factors: gender identity-conscious HR structures (few vs. many) and industry type (services vs. manufacturing). The main objectives of testing competing and contingent (moderating effects) gender diversity-performance predictions were to provide insights into the form of the gender diversity-performance relationship and to explain inconsistent results of past diversity research. The predictions were tested in two quantitative studies that adopted a combination of prospective and retrospective longitudinal research designs. Both studies were based on the sample frame of 1855 organizations listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. Study 1 collected data through a survey and from archival data sources, and the study was based on time lags of zero, one and two years between diversity and performance. Study 2 used multiple sources of archival data and was based on time lags of one, two, four and five years between diversity and performance. Both studies also tested reverse causality to provide strong evidence for the gender diversity?performance relationship. The results show partial support for the predicted positive linear relationship and for the proposed moderating effects of HR structures and industry type. The results also demonstrate an unpredicted inverted U-shaped gender diversity-performance relationship. The curvilinear relationship indicates that different proportions of organizational gender diversity have different effects on organizational performance, which may be attributed to different dynamics suggested by the resource-based view and self-categorization and social identity theories. The findings also show that organizations with many gender identity-conscious HR structures and organizations from the services industry benefit most from organizational gender diversity. The research contributes to the field of workforce diversity in several ways. First, it provides a clearer understanding of the form of the gender diversity-performance relationship by testing three competing gender diversity-performance predictions. The results also help explain the inconsistent findings of past research that focused on the linear gender diversity-performance relationship. Second, because of its longitudinal design, this research provides stronger evidence for a causal relationship between gender diversity and performance than past research. Third, the test of the moderating effect of gender-identity conscious HR structures helps practitioners to understand the type of HR structures that best aligns with gender diversity. Similarly, the test of the moderating effect of industry type helps practitioners to better manage diversity in the services and manufacturing industries.
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ItemEssays on structural transformation of Australia's economy( 2021)Structural transformation is a dynamic long-run process of resource reallocation within an economy, resulting in changes to industry shares of total employment. This thesis develops general equilibrium and dynamic economic and econometric models to identify and quantitatively assess the relative importance of factors underlying structural transformation in Australia between 1960 and 2018. These factors include non homothetic preferences (demand side) and relative industry technology changes (supply-side). The first general equilibrium model is of a small open economy with four industries: agriculture, mining, services, and an aggregation of manufacturing and construction. Three underlying factors drive structural transformation: a demand-side factor through non homothetic preferences, a supply side factor through relative industry technology changes, and world-determined output price changes. Comparative static analysis and model simulations reveal that for the services industry and the manufacturing/construction industry, non homotheticity of preferences is the dominant factor for explaining structural transformation. For agriculture and mining, the most influential factor underlying structural transformation is output price changes on world markets. The second general equilibrium model builds on the first by introducing dynamics through capital investment and international borrowing and lending. There are two sectors: a traded goods sector and a non traded services sector. Equilibrium is characterised through a social planner solution. Model simulations suggest both demand side and supply side factors are important in determining structural transformation in Australia, with the demand-side factor relatively more influential. The thesis then considers more atheoretical models based on recent approaches to dynamic stochastic econometrics. The econometric analysis covers five industries: agriculture, construction, mining, manufacturing, and services. For each industry, a vector error correction model is estimated, consisting of the industry share of total employment, industry relative prices (supply-side factor), and aggregate real household consumption per capita (the demand side factor). A structural vector error correction model is also identified, specified, and estimated. The results suggest that supply-side shocks are important for explaining the movement of the services industry’s share of total employment, which contrasts with the findings of the general equilibrium modelling where the demand-side factor dominates. Demand-side shocks are likewise the dominant factor for agriculture and mining, while nominal shocks (transitory deviations of relative hours from their long run level) are dominant for construction and manufacturing. The COVID-19 pandemic may have a long-lasting impact on industry shares of total employment. A scenario analysis based on the VECM model suggests a third COVID 19 wave would result in a positive long run effect on agriculture’s share of total employment, a negative effect on mining, and no significant long-run effects on the remaining industries. A second scenario of a vaccine-led recovery in 2021 followed by the emergence of a vaccine-resistant strain in 2022, shows a pronounced negative impact on the construction industry’s share of total employment in both the short and long-run. Agriculture and services also experience negative effects in the immediate term while the mining and manufacturing industry shares of total employment fall over the long-run.
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ItemEvaluation bias and backlash: how unconscious gender bias hurts women's career progress and two interventions to improve outcomes( 2019)In this thesis I investigate the impacts of unconscious gender bias on women in the workplace from the pespective of two types of bias: evaluation bias and backlash. I define evaluation bias as cases in which women are evaluated less favourably than men due to their gender. Similar to this, backlash is when women who behave in counter-stereotypical ways are evaluated less favourably, especially in terms of how likeable they are and how likely they are to be hired (Rudman & Phelan, 2008). In order to best understand the current state of the literature and calculate an estimate for the overall effect of bias, a meta-analysis was conducted for these two biases. This meta-analysis sampled a total of 151 papers which contributed a total of 203 studies or 822 independent effect sizes and an overall sample size of 86,661. Across all studies a small but robust effect of bias was found (g =-.10 [95%CI -.15, -.04]). A multilevel meta-regression was conducted in order to identify moderators that contributed to larger effects of bias. Larger effects of bias were found when the evaluator was male; when the work context was male or gender neutral; if the counter-stereotypical behaviour of the target was dominant or aggressive; and if the target was being evaluated on dimensions of likeability, their likelihood of future career success, or how hireable they were. Notably the year of publication had no effect on the measure of bias, which shows that across all papers sampled in this analysis from 1970 to 2014, bias has not varied. Results from the meta-analysis were used to inform two subsequent intervention studies, which focused on a method to ameliorate the impact of bias that could be enacted from either the supply-side (the job candidate) or the demand-side (the evaluator). These interventions were designed to focus the evaluator’s attention on the match between the job candidate and the role that they were interviewing for. When manipulated from the supply-side this match was made salient by the candidate using exact terms and phrasing taken from the key criteria in the job advertisement; from the demand-side a structured note-taking based around the key criteria was used. Results shows that the supply-side manipulation was successful in increasing the likability and leader desirability of the female candidate compared to the male candidate. Conditional process modelling showed that the manipulation increased perceived communality of the female target, which lead to better outcomes in terms of likeability, leader desirability, hireability, and future career success. The intervention for the demand-side was not successful, however it contributed insights into why demand-side intervention takeup rates in organisations is low.
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ItemRules bound: how institutional effects diffuse through and bind the market relations between firms( 2018)Institutions, in the sense of durable systems of behavioural rules, norms and beliefs, are generally limited in their scope. Collective rules and norms are developed for specific behaviours and enforced within delimited social domains. This dissertation examines how, in shaping the behaviour of firms, the effects of institutions diffuse from their original contexts to outside domains. It explores how firms’ market relations may serve as a conduit for this diffusion. Chapter One provides a context to, and overview of, the entire dissertation. A conceptual framework is introduced that distinguishes between four kinds of institutional effects on firm behaviour. Collective rules and norms can have direct effects, in promoting the adoption of behaviours in relation to which those rules and norms have developed. Institutions can also have diffuse effects, as when actors observe and react to how rules and norms are enforced on others. These direct and diffuse effects of institutions can unfold inside the domains in which they are established and enforced. Alternatively, the effects of an institution may be extra-jurisdictional, impinging on actors who are far from the institution’s original domain. A theoretical account of those effects that are at once diffuse and extra-jurisdictional is identified as a central contribution of this dissertation. Chapter Two presents the first of two empirical studies, entitled ‘Rules That Bound: How External Regulation and Partner Dependence Combine to Drive Practice Adoption.’ The study features a quantitative analysis of how regulation—explicit rules, administrative guidelines and laws (Scott, 1995)—affects the adoption of practices by the suppliers to a regulated industry. A novel dataset is utilised which tracks the adoption of green building design practices by a panel of 226 architecture studios in Australia from 2008-2015. In line with my theoretical predictions, I find that firms are influenced by regulations from jurisdictions where they do not operate but where their prospective clients do. In their responses to extra-jurisdictional regulation, firms are shown to vary to an extent that depends on a firm’s power relative to that of its clients. Chapter Three, entitled ‘Rules That Bind: The Observance of Norms in Early Stage Interorganisational Relations,’ explores how social norms—implicit behavioural rules which specify what is valued and what ought to be done (Scott, 1995)—function to draw firms into productive relations. This study involves a qualitative analysis of 22 early stage relationships between Australian design service firms and their clients. Using inductive multiple-case analysis, I identify a system of norms that influence the tendency of client firms to act cooperatively in new relations. Clients providing unilateral and weakly contingent benefits to their suppliers is found to have a positive effect on relationship development. I propose that this effect is mediated by a firm’s judgment of its client’s ‘character’ (i.e. the client’s underlying behavioural tendencies and values). In addition, this study suggests a previously unidentified contingency in the social judgment process by which corporate reputation forms: as a firm’s power increases relative to that of its client, the firm is more likely to impute positive character to the client for conduct that conforms to prevailing norms. Taken together, the findings from this research suggest that firms are receptive to how their prospective clients are operated upon by institutional forces, including by forces emanating from outside domains. The behavioural effects of institutions are found to diffuse, within and across contexts, through the market relations between firms. Consistent across the two studies presented, firms’ responses to institutional effects on their clients are found to vary to an extent that depends on a firm’s power relative to that of its clients. Following resource dependence theory, power is defined in terms of a firm’s control over vital resources and as a property of exchange relations (Emerson, 1962). This leads to the conclusion that as institutional effects diffuse through the relations between firms they are moderated by properties of those relations.
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ItemThe dark side of groups: effects of entitlement and conflict( 2017)Despite the focus in the popular press about entitlement, there has been limited research on entitlement in the management literature. Through multiple studies, this thesis examines the effects of entitlement beliefs in the workplace in the context of groups. Incorporating various literatures, I theorise and find that: 1) entitled individuals are physiologically more likely to experience threat than less entitled individuals and also more likely to experience threat after encountering task conflict; 2) entitlement relates to conflict in several different ways such that the relationship is affected by the duration of the task – in short-term tasks, entitlement is likely to influence heightened perceptions of the types of conflict, but in long-term tasks, entitlement is curvilineally related to relationship conflict; and 3) entitlement influences the distribution of roles in the workgroup as both low- and high-entitlement is likely to lead to being selected as the leader. I utilise both laboratory and survey methods to capture and collect the data in this thesis. I also discuss the implications of my findings on theory and practice.
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ItemCopula models of serial dependence with applications to economic and financial time series forecasting( 2018)Almost all existing copula models use copula functions to capture cross-sectional dependence. Instead, this thesis explores using copula functions to capture serial dependence. The advantage of doing this, is that the parametric assumptions on the margins, employed to capture serial dependence, are no longer needed, making the margins fully flexible. This thesis consists of three related papers. The first paper in Chapter 4 studies the properties of copulas of heteroskedastic processes, by retrieving the implied copula of the ARCH and SV models via simulation. The results show that the implied copula densities have an unusual cross shape, with mass concentratedat all four corners of the unit square. A major contribution of this paper is that it demonstrates that these copulas can be accurately approximated by a mixture of bivariate copulas. This mixture copula, when combined with a flexible marginal distribution, can be employed to model a wide range of heteroskedastic time series. In addition, because existing measures of dependence prove inadequate when heteroskdasticity is present, new measures of dependence are proposed. The model is also extended to multiple time series settings, and applied to foreign exchange rate return data. The second paper in Chapter 5 focuses on extending the methods from Chapter 4 to discrete time series. This work contains two significant contributions. First, it employs a copula to capture cross-sectional and serial dependence for discrete and mixed time series data. This copula is initially employed for the single variable case, and then extended to the multivariate case with discrete and mixed data. Second, this paper proposes a new Variational Bayes estimation technique, applicable to all time series copula models with discrete or mixed data. This technique allows for faster estimation of the copula parameters compared to previous methods. The last paper in Chapter 6 proposes a new copula created by the inversion of a multivariate unobserved component stochastic volatility model, and shows how to estimate it using Bayesian methods. This non-closed form copula is an alternative to the mixture copulas proposed in Chapter 4. An advantage of this inversion copula is that it is fast and simple to simulate from, and measures of dependence, filtered distributions, predictive distributions and other inference can all be computed readily and accurately via simulation. To illustrate the potential of this new copula, it is applied to a real-time U.S macroeconomic dataset. Out-sample predictions of GDP growth, inflation and an interest rate demonstrate that the copula model can improve upon predictions of the widely used VARSV model.
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ItemGift systems and the divine economy of the poor( 2016)Gift giving constitutes a significant phenomenon in consumer research. However, the current literature does not address gift giving within religious contexts. Yet more than half of the world’s consumers are religious and billions of dollars are donated annually to religious organizations. What factors drive such high and committed gifting to religious institutions and their members? Do religious gifting practices conform to the same gifting practices as more secular gift exchanges? Additionally, the gift giving literature in consumer research does not give much consideration to contexts of scarcity. There exists a gap in understanding pertaining to gift exchanges among low-income consumers and/or consumers in low-resource contexts. Do the same exchange practices, norms of reciprocity, and relations govern gift exchanges where resources are low (versus high), and hence the amount of personal sacrifice in a gifting situation is high (versus low)? This thesis addresses these questions by investigating gift giving to religious bodies within contexts of scarce economic resources. Specifically, I investigate the practice of monetary donations to churches among low-income consumers. The research question problematizes the practice of monetary donations by low-income consumers, which has significant economic implications for their livelihoods. Making monetary donations to the church infers sacrificing significant portions of income that would otherwise have been spent on food, health care, and clothing for these low-income consumers and their families. However, this practice remains widespread in very religious contexts despite the economic implications on the consumers’ livelihood. I therefore sought to understand the nature, meanings, and outcomes of church donations among low-income consumers. To investigate this agenda, I undertook a five-month ethnographic study of Salvation Baptist Church (SBC), a small Pentecostal/Charismatic Church (PCCs) in Ghana, whose members were mostly poor. I chose PCCs as my context because they advance a distinct Prosperity Gospel theology that encourages church donations in return for material prosperity. My findings revealed seventeen different donation funds within SBC, which had complex and intricate donation rituals and meaning. Building upon these seventeen donation funds and their practices in SBC, I theorize the divine economy of the poor. The divine economy presents a system of community, institutional, and divine gift systems overseen by the overarching hand of God, as understood in Pentecostal theology and ideology. In this divine economy, I trace various forms of consumer gift exchanges and rituals built around social solidarity, institutional impersonality, and religious sacrifice. However, the divine economy also produces church and personal moral obligations that often conflict. Due to their low incomes, informants sometimes struggle to give to the church and also provide for themselves and their families. In response, consumers in this divine economy adopt many tactics, afforded by the indeterminacy of Pentecostal theology, to negotiate these conflicts, without leaving the divine economy. This thesis contributes to the understanding of gift systems, and the role of religious ideology and poverty in gift exchanges and consumer resource circulation. Implications for consumer research, marketing practice, and church management are discussed.
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ItemLeadership behavior and organizational performance of social enterprises( 2016)Social Entrepreneurship is described as “using market based methods to solve social problems” (Miller, Grimes, McMillan, & Vogus, 2012, p.616). In three separate studies, this dissertation investigates the antecedents of social entrepreneurs, their leadership attributes and leadership styles that result in social performance of their social enterprises. Study 1 employed surveys in Australia and used Self-Determination Theory and Upper Echelon Theory to investigate nascent social entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial activity. We find social entrepreneurs undertake the highest level of entrepreneurial activity when they possess a high desire for independence and recognition and are surrounded by a start-up team with a high level of business acumen. Study 2 uses semi-structured interviews of entrepreneurs in six countries and 14 industries to understand their leadership attributes. We find that shared leadership, adaptability and social networking were important drivers of a social enterprise’s social performance. There is also evidence of multiple performance measures and gender differences. Finally, Study 3 used surveys in Australia and Asia to research leadership of social entrepreneurs. We find servant leadership behaviors and the causation process (planned strategies) of their enterprises significantly predicted social performance.