Management and Marketing - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 92
-
ItemDriven by Desire: Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motives for Power( 2023-02)Power is an essential part of societal functioning. Yet only limited research has focused on why different power holders seem to hold diverse views of the purpose of power, leading to divergent paths over time. Existing research revolves around the subjective feeling of power, but I argue that different purposes and paths reflect differences in why people originally seek power. This thesis is designed as an anthology of two research papers; it represents a unified set of ideas and I develop these ideas with an overall introduction and a general discussion. However, the two papers will be submitted independently for publication and therefore Chapters 2 and 3 should be read as distinct work. Chapter 2 develops the Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motives for Power Theory, which posits that people are motivated to seek power either for the short-term benefits it provides (hedonic motive for power) or for meaningful longer-term outcomes (eudaimonic motive for power). In Chapter 3, I develop and validate a power motivation scale using 3,573 participants across 5 phases. The scale demonstrates good psychometric properties, convergent and discriminant validity, and is situated in a network of relevant constructs. In a predictive validity study, I show that motives for power are vital in predicting attention and choice. Taken together, this thesis presents a compelling argument for understanding the trajectory of power through the study of motives and demonstrates that the motive for seeking power predicts a power holder’s choices. This perspective could improve our understanding on various decisions related to power, including consumer behavior around saving, spending and investment.
-
ItemEngineers in the Arab Gulf and Australia: Uncovering Drivers of Retention and Attrition( 2022)About 60% of engineers exit the profession within 10 years of graduation. Women are at greater risk of exiting the profession than men, and when women leave, their knowledge and technical expertise leave with them. Western-based research has shed some light on why women leave engineering. Scholars mainly identified factors in the organisational environment (e.g., hostile cultures and long work hours) as contributing to women’s attrition from engineering. Prior studies are limited on three fronts related to framing, sampling and context. First, researchers frequently assessed intentions to leave the job or organisation and extrapolated results to explain intentions to leave engineering. These outcomes are however not identical because an engineer may simply intend to leave her current engineering job for another. Second, many studies that conclude that gender influences attrition were based on female-only samples, excluding the male experience. Third, published attrition studies are mostly conducted in Western, advanced countries. We know that individuals make decisions considering their external environment, yet researchers fail to explain how the societal context shapes organisational experiences and personal decision-making. In this thesis, I address all three limitations in prior attrition research. I investigate why engineers intend to leave their jobs and why they intend to leave engineering. I focus on women but include men in my samples. I sample from Western and non-Western societies to provide a more comprehensive picture of attrition. I draw the Western sample from Australia and the non-Western sample from the Arab Gulf States (AGS), which are Bahrain, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). I thus extend our knowledge of attrition to the understudied context of the AGS. The AGS is an essential region for a study of attrition because, on average, the region graduates a higher proportion of female (versus male) engineers than Western countries like Australia. Specifically, I uncover drivers of retention and attrition from engineering using social role theory and social cognitive career theory (SCCT), and data from two studies. Study 1 is an interview study of Emirati engineers in the UAE. Study 2 is a survey study of engineers in Australia and the AGS. In Study 1, I identify seven themes that explain experiences in engineering and retention in the profession: support for engineering; career paths and progression; the values prestige and status, societal impact, and engineering identity (the loyalty or attachment that individuals have to engineering); organisational task and social environments; family centrality; financial influences; and equality through privilege. In Study 2, I find that neither gender nor region predicts intentions to leave engineering. However, three factors predict intentions to remain in or to leave engineering: engineering identity, workplace incivility, and the opinions of important others. I further distinguish between intentions to leave the job and intentions to leave engineering and find that they are disparate outcomes. Engineering identity is the strongest predictor of intentions to leave engineering, while opinions of important others is the strongest predictor of intentions to leave the job. I also find that engineering identity is more important for retaining women (than men) in engineering. Further, Study 2 shows engineering identity is the most important factor distinguishing engineers who remain in the profession from those who leave. This thesis is the first to study Emirati engineers’ attrition behaviour. It is also the first to compare attrition from engineering between the Western and non-Western contexts of Australia and the Arab Gulf States, respectively. The thesis underscores the importance of contextualisation in engineering attrition research.
-
ItemSupervisory Temporal Framing of Negative Performance Feedback: Effects on Subordinate Locus of Attention and Subsequent Task Performance( 2022)In organisations, supervisory negative performance feedback has conflicting (i.e., negative, positive, and null) effects on subsequent subordinate task performance. The goal of my research is to reconcile these conflicting effects by examining the role of supervisory temporal framing of negative performance feedback—that is, the extent to which a supervisor communicates negative performance feedback in a past- or future-focused manner. Drawing on feedback intervention theory, I demonstrate—across three experimental studies involving working participants—that supervisory past-framed negative performance feedback has a null effect on subsequent subordinate task performance, whereas supervisory future-framed negative performance feedback has a positive effect. Moreover, I demonstrate that: (a) supervisory past-framed negative performance feedback focuses subordinates’ attention on meta processes (i.e., on the self), (b) supervisory future-framed negative performance feedback focuses subordinates’ attention on task processes (i.e., on the task at hand), and (c) subordinate attention to task processes mediates the positive relationship between supervisory future-framed negative performance feedback and subsequent subordinate task performance. These effects are observed irrespective of individual differences in subordinate stress mindset. I discuss the theoretical and practical implications of my findings.
-
Item"Law, done differently”: Exploring the emergent legal organisational form of NewLaw in context( 2022)QUOTE: The legal world will change “more radically over the next two decades than over the last two centuries” (Susskind, 2013, p xiii). QUOTE: NewLaw for me is several things. It's a mindset first and foremost. It's a shift from looking at the value of lawyers being their time to the value of lawyers being everything else, which is their ability to review, their ability to provide professional advice, their negotiation skills. And it's outcome driven. Then you start looking at legal technology [and] how they can deliver things in a more flexible, client-centric way. And the flow-on from there is value-based pricing and project scoping, project management, with always the end user in mind. And obviously then the end result is they're customer service driven. For me, that is what NewLaw means. I talk a lot around a tribe and language (Interview K1-F). Recent decades have seen disruptive and transformative forces of increasing globalisation, more demanding clients and markets with regulatory changes, changing workforce expectations and technological advances that accelerated exponentially in the 2010s. In this dynamic context the legal industry, dominated for centuries by the professional partnership, has seen the entry of heterogeneous and innovative competitors. Since the mid-2000s the phenomenon labelled “NewLaw” has emerged with its participants claiming it to be a distinctive legal organisational form delivering legal services in new and different ways with a range of business models, that is, “law, done differently”. Early industry definitions opposed NewLaw to taken-for-granted traditional legal organisational forms and then the profit-oriented “BigLaw” while later definitions saw it gaining more complexity (Furlong, 2014). Growing rapidly in numbers and market share, NewLaw has attracted much attention in the industry literature for its symbolic significance as a new legal organisational form that is “disruptive innovation” and having a “disproportionate impact” (Thomson Reuters (Aus), 2019). However, as yet, the industry offers no valuable explanation or conclusive definition as to what constitutes NewLaw as a legal organisational form nor how NewLaw relates to its context. Therefore this Thesis seeks to understand and conceptualise the novel legal organisational form of NewLaw in its context by exploring the different academic literatures relevant to investigating the professional organisational form. With a lack of research concerning the NewLaw phenomenon, it begins by reviewing the “classic” definition of professional organisational form yet finds this unsatisfactory with a selective use of the literature, a search for distinctive professional characteristics and “classic” assumptions. It turns to examining in more depth each of the three literatures that have long explored the professions and their professional organisational forms: the sociology of professions, archetype theory and institutional logics. It finds useful concepts and arguments in these literatures, and also significant gaps. These gaps include limited descriptions of characteristics, continued dominance of historical understandings of professionalism and centrality of expert knowledge, and lack of consideration of interaction with contextual influences. Based on this review, the Thesis formulates two research questions (RQs) that focus on conceptualising the contemporary phenomenon of NewLaw as a legal (professional) organisational form and how participants within and advising NewLaw understand its influences and relationship with its context. To answer these meaning-centred questions, a constructivist-interpretive philosophy with a qualitative methodology was chosen. This Thesis developed 42 Australian NewLaw case studies that drew on 37 interviews with NewLaw participants and industry experts, observations and site visits, as well as extensive secondary data including webpages, industry media and podcasts, social media, artefacts and visuals. Nine characteristics and six themes are identified in the findings. As the two RQs are tightly interconnected, the findings are analysed together in relation to each of the literatures to provide a greater understanding of the NewLaw organisational form. These show the NewLaw organisational form as a distinctive constellation with an overarching philosophy of purpose that, distinguished from BigLaw and TradLaw, values true professionalism, includes profitability and supports innovation, with multi-level characteristics. For NewLaw these characteristics are analysed to be an active design, client-centric approach with fit for purpose work, use and sharing of expert knowledge both legal and beyond, valuing of professional workers, pricing for value, mindset of innovation aided by technological tools as required, being privately owned and using six business models. Interlinking the academic and industry literatures with these findings, this Thesis makes a number of contributions to knowledge to critically enrich the understanding of NewLaw as an emergent legal (professional) organisational form in the contemporary context. Theoretical contributions at a macro level include renewing the concept (and re-labelling the institutional order) of professionalism with multiple dimensions, extending the content of and approaches to expert knowledge beyond a monopoly to include lawyers as interpreters and collaborators with empowered clients while exploring jurisdictional claims, and adding the influence of innovation - suggesting it as an eighth institutional order. Theoretical contributions at the meso level make a case for the NewLaw interpretive scheme as a purpose-based combination of renewed professionalism with balanced profitability, extended expert knowledge and intentional innovation. This is called the 2PI, building on the historically dominant schemes of P2 (professional partnership) and MPB (managed professional business). Combining these contributions means NewLaw is an actively designed and distinctive organisational form with the 2PI purposive interpretive scheme guiding and being guided by its multiple, multi-level characteristics. Empirical contributions show a difference between meaning-based symbols and values compared to their material manifestations, and also suggest that “levels” of logics have blurred boundaries. A practical contribution guides managers as to designing and operating a NewLaw organisational form. The Thesis suggests these contributions are transferable to other emergent and existing legal and perhaps other professional organisational forms, while the framework of an interpretive scheme and characteristics may assist in moving closer to a definitive definition of the legal organisational form. Finally, it re-examines the label “New” as understood by participants and the claim for the purposeful and innovative NewLaw organisational form as a positive disruption for the legal profession.
-
ItemListening to "Her" Unheard Voice: Using a decolonial lens to make visible institutional work efforts to disrupt gendered violence in India( 2022)How would you recognize efforts to challenge an oppressive institution like gendered violence when they are subtle and “non-heroic”? In this dissertation, I take the reader on a decolonizing critical ethnographic journey, in India, to look at the efforts of an organization, its beneficiaries (the women who faced the violence), and its network of actors (politicians, police etc.), to understand how processes of change occur in contexts other than the West. In doing so, I adopted the institutional work literature to guide my understanding of these institutional processes to address the following research question: i) How does an organization, and related actors, including its beneficiaries, and elites, engage in institutional work to disrupt the oppressive institution of gendered violence? In trying to answer this question, I developed three papers. The first paper was driven by the recurring theme of affect that emerged during my data collection and data analysis. Therefore, I wanted to understand: ii) What role do affective processes play in the reproduction and challenging of oppressive institutions? Specifically, I theorize that over time apathy aggregates through emotions like grief, relational shame, and false hope, that entangles the beneficiaries within oppressive institutions, like gendered violence. This, however, can be destabilized through affective intrusions and encounters with particular actors that allows them to reimagine an alternative life. The second paper emerged from a conundrum that I kept facing during my research journey, and that was: iii) Would we recognize institutional change if we saw it? This paper argues for a more fundamental rethinking of epistemological and ontological assumptions to develop a location-sensitive institutionalism. Here, I theorize that, as institutional scholars, we have to radically engage with location and where knowledge is produced, specifically turning to decolonial theory. Using “Western” knowledge, and theoretical frameworks, may not always help us understand the lived realities of certain people, and the knowledge they produce. Therefore, situated institutionalism, and conceptions of space and place, could help us recognize institutional work processes in particular contexts. The third paper then built on this by reflecting on my methodological journey, seeking to answer the research question: iv) How does the colonial influence, and perpetuation of Western hegemonic knowledge, exclude knowledge from the Global South, and how do we as researchers begin to remedy this exclusion? I provide scholars doing research in contexts, other than the West, a toolkit to decolonize themselves, so that they can engage in the critical reflexivity needed to do justice to the knowledge being produced.
-
ItemHow Market Actors Contend with Persistent Market Legitimacy Contestations: A Microfoundational Approach to the Institutions Present in the Market for Donor-Assisted Conception( 2022)The literature has acknowledged that markets, product categories, and service categories are all subject to contestations. A market’s legitimacy may be contested when its consumers, its practices, or its products or services are considered cognitively abnormal, morally deviant, practically valueless, or legally taboo. This two-paper dissertation takes a microfoundations of institutional theory approach to illuminate how different market actors contend with the conditions they encounter in markets characterized by continuing legitimacy contestations. Studies on contested markets have examined processes of legitimation and have identified how public opinion may be altered through discursive and material practices. These studies have primarily examined macro-level legitimation processes, in which discursive objects, practices, or institutions (e.g., the media) affect particular pillars of legitimacy (e.g., regulative) to increase or decrease market legitimation in time. However, much less is known about perceptions of market legitimacy from those market participating actors, and in markets where contestations endure—in particular, from one or more legitimacy dimensions (regulatory, moral, cultural-cognitive, and pragmatic). To address this research gap, this dissertation focuses on the market for donor-assisted conception in the United States, a market in which all four legitimacy dimensions are persistently contested, and further highlights the intentional efforts and strategies of market actors—in marketing, intermediary and consumption roles—to mitigate negative perceptions of illegitimacy. In the first paper, the micro practices of marketers in how they communicate are examined in terms of their attempts to reshape legitimacy perceptions about the issue of human egg commodification in donor-assisted reproduction through the advertising language used to recruit commercial egg donors. This published paper (Hartman and Coslor 2019) used a rhetorical and semiotic approach in reviewing 412 online advertisements on craigslist.org from intermediaries (agencies) who wish to recruit women for commercial egg donation from across 30 states (82 cities/regions) in the United States. This analysis documents that this market is characterized by institutional complexity owing to the coexistence of contradictory logics relating to altruism (gift giving) and commodified market exchanges. We identify reframing strategies that downplay opposition as well as mixtures of what should be adversarial logics existing simultaneously. This contributes to an understanding of the use of rhetorical strategies and the content of communications to navigate oppositional logics in legitimacy perceptions—in addition to advancing knowledge about strategic communications by third-party intermediaries. In the second paper, the social emotions experienced by individual consumers are studied in terms of how they accompany participating in a market with persistent legitimacy contestations. It identifies the institutional factors that contribute to making a market heavily laden with emotions—including four forms of contested legitimacy that are persistently associated with a market’s products, practices, and/or outcomes. The findings further illuminate the emotion work strategies consumers adopt to shape individual and social evaluations (legitimacy perceptions), in order to mitigate the challenges of navigating the emotional impact of market participation. In developing these insights, this dissertation contributes to the affective turn in consumer culture research that is increasingly illuminating connections between emotions and markets—identifying the perceptions of consumers who actually engage in the market, not just those who may pass judgment from the outside. Collectively, these two studies extend knowledge about legitimacy perceptions in contested markets highlighting the relationship between agency and structure as a multilevel social evaluation and action process.
-
ItemSupply Chain Antecedents and the Vertical Spillover Effect of Product Recalls( 2021)Product recalls caused by product quality risks have become a pressing problem for society and caused widespread public attention in recent years. This dissertation, comprising three essays, contributes to supply chain risk and product recall research by adopting a supply chain perspective to examine supply chain antecedents and consequences of product recalls. In the first essay, I present a cross-disciplinary literature review of product recall research. I review 138 papers published in 52 journals and summarize and integrate them in a stakeholder-stage framework: the stakeholders of a recall (e.g., managers, employees, shareholders, consumers, suppliers, competitors, media, and regulators) and the key issues at different stages of a recall (before-recall, during-recall, and after-recall). I find that current research has focused on managers, shareholders, and consumers, but has paid limited attention to other equally important stakeholders such as suppliers, employees, competitors, media, and regulators. Also, researchers have predominantly examined the issues associated with the after-recall stage to minimize the negative impact of recalls, while the before- and during-recall stages that prevent recalls and make them more effective are relatively underexamined. Based on the knowledge gaps identified, I propose several directions for future research, and develop research questions for two empirical studies, described next. The second essay examines the supply chain antecedents of product quality risks. Supply base geographical complexity has been regarded as a key source of supply chain risks, but its impact on product quality risks remains unclear. Drawing on the transaction cost economics and social network theory, I propose that the geographical complexity of the supply base will increase monitoring and coordination challenges, thus leading to higher product quality risks. However, vertical integration and high network centrality can mitigate this impact by facilitating trust and information sharing. I test my hypotheses using Chinese automobile industry data collected from five databases (i.e., Marklines, 12365auto.com, Bureau van Dijk’s Orbis, Google Map, and Gaode Map). By analyzing automobile complaints of 731 passenger car models from 2014 to 2019, I find that supply base geographical complexity is positively related to product quality risks of automobile systems, but network centrality asymmetry between a buyer and its suppliers mitigates this risk. The third essay examines the vertical spillover effect of product recalls. Previous research on product recalls has examined horizontal spillover of product recalls that erode market value of firms and their competitors, but little is known about whether recalls have a vertical spillover effect on supplier firms, even when they may not be responsible for such recalls. I theorize that the impact caused by negative events will spread within the supply network due to cash flow and impression effects, and that these effects depend on the characteristics of the buyer-supplier relationship and supply network structure. I test my hypotheses using data compiled from six databases (i.e., National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Compustat Segment, Eventus, RavenPack, Compustat, and Thomson Reuters). Analyzing 330 automobile recalls in the US from 2011 to 2018 involving 162 buyer-supplier relationship dyads, I find that recalls by automobile companies result in losses in the firm value of the companies’ suppliers. In addition, the vertical spillover effect is stronger when the supplier 1) has equivalent power with the automaker, 2) is from a highly related industry, and 3) has high network centrality. By exploring the supply chain antecedents and vertical spillover effects of product recalls, this dissertation enhances our understanding of the role of supply chain management in reducing product quality risks and motivates regulators and managers to adopt a supply chain view in managing product recalls.
-
ItemExploring the Construction, Embodiment, and Management of Disruptive Consumer Performances using Practice Theory( 2021)Consumer performances are dynamic and complex. They emerge from the interplay between practices, bodies, spaces and audiences and are embedded in specific cultural fields. Some performances are deeply rooted in the body and have the potential to travel across cultural fields. Through an ethnography of drag performances, I investigate how consumer performances are created, embodied and move across cultural fields. Drawing on Schatzki’s practice theory, I first theorise the body-in-practice as a processual conceptualisation of consumer performances, in which performances emerge through the interplay between the imagined and real body. The body-in-practice captures how consumer performances emerge over time in the negotiation between a real and imagined body as a range of micropractices align and stabilise. I then draw on Bourdieu’s theory of practice and concepts of fields and habitus to explain the embodiment of a secondary habitus within a field of performance that can move across cultural fields. This disruptive secondary habitus offers consumers a new way of understanding and engaging with their world, potentially in ways that disrupt the primary habitus. I theorise six tactics that consumers use to manage this disruptive habitus within and across supportive and unsupportive cultural fields. Finally, I explore the implications of these empirical findings for consumer research on practices, performances, embodiment and status negotiations.
-
ItemHow the qualities of cash affect negotiation, tipping, spending, and saving( 2021)Cash is still crucial to billions of people world-wide. Despite this ubiquity, research on money has predominantly focused on the question of quantity (how much money?) over the question of quality (what kind of money?) when determining how money is used. Yet, some evidence suggests that the quality of money, and the qualities of cash in particular, matter to people’s behaviour. Given the practical importance of cash and the potential for important conceptual contribution, I examine how the qualities of cash—its form and physical properties—affect its fundamental uses: negotiation, tipping, spending, and saving. This thesis contains three papers and fifteen experiments examining how the qualities of cash affect usage behaviour. In paper 1, I show that people consider the quality of the money in a negotiated offer just as they consider quantity. Specifically, I find that people even reject 50:50 financial splits (equal quantity) when they are to receive inferior money (i.e., smaller denominations) relative to their negotiation partner (who receives larger denominations) at a greater rate than when both receive money of the same quality (i.e., same denomination). I thereby open up an avenue for a new line of research on how the quality of resources affects fairness perceptions in negotiations and provide practical guidance for negotiators. In paper 2, I examine how smaller and larger denominations affect consumer tipping. In finding that consumers are less likely to tip with smaller (vs. larger) denominations, I contribute support for a reversal of the denomination effect to the literature on the physical characteristics of money, the potential for embarrassment as an inhibitor to tipping, and actionable guidance on how tipping can be encouraged to improve the financial wellbeing of service workers. Finally, in paper 3, I identify and establish an entirely new qualitative factor of cash that affects consumer behaviour. Specifically, I examine how the two fundamental physical forms of cash—coins and banknotes—affect consumer spending and thereby also their saving. In finding that coins are more of a pain to keep than equivalent banknotes, I contribute the pain of holding as a counterpoint to the pain of paying, advancing the form (coins vs. banknotes) of cash as an important determinant of spending behaviour to literature on the physical characteristics of cash. The pain of holding is furthermore identified as a novel reason for under-saving. The aggregate findings of these papers emphasise the importance of the qualities of cash to financial decision-making, contribute to the literatures on the physical characteristics of money, the pain of paying, embarrassment, and fairness, and have important practical implications for the vast number of people receiving and using cash on a day-to-day basis across a variety of contexts.
-
ItemThe Trouble with "Shoulds": Interpersonal Meaning Violation and Workplace Wellbeing( 2021)A person’s sense of meaning can be violated in vivid ways, like dealing with a cancer diagnosis, or in small ways, like being treated contrary to how they feel they should be treated. Interpersonal interactions provide a lot of opportunities for these small meaning violations. This dissertation focuses on interpersonal meaning violations in two research phases: first, a scale development, and second, an application of the interpersonal meaning violation construct to workplace conflict. In the scale development phase I draw on nine separate data collections, involving 1,490 people, in which I develop and validate the scale items, test their psychometric properties, demonstrate the convergent and discriminant validity, and establish a nascent nomological net. In the workplace conflict phase I use two experiments and a 10-day experience sampling survey (a total of 1,381 participants spread across the three data collection efforts) to contrast interpersonal meaning violation with a prominent conflict paradigm and demonstrate that interpersonal meaning violation is essential for understanding how conflict affects workplace wellbeing.