Filters
Availability
Publication Year
Resource Type
Faculty
School/Institute
Publication Search Results
Sort
Results per page
1 - 10 of 17
-
(2021)ThesisDecades of research on organizational change and its leadership has explored the influence of leaders on change outcomes. Yet, despite this accumulated effort, the likelihood of success remains stubbornly low. This dissertation explores: how do leaders improve the likelihood of change success? Prior scholarship has examined this question from two perspectives. Change practice discussion describes change processes, the activities that enable change, with allied suggestions for leader engagement – how to lead change processes. Change leadership discussion studies leader attributes, aiming to identify and generalize those allied with success and, in doing so, provide guidance for leadership development. Addressing the leader-success challenge, scholars have identified two problems: (1) these two discussions lack integration – while it is difficult to talk about change leadership without inherently referring to a change process, the former discussion overlooks the available choices between change processes, and (2) the study of attributes has yielded desired leader behaviors, yet evidence shows that these behaviors do not always manifest in practice. Addressing the first challenge, I commence with a process study of 79 cases of change. This research finds that a dynamic choice between two perspectives of change processes – illustrated as diagnostic and dialogic – significantly improves the likelihood of change success. It also extends an understanding of a leadership practice that facilitates this choice. Integrating these findings, I develop a model that explains how choice connects change leadership to change process knowledge, at the same time as providing a roadmap for leaders to navigate between diagnostic and dialogic processes in practice. Addressing the second challenge, psychologists explain a key limitation of behavioral study is that a large component of people’s behavior is a product of situational cues. To explain this phenomenon, these scholars have explored mindsets, describing how behavioral dispositions result from mental frameworks that stand ‘ready to fire’ based on situational cues. My second study establishes psychology-derived mindsets as relevant for leadership engagement of change processes. It does so by developing a typology of mindset constructs, then conducting an integrative review of mindset knowledge between change leadership and psychology settings. This study matches the fixed and growth mindsets with leadership engagement of diagnostic and dialogic change processes. My third study empirically examines how the fixed and growth mindsets manifest within leaders when change is targeted. It finds that leaders with a growth mindset are likely to choose to oscillate between change processes and achieve change success. Further, I identify that diagnostic change processes can provide situational cues that foster a fixed mindset within leaders, with detrimental effects on outcomes. Integrating these findings from all three studies, this dissertation puts forward a new means for leadership development – mindset activation theory – explaining a means for leaders to take control of their situation-mindset interaction and guide their behaviors in practice. It demonstrates how leaders can increase awareness of and operationalize the situational cues that guide their mindset, facilitating choices between change processes that improve their likelihood of change success.
-
(2021)ThesisFor decades scholars have detailed the benefits of having embedded workers in the workplace. Increasing embeddedness reduces the costs workplaces incur from workers’ withdrawal behaviours. In comparison, less is known regarding the costs of high embeddedness. Drawing on conservation of resource theory, this thesis examines the negative effects of embeddedness in conjunction with work role overload on burnout and withdrawal. It further considers the impact of workers’ physical and psychological maintenance of barriers between work and life (i.e., work-life boundary control flexstyles) on the aforementioned effects. The results of two waves of survey data from 243 aged care workers, analysed using a moderated mediation framework, showed work role overload and flexstyle moderate the mediated relationship between job embeddedness, burnout, and withdrawal behaviours (lateness, absenteeism, and turnover). These results underscore the importance of workers’ experience of work overload and their work-life control flexstyles when considering the impact of embeddedness on retaining, expanding, and sustaining the aged care workforce. These findings have important implications for employees, managers, and organisations in the aged care industry.
-
(2022)ThesisAs collaborative agents are implemented within everyday environments and the workforce, user trust in these agents becomes critical to consider. Trust affects user decision making, rendering it an essential component to consider when designing for successful Human-Agent Collaboration (HAC). The purpose of this work is to investigate the relationship between user trust and decision making with the overall aim of providing a trust calibration methodology to achieve the goals and optimise the outcomes of HAC. Recommender systems are used as a testbed for investigation, offering insight on human collaboration with dyadic decision domains. Four studies are conducted and include in-person, online, and simulation experiments. The first study provides evidence of a relationship between user perception of a collaborative agent and trust. Outcomes of the second study demonstrate that initial trust can be used to predict task outcome during HAC, with Signal Detection Theory (SDT) introduced as a method to interpret user decision making in-task. The third study provides evidence to suggest that the implementation of different features within a single agent's interface influences user perception and trust, subsequently impacting outcomes of HAC. Finally, a computational trust calibration methodology harnessing a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) model and SDT is presented and assessed, providing an improved understanding of the mechanisms governing user trust and its relationship with decision making and collaborative task performance during HAC. The contributions from this work address important gaps within the HAC literature. The implications of the proposed methodology and its application to alternative domains are identified and discussed.
-
(2023)ThesisThe aim of this thesis is to review and statistically synthesize the state of research on the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees’ affective and behavioral outcomes and to examine the spillover and spiraling mechanisms of resource losses. In study 1, I included 93 effect sizes of 80 independent samples from 70 primary studies (N = 24,708). I used a meta-analytic approach to conduct a quantitative review of the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees’ affective and behavioral outcomes. Meta-regression was applied to explore the impact of contextual- level moderators (i.e., service provider type, mean sample age, percentage of female employees) on these relationships. Furthermore, I compared the effects of customer mistreatment with the effects of other work-related stressors (i.e., challenge-related stressors and hindrance-related stressors). The results show that customer mistreatment has a significant negative impact on service employees’ affective outcomes (i.e., reduced job satisfaction, reduced organizational commitment, and increased stress) and behavioral outcomes (i.e., increased emotional labor, increased surface acting, increased turnover intention, and increased work withdrawal). Additionally, the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees’ organizational commitment is influenced by a contextual-level moderator (i.e., service provider type). Furthermore, the meta-analysis results show that the effect sizes between customer mistreatment and employee outcomes ranged from moderately small to moderately large. In study 2, adopting a dynamic perspective of resource loss, I examined the spillover mechanism between employees’ emotional exhaustion in the evening and their negative emotions the next morning. Moreover, I tested the spiraling mechanism from service employees’ emotional exhaustion the previous evening to their emotional exhaustion the next evening. The results show that the impact of customer mistreatment on employees’ evening emotional exhaustion spills over to the next day, which leads them to feel negative emotions in the morning. Furthermore, the impact of customer mistreatment on employees’ evening emotional exhaustion triggers their emotional exhaustion spirals, and their evening emotional exhaustion leads to more emotional exhaustion the next evening. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
-
(2021)ThesisThe widespread fragmentation of global supply chains (GSCs) poses considerable challenges for regulating severe forms of labour exploitation, collectively referred to as modern slavery. Recent responses to these challenges include the promulgation of modern slavery reporting (MSR) laws in the UK, California and Australia. In theory, these laws are a promising development geared towards leveraging corporate influence over GSCs to minimise, or where possible, eliminate modern slavery. However, commentators have criticised their design for lack of sanctions and inadequate reporting requirements. Despite this, MSR laws continue to proliferate internationally, underscoring a need for critical inquiry into the antecedents of their design and their practical effectiveness. To that end, this thesis poses the following overarching research question: How do policy-making process dynamics shape the design of modern slavery reporting laws, and how do external stakeholder pressure and actors internal to firms influence their effectiveness? To answer this question the thesis is organised into six chapters. Two introductory chapters define modern slavery and explore the literature on regulatory design. Following this, three empirical studies are presented, each occupying a single chapter. These studies apply policy change theory to explain MSR law design outcomes, stakeholder influence over reporting outcomes, and the how actors internal to the firm shape changes in policy and practice, respectively. The final chapter summarises the central conceptual and practice-related insights of the thesis. Regarding design, MSR law design is shown to be shaped primarily by coalitions of actors through deliberative, associational and ideological strategies throughout the policy change process. Regarding effectiveness, reporting quality is found to depend on the influence of various stakeholder groups, which varies significantly across institutional settings. In addition, policy and practice changes prompted by MSR laws are shown to be contingent on the extent to which organisations empower internal compliance professionals to promote and enact change and how third-party advisers define best practice. Overall, the findings of this study indicate that fulfilment of the aims of MSR laws is far from guaranteed. This will require changes to their regulatory design and more regulator commitment to steering corporate behaviour in the desired direction.
-
(2021)ThesisEvidence-based management (EBM) is an increasingly essential framework to bolster informed decision-making. Amid a complex and uncertain environment, combined with an ever-increasing volume of relevant yet contradictory evidence, EBM aids managers to use the best available evidence from multiple sources to make decisions. Despite the potential benefits of EBM, and the general lack of EBM use among practitioners, little is known about the factors and mechanisms that enable its practice. This thesis presents three papers that aim to shed light on the factors that facilitate EBM. I first explore the literature and use meta-analyses to identify multi-level factors that are likely to facilitate EBM use. The findings highlight organisational-level and individual-level enablers of EBM that should be prioritised in future research. Following this, I draw on the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity framework to conduct two experimental laboratory studies which examine the effect of these three predictors. I rely on a novel measure of EBM use, which I develop and validate as objective measures of evidence collection and evidence-based decision-making. The results support rational thinking ability and social norms as significant predictors of EBM. The final study focuses on the influence of rational thinking ability in predicting the adaptive use of EBM, and specifically evidence collection. One online experiment and two additional laboratory experiments investigate whether individuals high on rational thinking ability adapt evidence collection under cognitive load and emotional load. The findings provide support that under cognitive load, individuals high on rational thinking ability refrain from collecting more evidence. However, under emotional load, rational thinking ability helps mitigate these effects and predicts more evidence collection. The findings advance empirical knowledge and theoretical insights on EBM. I highlight enablers of EBM at multiple levels of analysis and shed light on the mechanisms through which rational thinking ability influences EBM use and decision-making.
-
(2021)ThesisThe social entrepreneurship literature has identified multiple personality traits associated with the intention to pursue social entrepreneurial opportunities, yet the characteristics of social entrepreneurs that impact social venture evaluations have been largely ignored. Meanwhile, recent psychological studies report that people use facial characteristics to form first impressions as to a person's competence or trustworthiness and that these social judgments influence a variety of business decisions, yet little research has investigated the intriguing role of facial characteristics in forming first impressions during the initial interactions between investors and social entrepreneurs. In this thesis, we develop a conceptual model and conduct five studies to test and explore the underlying psychological processes of how a social entrepreneur's facial characteristics influence investors' venture evaluations. The first three studies were conducted in a university context using student samples. Study 1, an experimental study, provides an initial test of the relationships between the two facial dimensions (i.e., trustworthiness and competence) and investor evaluations (i.e., ratings of a social venture proposal) through two types of perceived risks (relationship risk and execution risk) using faces from an existing database. Studies 2 and 3, using two sets of student participants, further investigate the effects in a multilevel experimental design across 4 scenarios with pretested faces. The last two studies were conducted in a community context with participants from the general public in the U.S. Study 4 tests the basic effects and explores the interactions between facial trustworthiness and competence in their influence on venture evaluations. Study 5 builds the overall model using a cross-sectional design with 20 randomly selected faces in an exploratory way and confirms the effects found in previous studies with path analysis. Overall, our results showed that higher facial trustworthiness and higher facial competence indirectly lead to higher venture evaluations through lower anticipated relationship and execution risks.
-
(2020)ThesisSelf-efficacy has a significant positive influence on one’s efforts, thoughts, feelings and behaviours. This dissertation centres on parenting self-efficacy (PSE), which describes a perceived ability to effectively perform the parenting role, exploring whether it spills over to positively influence employee engagement, performance and wellbeing. This dissertation is comprised of three studies. Study 1 examines whether and how PSE varies across child development stages. It also investigates the role of PSE in both work-to-family and family-to-work spillover relationships. Three PSE classes (i.e., low, moderate, and high) were detected over a 12-year period, and PSE was found to be both a negative predictor and outcome of work-family conflict over time. These findings helped unpack the dynamic nature of PSE across infancy and early adolescence, and gain an initial understanding of the longitudinal PSE-work spillover relationships. Study 2 further expands the PSE literature by developing a multidimensional PSE scale with the use of a mixed-methods research approach. The findings of the qualitative interviews suggested that parenting was multifaceted, and that parents might have a different level of self-efficacy across various parenting areas. The scale was then validated by analysing the results of two quantitative surveys, which demonstrated that each PSE dimension was associated with a specific work outcome. This showed that PSE was a multidimensional construct consisting of PSE task, regulatory, resource (partner) and resource (others). Extending the findings of both Studies 1 and 2, Study 3 utilises the experience sampling method to examine whether and how the daily fluctuations in multidimensional PSE affect work outcomes. Three PSE classes (i.e., low, moderate and high) were also found for PSE regulatory and resource (partner) across five days. Importantly, both PSE regulatory and resource (partner) positively predicted parents’ Friday work engagement and job performance. In summary, all three studies support that PSE is a multidimensional and/ or dynamic construct that impacts various work outcomes over time. This series of studies also provides evidence for the existence of a moderate PSE class that has been largely ignored in the literature, and is vital because this level of PSE also enhances work outcomes. These findings provide both theoretical and practical implications and important directions for future research.
-
(2022)ThesisChange scholars have largely studied readiness for change (RFC) as an individual’s property and examined its antecedents and outcomes. In this thesis, I identify three limitations of this line of research. First, studies that examine readiness across individuals and groups are limited even though change happens at multiple organizational levels. Second, while communication is critical to explain RFC and other change attitudes, the current conceptualization of communication, namely communication quality, is overly broad and encompasses multiple communication issues. Examining these issues simultaneously would improve our understanding of the influence of communication on change attitudes. Third, I argue that we lack insights into whether RFC varies over time and the factors that influence this temporal variation in the readiness. In this thesis, I address these three limitations by examining a more nuanced conceptualization of communication in predicting RFC across individuals and groups (i.e., the field study) and over time (i.e., the experimental study). Particularly, I denote RFC at the individual level as individual perceptions of collective RFC and denote RFC at the group level as collective RFC. Regarding my conceptualization of communication, I consider managerial communication efforts and communication strength, instead of communication quality, as two novel and relevant concepts. In the field study, I test if communication that encompasses managerial (formal and informal) communication efforts and communication strength influence multilevel RFC (i.e., individual perceptions of collective RFC and collective RFC) using a field sample of 402 employees in 48 groups. In the experimental study, I examine the effects of these communication variables on individual perceptions of collective RFC over time using a longitudinal sample of 463 undergraduate students. Results of the two studies indicate that formal and informal communication efforts explain individual perceptions of collective RFC and the change in the perceptions of collective RFC over time. Notably, communication strength is positively associated with multilevel RFC as well as the change in individual perceptions of collective RFC over time. In addition, I find that communication strength partly moderates the multilevel and temporal influence of managerial communication efforts. Overall, the thesis offers implications for theory and practice in organizational change and related literature.
-
(2022)ThesisIn recent decades, ambitious climate policies in some developed countries have evoked concerns about the damage to international competitiveness for domestic industries and carbon leakage. In this context, a number of unilateral trade measures related to climate change mitigation have been proposed by developed countries such as the United States and the European Union. Such measures have significant impact on economic activity and international trade. In this context, developing countries face greater difficulties in balancing climate mitigation and trade development. Differential treatment for developing and least developed countries is a fundamental principle in the UN Climate Regime; therefore, one of the major issues in the implementation of World Trade Organization (WTO) law on climate change mitigation related trade measures is the extent to which the rights and obligations of developing and least developed countries, based on their levels of development, should differ from those of developed countries and how this should be achieved. This thesis aims to define a role for the World Trade Organization (WTO) in facilitating global climate change mitigation through aligning differential treatment for developing and least developed countries in the UN Climate Regime and of those in the WTO. The WTO's environmental protection provisions only emphasise the principle of non-discrimination but neglect differential treatment for developing countries, making the application of these provisions seem fair, when in fact it is unfair. Therefore, in order for the WTO to facilitate the global climate change mitigation, it is important the differential treatment rules in the WTO environmental protection provisions is consistent with the differential treatment rules in the UN Climate Regime. None of the existing literature systematically examines the similarities and differences between the differential treatment rules in the UN Climate Regime and the WTO. This thesis addresses this gap by analysing and comparing the differential rules between these two regimes to identify changes required for harmonisation. This thesis recommends that the WTO should take responsibility to develop cohesion of and improve upon differential treatment in the two regimes in the form of a WTO Climate Waiver. It also provides specific suggestions for the waiver including setting categories for developing countries, allowing Border Carbon Adjustments (BCAs) with the condition of differential treatment, making financial mechanisms mandatory and improving differential treatment in the WTO dispute settlement mechanism.