Corporate Culture

The recent increase in common ownership makes it imperative to study the impact of common ownership on corporate policies. In this two-essay study, I examine how common owners interact with firms to make decisions and how they moderate the impact of market manipulation on corporate culture.
In the first essay, I examine whether firms in the same industry make similar investment and financial policies when their large institutional owners overlap. This relationship is important given the tremendous rise of common institutional owners and their significance on their portfolio firms’ policies. I hypothesize that common institutional owners cause their portfolio firms in the same industry to make similar policies by creating anti-competitive incentives, reducing information asymmetry, and influencing governance.

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the contingencies that alter the link between entrepreneurial orientation (“EO”; a strategic posture characterized by behaviors and attitudes that display innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking) and firm outcomes. While conceptual claims unite on the belief that firms largely benefit from emphasizing innovation through proactive and risky initiatives, the empirical findings on a positive link between EO and performance are inconclusive. As such, several scholars have explored the contingencies that illuminate the boundary conditions to EO, however, most of this research has focused on external contingencies, i.e. those connected to the environment, while internal contingencies, i.e. those connected to the firm, have been fairly disregarded. Not only will the industry and market play a significant role in a firm’s ability to effectively carry out their desired strategic initiatives, so too will firm characteristics, such as communication and culture, as these internal factors are directly related to the level of value created from strategic actions. Therefore, this dissertation is an attempt to further clarify the boundary conditions of EO by focusing on these firm specific attributes. Chapter two, titled “Family communication patterns and entrepreneurial orientation in family firms” exposes the impact of specific family communication patterns on the performance outcomes from an entrepreneurial orientation. This chapter contributes to the corporate entrepreneurship literature, by confining the positive effects of EO to certain firm specific characteristic, as well as to the family business literature by further demonstrating the heterogeneity between family firms. Thereafter, chapter three, titled “Entrepreneurial orientation, organizational culture, and firm performance: The importance of a balanced approach”, argues and tests the importance of organizational culture, as defined by the competing values framework, as a contingency variable of the EO-performance relationship. This empirical chapter exploits a configurational approach, using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis
(“fs/QCA”) to analyze the arrangements of different entrepreneurial orientation and organizational cultures that yield superior performance. Through this exploration, I advance research on the EO-performance relationship by integrating the firm’s corporate culture as a means of alleviating concerns with resistance by certain stakeholders to the ambiguity associated with entrepreneurial ventures.

This qualitative case study explored the changing relationships and cultural evolution that occurred over the course of the initial year of a principal transition within a private upper school. Collected data included interviews, observations, and documents. All data were reviewed and analyzed in order to understand the experience that the transitioning principal, administrators, faculty, college counselors, and staff encountered during the course of the transition. The conceptual framework of this study was based on a social constructivist mindset and was ethnographic in nature: the researcher understood and defined the culture and transition experience through data synthesis, revealing varied interpretations of the culture and transition on the place and self.

Animal rights organizations, in attempting to affect institutional change in industrial
animal agriculture, face an institutional mountain. I show how these organizations,
though contesting institutions which are highly reified, tacitly endorsed, and historically
inertial, leverage emotional experiences and regulation to incrementally move this
mountain. Using a grounded qualitative study of interview data from animal rights
advocates and archival data generated by animal rights organizations, this study finds that
animal rights organizations have encoded both response- and antecedent-focused emotion
regulation into two distinct strategies used to garner support for their institutional change
project: transgression mining and seed planting. Furthermore, this study expounds upon
the role of moral emotional experiences in the individual-level process by which persons
alternate into support for animal rights organizations and their goals, here labeled
autodidactic frame alignment. Drawing on Goffman’s backstage/frontstage distinction,
this study illustrates how emotion’s role in institutional change efforts varies across both level of analysis and areas of interactive life. In doing so, this research adds empirical
weight to and extends recent theoretical work expounding upon the emotionally-charged
nature of the lived experience of institutions.

Mission statements are an important part of the strategic planning process. In the
federal government they are required for cabinet departments. Research about publicsector
mission statements has been limited, compared to research on private-sector
mission statements. Mission statements are important as artifacts of organizational
culture. They introduce and reinforce important organizational values and can be part of
a system of control. Within organizational culture and as part of a system of control,
mission statements may play a role in creating and maintaining certain power
relationships.
In this research I examine manifestations of organizational culture and power in
cabinet-level federal agencies as expressed in the content and rhetoric of their mission
statements. The research presented here examines the mission statements of federal departments and their affiliated agencies and offices. It seeks to identify the importance
of mission statements outside of their role in the strategic planning process. The
methodology used is Ethnographic Content Analysis (ECA). ECA allows for numerical
and descriptive data. Numerically, the researcher creates and counts occurrences of
relevant categories of analysis and then uses examples as descriptors.
This dissertation describes the content of mission statements and compares it to
features other researchers have identified as important for mission statements. In general,
the federal mission statements studied here do not include many of the elements that
previous research has identified as important for mission statements.
Second, the research examines the presence in mission statements of values in
general and, in particular, two specific groups of values: New Public Management and
Democratic Constitutional values. Both types of values are found in federal mission
statements, and the research shows that authors of mission statements are making a
choice between the New Public and Democratic Constitutional sets of values.
Next, this research looks for evidence of statements of power that are included
within the mission statements. Borrowing French and Raven's five bases of interpersonal
power for its rubric, this research finds evidence of all five bases of power in these
organizational mission statements.
Finally, this research looks for the intended audiences of the mission statements
and finds that it is often unclear.

Although recognized as an important stage of the merger and acquisition (M&A) process, little is understood about the processes that unfold during deal negotiations. In line with recent qualitative research highlighting the role of interorganizational trust, I examine the role of acquirer trust during M&A negotiations. Specifically, through two essays, I consider the effects of acquirer trust on two outcome variables: the acquisition premium and target executive retention. In Essay One, I integrate the social embeddedness theory and agency theory and find that acquirer trust leads to higher premiums. In Essay Two, I integrate the social embeddedness perspective with justice theory and find that the positive relationship between acquirer trust and target executive retention is mediated by justice. Boundary conditions are also considered in each essay. These two essay provide contributions to the nascent literature on M&A negotiations and the complex role of trust in M&A negotiations.

The impact of executive cognitive bases and values on corporate strategic change was examined in a longitudinal study of the computer hardware industry. Corporate strategic change was separated into pattern and magnitude dimensions as suggested by Ginsberg (1988). These dimensions complement the logic of Tushman and Romanelli (1985) who suggest that organizations proceed through long periods of stability or adjustment, punctuated by periods of metamorphic change or reorientation. I proposed that executive cognitive bases and values would be associated with strategic reorientation but not strategic adjustment since executive perceptions and responses are the internal driving forces that direct and redirect organizations (Romanelli & Tushman, 1988). Panel data analysis techniques were used to test the hypotheses developed in this study. Corporate strategic reorientation and adjustment were operationalized by changes in unrelated and related diversification, and changes in between-stage and within-stage vertical integration, respectively. The mean organization tenure and functional background heterogeneity of top management teams were used as proxies for executive cognitive bases and values. Results provided overall support for the hypotheses. Mean organization tenure was negatively related to unrelated diversification change, while neither mean organization tenure nor functional background heterogeneity were associated with related diversification change. Functional background heterogeneity was positively related to between-stage vertical integration change, however, contrary to expectations, it was negatively related to within-stage vertical integration change. These findings confirm and extend the literature which relates managerial characteristics to strategic change.

The purpose of this study was to (a) explore the lived experiences of school district employees who have sustained on-the-job injuries with specific attention to employee perceptions of employer response after injury and (b) examine whether purposeful empathetic response from the employer after workplace injury was related to changes in employee perceptions of employer response. This study included both qualitative and quantitative methods. In Phase 1, the sample for the interviews included nine workers from a large school district in South Florida who had active injury claims within two years before the study began. The Phase 1 findings were that the level of assistance and type of support received after reporting an injury varied among participants, despite working for the same employer; that the perceived response from the employer was more influential in affecting the participants' experience of workplace injury than participants' perception of the response of their coworkers; t hat the reaction from a majority of the school district employees (6 of 9) who were injured at work mirrored perceived employer response; and that more than half of the nine participants had unmet expectations of their employer with respect to how they were treated after experiencing workplace injury. In Phase 2, the 91 subjects that participated in the organizational response survey (See Appendix E and Appendix F) were employees from the same school district who were injured during an eight-week period. Data from three subscales (organizational support, return-to-work policies, and post-injury job satisfaction) on the survey instrument were compared between two groups.

The ability to understand the individuals that we deal with on a daily basis can give anyone who focuses on this knowledge a competitive advantage in today's business world. In today's fast paced and globally expanding business world, it is critical to explore innovative approaches that will facilitate the process and time it typically takes to establish business relationships. When it is imperative to quickly create a business relationship between individuals that are unknown to each other, identifying the city or region of the individual with whom a relationship is being formed and understanding that culture will help build a common ground which will facilitate and enhance the newly established working relationship. This paper shows how this can be achieved.