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Browsing by Subject "Commitment"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Antecedents and consequences of occupational ideologies: a comparison of multiple occupational groups.
    (2012-05) Bechara, John P.
    As occupations become increasingly employed by large organizations, understanding the role of their occupational ideologies especially their antecedents and their consequences becomes critical to managing them and their work. Occupational ideology refers to ideas occupational members maintain about the nature of work and their identities as occupational practitioners. The ideology I examine is this dissertation is professionalism. Professionalism emphasizes the use of expert knowledge, norms of equality, work autonomy, and self-regulation. In contrast to the literature on occupations that construes professionalism to be shared among members of the same occupation, I argue and show using a longitudinal dataset that members of the same occupation maintain heterogeneous degrees of professionalism which are rooted in their organizational context and specifically in the nature of their work. I propose three central antecedents of professionalism that are characteristic of occupational work namely, task uncertainty, task interdependence, and communication frequency. The results support the predictions that task interdependence and communication frequency increase occupational members' sense of professionalism. Next, I argue and show partial support for the consequences of professionalism on organizational and occupational commitment. While previous work has shown that occupational members can commit to multiple targets and that their commitment to their organization and occupation are positively correlated especially in more "professionally" consistent organizational contexts, I argue and show that although an organization's professionalism has a positive and significant effect on members' commitment to the organization and occupation, a more nuanced account is also required. Specifically, I argue and show partial support for an interactionist account which suggests that occupational members' commitment to the organization and occupation is a function of the similarity between their own sense of professionalism and their organization's professionalism. The results suggest that occupational members that perceive their organization to be upholding their professionalism will be committed to the organization and less committed to the occupation revealing a substitution in identification undocumented in prior work. Finally, the dissertation provides a comparative account of the inter-occupational differences in occupational members' ideologies and their organizational and occupational commitment which sheds light on the occupational subcultures that develop in contemporary organizations.
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    Beyond Commitment: intellectual engagement in politics in Postwar France, 1944-1962.
    (2010-05) Richtmyer, Eric William
    This dissertation is a study of the way that French intellectuals engaged in major political debates in the years immediately after World War II. It examines three moments in particular: the purge of writers and intellectuals who collaborated during World War II, the Algerian war of independence, and the emergence of structuralism in the early 1960s. Initially, the mode of engagement developed by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, called commitment, dominated the political debate over the postwar purge between 1945 and 1948. At the same time, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Jean Paulhan critiqued Sartrean commitment for its philosophical inadequacy, its political inefficacy, and its moral ambiguity. As a result, they developed their own mode of engagement, based on the articulation of political arguments through unlikely means, such as literature and philosophy, which achieved prominence by the end of the war in Algeria in 1962. This dissertation concludes with an examination of the mode of discursive, or textual analysis developed in an exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault at the beginning of the 1960s. This exchange reveals that their version of textual analysis itself served as a mode of engagement in politics, and was rooted in the critique of Sartrean commitment articulated during the postwar purge, and the war in Algeria. This dissertation has the additional significance of redefining how the body of thought known in the United States as French theory is conceived. Ultimately, the move away from existentialism and its mode of political commitment was one of the main factors that contributed to French theory's growth in the 1960s. By historicizing French theory within the culture and politics of postwar France, this dissertation shows that French theory must be understood as a large and synthetic intellectual community, rather than as a description of a particular kind of philosophical or literary thought. The relations which obtained within this community affected, and sometimes even determined the generation of theoretical ideas and texts. This dissertation shows that French theory has continued utility for contemporary scholarship when it is taken to indicate the relations of this intellectual community.
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    Can Power Change Consumers? Investigating Consumer Empowerment through Social Media and Their Complaining Behavioral Intentions
    (2016-08) Xu, Hao
    In recent years, social media has become an important source of power for consumers, helping them put forward their opinions of the companies’ products and services and demand improvements. As contemporary consumers have been granted increasing power over brands via social media, their complaining behaviors are playing an important role in the daily business practices, which also offers new research opportunities for the study of consumer behaviors. Heeding the limited research on the underlying mechanism of consumer complaining behavioral intentions and social media empowerment, this experimental study examined the relationships between two dimensions of psychological empowerment (interactional and intrapersonal empowerment) and consumers’ complaining behavioral intentions in the social media context. At the same time, the roles of consumers’ prior trust and commitment with the brands, as well as their feeling of dissatisfaction were also investigated in this study. This study revealed two effects of psychological empowerment, including increasing consumers’ intention to perform certain complaining behaviors, as well as reinforcing the correspondence between their predisposition and behaviors. In addition, consumers’ prior trust and commitment with brands were found to serve as a buffer and mitigate consumers’ intention to take negative complaining behaviors. Both theoretical and practical implications in terms of the dynamics of power-induced dissatisfaction responses and other related factors were discussed.
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    Enhancing activist commitment through frame alignment and the amplification of collective identity: how the Tea Party unites its divergent membership
    (2013-05) Haltinner, Kristin
    The TEA Party Patriots arose in 2010 following a series of socio-political events: the housing crises, the passage of the Affordable Health Care For America Act, and an increasing public outcry from right-wing pundits on network news stations. After a "call" for a Chicago TEA Party by reporter Rick Santelli of CNBC, the TEA Party was launched. In 2013, the organization consisted of over 600 chapters nationwide. This dissertation uses the case study of the TEA Party Patriots to examine sentiment pools, framing, identity, and commitment in a social movement organization. As a large, geographically expansive organization, the TEA Party is host to five distinct activist types, which can be thought of as sentiment pools internal to an organization: the Christian Conservative, the Constitutionalist, the Reformed Liberal, the Libertarian, and the Conspiracy Theorist. All five of these sentiment pools have distinct understandings of the role of the state and the rights of citizenship. They also have divergent explanations for social problems such as racial inequality. The TEA Party organization, then, employs frame alignment strategies to increase the movement organization's collective identity and subsequently foster activist commitment. This is primarily done through frame amplification, promoting the values that all five sentiment pools share: the belief that they are fatherly citizens dedicated to saving childlike Americans who are preyed upon by the villainous left, the three pillars of the organization, and racial colorblindness
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    Essays on Labor Market Frictions and Institutions
    (2016-06) Xie, Leiyu
    The U.S. government makes unemployment insurance (UI) more generous during recessions. In this thesis I study the interaction between unemployment insurance policies and labor market dynamics in a macroeconomic context. The first chapter examines government commitment and its role in shaping the dynamics of optimal UI over the business cycle. The second chapter proposes a quantitative theory featuring time-consistent policy to rationalize the increased generosity of UI benefit duration during recessions. The final chapter explores the link between allowing unemployed workers to keep uncollected UI benefits and future job-search incentives.
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    Essays on optimal policy in open economies
    (2013-08) Dovis, Alessandro
    My dissertation consists of three chapters. The common theme that unifies the chapters is the analysis of how lack of commitment and enforcement frictions shape outcomes in dynamic economies and the implications that the existence of these frictions have for policy. In the first chapter, ``Efficient Sovereign Default,'' I show that key aspects of sovereign debt crises can be rationalized as part of the efficient risk-sharing arrangement between a sovereign borrower and foreign lenders in a production economy with informational and commitment frictions. I show that, under appropriate assumptions, the interaction between lack of commitment and private information gives rise to ex-post inefficient outcomes that exhibit many of the characteristics of sovereign debt crises in the data. Despite being ex-post inefficient, these outcomes are efficient from an ex-ante perspective because they help to provide incentives. To interpret these inefficient outcomes as debt crises, I show how the efficient allocation can be implemented as an equilibrium outcome of a sovereign debt game in which the set of securities that the sovereign government can issue is restricted to non-contingent defaultable bonds of multiple maturities. The implementation has implications for the optimal maturity composition of debt. Consistently with the data, as default is more likely, the maturity composition of debt shifts toward short term debt. In the second chapter, ``Credit Market Frictions and Trade Liberalization,'' joint with Wyatt Brooks, we investigate whether credit market frictions reduce gains from trade liberalization. We develop a dynamic, general equilibrium trade model with heterogeneous firms and consider two specifications of credit market frictions: collateral constraints as in Evans and Jovanovic (1989) and limited enforcement as in Albuquerque and Hopenhayn (2004). Though these two specifications have similar implications for firm-level dynamics, but they have different implications for trade reform. With limited enforcement there are the same percentage gains from trade liberalization as there would be in the presence of perfect credit markets; with collateral constraints the gains are lower. This is because the debt limits that firms face respond to profit opportunities in the first case and not in the second. Using firm-level panel data from a trade reform in Colombia, we find that the change in entry decisions in the export market after the reform is consistent with the limited enforcement specification. In the third chapter, ``Capital Mobility and Optimal Fiscal Policy without Commitment: A Rationale for Capital Controls?,'' I study a Ramsey taxation model for a small open economy. A known result in the literature is that if the government has commitment, there is no need to introduce capital controls. In contrast, I show that when the government lacks commitment, imposing capital controls on inflows is necessary to support the efficient allocation when the economy is capital scarce. In this chapter I abstract from uncertainty. The model, augmented with shocks to productivity and the international interest rate, offers a framework for studying how the government should respond to shock to the international interest rate, and how the differential between domestic and foreign capital income taxes moves over the cycle.
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    Essays on Optimal Policy without Commitment
    (2015-07) Pei, Yun
    My dissertation consists of two chapters. The common theme that unifies these chapters is the determination of optimal government policy when the government cannot commit. In the first chapter, I investigate why sovereign defaults are often accompanied by significant declines in economic aggregates, and what determines the decisions of the governments to default on their debts. I develop a model of domestic default in a production economy with financial frictions. The government finances exogenous spending with distorting taxes on labor and by issuing debt. I assume that the government cannot commit to repay its debt and characterize optimal government policies in a Markov equilibrium. A key feature of the model is that government bonds are used as collateral. Hence, defaulting on debt tightens firms' collateral constraints, thereby inducing firms to reduce their demand for labor and cut back on production. This fall in output implies defaulting on debt is costly for the government. The government trades off these costs against the distortions from taxes needed to repay the debt. Defaults occur when the costs of distorting taxes of repaying the debt outweighs the costs of output loss following default. I find that the government is more likely to default if the economy encounters a large negative TFP shock after a sequence of positive shocks. The reason is that in response to positive TFP shocks, firms increase investment and build up a high level of capital stock. If the economy is then hit with a negative shock, the collateral level is relatively high, so the cost of defaulting is lower. I calibrate the model separately to Argentine and Italian data. In the model, Argentina sustains a lower debt level with high default rate while Italy sustains a higher debt level with negligible default rate. This finding is due to the fact that the TFP process in Argentina is much more volatile, which induces its government to default more often. Furthermore, the model successfully captures the declines in output and investment associated with defaults. Output drops around 10% during defaults in the Argentine version of my model, which is close to the data; while in a counterfactual analysis, output decreases around 5% if Italy defaults. In the second chapter, joint with Zoe Leiyu Xie, we characterize a Markov perfect equilibrium in a stochastic general equilibrium search model, where a benevolent government without commitment makes unemployment insurance policy. The policy is time consistent, as opposed to the optimal policy implemented by a Ramsey government. We contrast the Markov policy with the optimal policy. In the steady state, the Markov policy is associated with higher benefits and higher unemployment than the optimal policy. In response to a fall in productivity, the optimal policy rises on impact and then falls significantly below the steady state. In contrast, the Markov policy starts below the steady state and increases monotonically as the economy recovers. Compared to the optimal policy, the Markov policy leads to a slower recovery of unemployment. The reason behind the differences is the lack of commitment by the Markov government. The comparison highlights that with government commitment, unemployment insurance policy leads to a faster recovery of unemployment during recession. This paper thus offers a theory for why the government increases the generosity of unemployment insurance during a recession, and how such policies contribute to slow recovery in unemployment.
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    The relationships among employee reactions to training, commitment to organizational change, learning, and volunteering behavior.
    (2010-03) Staples, Justin Gregory
    This study explored the relationships between employee reactions to change-related training, commitment to organizational change, learning, and volunteering behavior. To accomplish this, online surveys were used to gather employee perceptions. Measures used were the Affective Commitment to Change Scale developed by Herscovitch and Meyer (2002) and Affective and Cognitive Reaction to Training Scales which were developed for this study based on Alliger, Tannenbaum, Bennett, Traver, and Shotland's (1997) previous conceptualizations. Theories related to attitude formation and change, learning, and organizational change provided a framework for this study and guided the research questions. The sample in this study was comprised of four divisions of a large healthcare organization with approximately 650 independently operating facilities across the United States. Completed data were obtained from 1,091 participants, with a total response rate of approximately 30%. Correlational, factor, and hierarchical regression analyses were employed to assess study scales and relationships among the constructs.Results showed strong correlations between training reaction sub-scales, suggesting conceptual overlap and need for revision. The results of factor analyses provided the best fit for a 2-dimensional model of training reactions. Hierarchical regression analyses showed significant relationships between training reactions, commitment to change, and volunteering behavior.It was concluded that training reactions may serve as leading indicators for employee commitment and behavioral support for an organizational change. In general, this study supports previous theoretical claims that commitment to change is critical to the successful implementation of organizational change. These findings have implications for future research and practice. It is recommended that future research further explore the causal links between reactions, commitment, and volunteering behavior using approaches such as longitudinal methods. Additional research on other antecedents to commitment to change is recommended. Next, although affective and cognitive training reactions are useful concepts, the scale developed for this study needs further refinement. In conclusion, this study suggests that, as the causes and consequences of employee commitment to change are better understood, human resource development (HRD) practitioners and academics will be better equipped to help organizations realize their strategic objectives and help organizational members find greater fulfillment and meaning in the workplace.