Doctoral students push serious research
Katherine Alexander
Disagreeable employees are an issue for managers. How do these disagreeable individuals react to negative social exchange relationships with their superiors? Second-year Ph.D. student Katie Alexander (management)and professor Jeremy Mackey are examining how and when these employees may become defiant at work.
In her research, Alexander found that the more disagreeable the individual becomes, the more likely they are to be insubordinate. This connection occurs when the disagreeable subordinate and the supervisor have a contentious and distrusting relationship. Thus, building positive social exchange relationships with disagreeable employees may decrease insubordination.
Jack Carson
Workplace incivility between coworkers is bad news for both employee well-being and organizational performance. In his dissertation “Fix, Flee, or Fan the Flames?” Jack Carson, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in management, is researching how employees’ perceptions of the causality and controllability of workplace incivility influence their responses. The study digs deeper into which combinations of causality and controllability are differentially related to employees’ subsequent “fixing” behaviors (relationship repair), “fleeing” behaviors (relationship avoidance), and “fanning the flames” behaviors (being uncivil in return).
Jianliang Hao
Research by Jianliang Hao, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Systems and Technology, includes supply chain management from different stakeholders’ perspectives such as supply chain transparency, security, and reverse logistics management. Hao’s dissertation explores the facilitators and barriers of omnichannel returns, and how these factors influence customer repurchase intentions for online and brick-and-mortar stores. Using qualitative research methods and behavioral experiments, he continues to investigate how to turn reverse logistics, specifically the return experience, into a positive differentiator for retailers.
Ian Mercer
Prior research has examined the relationship between
religiosity and numerous important work-related outcomes, including ethical judgments, moral reasoning, and pro-social behavior. However, no research has examined the relationship between religiosity and greed. Along with Alan Walker, professor of management, doctoral student Ian Mercer examined religious motivation as a trait measure of greed. Results indicated that intrinsic religious motivation was negatively related to a trait measure of greed, while extrinsic religious motivation was positively related to greed. They also found that moral disengagement mediated the relationship between religious motivation and greed. Intrinsically motivated individuals were less likely to engage in moral disengagement strategies than were extrinsically motivated individuals.
Yinan Ni
Firms and market participants hedge their positions to reduce risk. Developing an effective hedge ratio requires a model that relates a firm’s position to instruments traded in the financial markets, notes Yinan Ni, a doctoral student in finance. Historically, the Black-Scholes model has been the standard. The short-lived arbitrage model largely developed by Auburn faculty has been shown to significantly improve in-sample fit relative to the Black-Scholes model. Using several error metrics, research finds that the hedging model significantly outperforms the traditional delta hedge and a current benchmark hedge based on the practitioner Black-Scholes model.
Ruixiang Song
Entrepreneurs often rely on crowd funding. But what happens to those crowd funders, who gamble on the success or failure of a pitched product once it hits the marketplace? Third-year Ph.D. student Ruixiang Song, with management professor and Luck Eminent Scholar Brian Connelly, is exploring how the personalities—and crowd funding habits—of funders change over time in the working paper, “Circle of Failure.”
In his research, Song found that the more crowd funders fail, the more conservative they grow in their funding choices. However, further studies have found that conservative crowd funding investments are even more likely to fail. Thus, they are caught in a circle of failure.
Jacob Waddingham
How do job recruiters view entrepreneurs when they choose to re-enter the traditional, 9-to-5 workplace? Jacob Waddingham, a Ph.D. student in management, provides answers in his working paper, “Burning Up on Re-Entry: The Effects of Entrepreneurial Exit in the Hiring Context.” Waddingham is collaborating with management professors Jack Walker and Miles Zachary. While recruiters favored candidates with traditional work experience, the most desired job candidates with entrepreneurial experience were younger ex-entrepreneurs who sold their businesses because they aren’t as set in their own professional ways.
Jiayi Xu
In 1865, the first minority bank in the United States was established. Over time, depository institutions owned or controlled by minorities, known as minority depository institutions (MDIs), have grown in number. However, they still account for only 2.8 percent of all banks 150 years later. Jiayi Xu, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in finance, teamed with Lowder Eminent Scholar Jim Barth to produce “Minority Depository Institutions: Why So Few After 150 Years?”
Empirical results found that a MDI is highly likely to be located in a community in which the largest share of the population is minority and one in which income and poverty are worse compared to national averages. When located in the same communities, MDIs generally show no sign of underperformance or greater riskiness than non-MDIs.