Poder e influencia en el liderazgo transformacional

Como proyecto de grado, el presente trabajo consiste en una revisión teórica de los conceptos de liderazgo, poder e influencia, junto con las posibles relaciones que entre ellos se pueden presentar. Para ello, cada concepto es definido de manera individual, y con base en ello, se identifica la dependencia que tienen estos conceptos entre sí y la importancia dentro del desarrollo del liderazgo transformacional actual. Para lograr lo propuesto, se llevó a cabo la revisión de una parte de la literatura académica presente en libros, revistas académicas, bases de datos y documentos relacionados con los temas y conceptos tratados. A partir de ello, se entendió la evolución del concepto del liderazgo y los enfoques presentados desde la década de los 1920´s hasta la actualidad, junto con el modelo de rango total y el tipo transaccional y transformacional del liderazgo, para luego definir el papel y la importancia de los conceptos de poder, los tipos de poder, la influencia y las tácticas de influencia, y así, identificar las posibles relaciones que se presentan entre los conceptos y la importancia de estos en el entorno organizacional actual.

Managing the duality of IHRM: unravelling the strategy and perceptions of key actors in South Korean MNCs

This research aims to extend our understanding of the duality between global integration and local responsiveness in multinational corporations (MNCs) by exploring the perceptions of corporate HR actors regarding the intra-organisational factors that alter the balance between these pressures. It examines the perceptions and actions of key actors in the context of two Korean MNCs. The study shows the importance attributed to a range of socio-procedural factors by corporate actors and which, therefore, inform the practical management of the dual forces, notably: HR expertise, social ties, trustworthy relationships and co-involvement in decision processes.

An Experiment on Prisoner's Dilemma with confirmed Proposals

We apply an alternating proposals protocol with a confirmation stage as a way of solving a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We interpret players’ proposals and (no) confirmation of outcomes of the game as a tacit communication device. The protocol leads to unprecedented high levels of cooperation in the laboratory. Assigning the power of confirmation to one of the two players alone, rather than alternating the role of a leader significantly increases the probability of signing a cooperative agreement in the first bargaining period. We interpret pre-agreement strategies as tacit messages on players’ willingness to cooperate and on their beliefs about the others’ type.

An experiment on Prisoner’s Dilemma with confirmed proposals

We suggest an alternating proposals protocol with a confirmation stage as a way of solving a Prisoner's Dilemma game. We interpret players' proposals and (no) confirmation of outcomes of the game as a tacit communication device. The protocol leads to unprecedented high levels of cooperation in the laboratory. Assigning the power of confirmation to one of the two players alone, rather than alternating the role of a leader significantly increases the probability of cooperation in the first bargaining period. We interpret pre-agreement strategies as tacit messages on players' willingness to cooperate and as signals pursuing individualistic objectives like publicizing one's bargaining abilities or eliciting those of the opponent.

Accountability and ideology: when left looks right and right looks left

Abstract Managers face hard choices between process and outcome systems of accountability in evaluating employees, but little is known about how managers resolve them. Building on the premise that political ideologies serve as uncertainty-reducing heuristics, two studies of working managers show that: (1) conservatives prefer outcome accountability and liberals prefer process accountability in an unspecified policy domain; (2) this split becomes more pronounced in a controversial domain (public schools) in which the foreground value is educational efficiency but reverses direction in a controversial domain (affirmative action) in which the foreground value is demographic equality; (3) managers who discover employees have subverted their preferred system favor tinkering over switching to an alternative system; (4) but bipartisan consensus arises when managers have clear evidence about employee trustworthiness and the tightness of the causal links between employee effort and success. These findings shed light on ideological and contextual factors that shape preferences for accountability systems.

Efficient solutions to factored MDPs with imprecise transition probabilities

When modeling real-world decision-theoretic planning problems in the Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework, it is often impossible to obtain a completely accurate estimate of transition probabilities. For example, natural uncertainty arises in the transition specification due to elicitation of MOP transition models from an expert or estimation from data, or non-stationary transition distributions arising from insufficient state knowledge. In the interest of obtaining the most robust policy under transition uncertainty, the Markov Decision Process with Imprecise Transition Probabilities (MDP-IPs) has been introduced to model such scenarios. Unfortunately, while various solution algorithms exist for MDP-IPs, they often require external calls to optimization routines and thus can be extremely time-consuming in practice. To address this deficiency, we introduce the factored MDP-IP and propose efficient dynamic programming methods to exploit its structure. Noting that the key computational bottleneck in the solution of factored MDP-IPs is the need to repeatedly solve nonlinear constrained optimization problems, we show how to target approximation techniques to drastically reduce the computational overhead of the nonlinear solver while producing bounded, approximately optimal solutions. Our results show up to two orders of magnitude speedup in comparison to traditional ""flat"" dynamic programming approaches and up to an order of magnitude speedup over the extension of factored MDP approximate value iteration techniques to MDP-IPs while producing the lowest error of any approximation algorithm evaluated. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Brand Awareness among Customers : A case study of ICA-Kvantum

This research paper has been prepared by Bachelor students from Dalarna University in Borlänge. The project is centered on a case study of ICA – Kvantum and its brand awareness among customers. The purpose of this study is to find out that which measures can help ICA-Kvantum to create brand awareness among its current and potential customers by looking in to the importance of information of its offerings and use of effective communication tools to convey this information. Further, to recommend them what they need to do, to increase brand awareness among their customers with the help of managerial implications. The research question was formulated as what actions could be seen effective for ICA-Kvantum to maintain or improve brand awareness among its current and potential customers.The project was created with the help of theoretical concepts of brand awareness, brand loyalty, perceived quality, consumer decision model, integrated marketing communication approach and strategic planning process. These theories were applied in this thesis in order to find out the most effective communication measures to maintain or improve brand awareness among current and potential customers of ICA-Kvantum.The primary and secondary data was collected. Primary data was gathered through the survey among ICA-Kvantum customers in the front of the store in Borlänge. The personal interview with manager was conducted in the office of ICA-Kvantum store located in Borlänge. Secondary data was gathered from textbooks, academic journals, theses and websites.The empirical findings have been presented in detail and then analyzed with the help of theoretical concepts. The analysis and further results from survey and interview focused on importance of information, marketing communication tools, brand awareness and loyalty, perceived quality and implementation of strategic planning process. Moreover, the main weaknesses and strengths of ICA-Kvantun have been evaluated. The conclusion including short summary of analysis and its results have been provided at the end. Each weakness of issues related to brand awareness i.e. importance of information, effectiveness of marketing communication tools and strengths and weaknesses of ICA-Kvantum discussed in the paper, has been pointed out along with solutions and managerial implications.

Experience as a moderator of involvement and satisfaction on brand loyalty in a business-to-business setting 02-314R

This paper examines the relative influence of two key antecedents of brand loyalty—satisfaction and involvement and the moderating role of experience, using a sample of business buyers. The central argument of this paper is that the strength of the effect of these variables on attitudinal brand loyalty will vary with the level of customer experience with purchasing the service. Building on previous research which examined low-risk, customer product settings [Kim, J., Lim, J.S., & Bhargava, M. (1998). The role of affect in attitude formation: A classical conditioning approach. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 26 (2): pp. 143–152; Shiv, B., & Fedorikhin, A. (1999). Heart and mind in conflict: The interplay of affect and cognition in consumer decision-making. Journal of Consumer Research 26: 278], this study shows that for a high-risk setting, involvement with the service category will be more dominant in its influence on brand loyalty than satisfaction with the preferred brand. Furthermore, it was found that experience moderated the influence of involvement and satisfaction on attitudinal brand loyalty for a high-risk business-to-business service. This study provides new insights into the theory and practice of buyer behavior and business-to-business brands.

Competition in mature software markets

A theoretical framework is built for capturing properties of competition in mature monopolistic digital product markets. Based on an empirical study of the market of accounting software for small and medium enterprises, a consumer choice model is suggested, where a rational consumer is already using a particular version of a software package and is considering to chose from the following three options: either to continue using it, or to upgrade to a newer version of the product, or to switch to a competitive product. Consumer decision is justified by software quality, and network effects, under the price and switching costs constrains. A modified consumer demand function is used for the model, and theoretical conditions are analysed for choosing from one of the three above-mentioned options. The results are applicable to a wide range of digital products.

Self-service technology complaint channel choice : exploring consumers' motives

Purpose – This study aims to explore consumers' motives for their choice of complaint channel in the context of self-service technology (SST) failure. Traditional and evolving communication channels are considered.

Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative self-report data from consumers who had recently experienced dissatisfaction with SSTs were collected via an open-ended survey question. Three independent coders used a deductive and inductive iterative process to code the data.

Findings – The findings suggest that both consumer complaint behaviour (CCB) theory and media richness theory (MRT) help to explain consumers' motivation for channel choice. However, consumers' choice appears to be motivated to a greater degree by convenience rather than task-medium fit.

Research limitations/implications – This study was set solely in the SST context and explored consumers' hypothetical complaint channel choice, not actual channel use. Future research could examine the actual performance of complaint channels as perceived by consumers. Consumers' motivation to choose other emerging electronic complaint channels, such as complaint blogs and forums, could also be explored.

Practical implications – Understanding consumers' complaint channel choice is important for organisations to enable them to provide effective and efficient ways for consumers to complain. As complaint channels proliferate, it is difficult for organisations to know which channels to offer.

Originality/value – Choosing an appropriate channel for resolving a complaint is an important consumer decision, which the study of CCB needs to be broadened to include. The current study addresses this gap by, for the first time, integrating CCB theory and MRT. This is valuable because it is common for consumers not to voice their complaints to organisations. To facilitate voiced complaints, organisations need to determine which complaint channels will be most effective and efficient and in which situations.

Defining Bonferroni means over lattices

In the face of mass amounts of information and the need for transparent and fair decision processes, aggregation functions are essential for summarizing data and providing overall evaluations. Although families such as weighted means and medians have been well studied, there are still applications for which no existing aggregation functions can capture the decision makers' preferences. Furthermore, extensions of aggregation functions to lattices are often needed to model operations on L-fuzzy sets, interval-valued and intuitionistic fuzzy sets. In such cases, the aggregation properties need to be considered in light of the lattice structure, as otherwise counterintuitive or unreliable behavior may result. The Bonferroni mean has recently received attention in the fuzzy sets and decision making community as it is able to model useful notions such as mandatory requirements. Here, we consider its associated penalty function to extend the generalized Bonferroni mean to lattices. We show that different notions of dissimilarity on lattices can lead to alternative expressions.

The role of external influences in high involvement purchase behaviour

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discover the consumer decision-making style clusters within the context of automobile purchases in Australia. It also examines the differences between consumer decision-making styles in terms of the importance given to external influences, such as importance of dealers, importance of friends/family members, number of cars test driven, time spent researching final decision and importance of information sources (e.g. internet, magazines, TV ads, word of mouth, etc.), prior to making their final purchase decision.

Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 209 respondents using self-administered questionnaires. Cluster analysis and ANOVA were employed to identify and analyse the differences between consumer decision-making style clusters. Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI; Sproles and Kendall, 1986) was used to measure respondents’ consumer decision-making styles in relation to automobile purchases.

Findings
Three clusters were identified from the analysis, namely “innovative informed”, “rational confused”, and “traditional habitual”. Significant differences were found between the clusters in terms of the average time they spent with each car dealer, the time they spent on researching final decision and the importance of consulting with family members prior to making their final purchase decision.

Practical implications
The paper found that some consumers rely heavily on friends/families and dealers as the most important sources of information. Other sources of information consumers use include television advertisements, newspapers, billboards and magazines. Based on the findings, marketers should focus on providing similar types of information/messages by using these above-mentioned sources when communicating with this type of consumers. Dealers could be trained to spend time explaining product features and benefits in full with these consumers and their friends and family members whom they are likely to bring along before making the final purchase decision.

Originality/value
The findings of this study have extended the knowledge by determining the impact of external influences on consumer decision-making styles using the CSI in context of specific product which is yet to be known in relation to Australian automobile consumers.

Hume's humanity: a nexus for global management

This chapter explains the development of the Human Nexus, being an original interpretation of ethics based on David Hume's exploration of morality. Recognizing the current moral malaise in global business practice, and searching for a contemporary approach to relational ethics, his elegant reasoning is concisely adapted for global managers. The Human Nexus is proposed as a tool for conveying humanism in global business decision-making today. A matrix of Humean variables from Hume's moral treatise counterbalances usefulness and agreeableness with considerations of self-interest, selflessness and the human connection with ecology. The analysis explores the interaction of variables, relationships and decision processes common in global management. A longitudinal reflective study underpins the research. The resultant construct is presented in context with foundational and emerging literature about the challenge of abstract moral perspectives for global managers, highlighting the desire for something more practical. The Human Nexus shows potential for pragmatically encouraging and enhancing humanistic engagement in ethical decision-making.