Category Archives: Scholarly Pursuits

The Relationship Diet: How to Create Happy, Healthy, and Valuable Relationships (At Home, At Work, and Everywhere You Go)

By James A. Mourey, assistant professor of marketing
(James A. Mourey, 2018)

Synopsis:

Mourey combines 50 years’ worth of social psychology research with more than a decade of corporate consulting experience “to provide a novel relationship framework that will change the way you think about and engage in relationships with others.”

Three Takeaways

1. The same variables predict all healthy, successful relationships, whether they are professional, romantic or friendly.
2. Successful relationships depend on four core “flavors”: direct communication, interdependence, enduring commitment and trust. Fifteen “ingredients,” including amiability, confidence, honesty and openness, build these relationship flavors.
3. The word “diet” in the book’s title comes from the Greek word diaita, meaning “a way of life.” Your way of life, including your career, can be improved significantly by building relationship skills, Mourey writes.

“The Relationship Diet includes a diagnostic tool, sort of a ‘strengths finder for relationships,’ that reveals your relationship-building strengths and weaknesses, so you know what to leverage and what to improve,” Mourey says. “It provides a useful way for managers to create high-functioning teams based on knowledge about how team members are likely to relate and where teams are most likely to have relationship problems.”

By Robin Florzak

The Million Dollar Greeting: Today’s Best Practices for Profit, Customer Retention, and a Happy Workplace

By Dan Sachs, instructor, School of Hospitality Leadership
(Apollo Publishers, 2018)

Synopsis

Sachs travels across the United States and Canada interviewing leaders of consistently profitable large and small companies who tie their success to exceptional customer service and employees who rank their organizations among the top places to work in North America.

Three Takeaways

1. Creating a great customer service culture begins with your employees—be accountable and authentic with them. It goes a long way toward building a team that prioritizes the customer experience.
2. Great service experiences start with empathy and the ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes and then act on this understanding to change somebody’s day.
3. Exceptional leaders understand that having a vision is not enough. Leadership requires turning a vision into a culture that engages both the employees and the community.

“When I started teaching at DePaul, I couldn’t find a book that integrated a philosophy focused on hospitality as a tool to create great customer service experiences, so I decided to write it myself,” Sachs says. “Products and processes can be duplicated, but the way you treat people, the type of culture you create and the values you champion are unique. Building a business that lasts is all about creating emotional connections with customers through hospitality.”

By Andrew Zamorski

Business Insights From Driehaus Faculty Research

Curtis Verschoor’s background is as impressive as it is extensive. At DePaul, he is the Emeritus Ledger & Quill Research Professor in the School of Accountancy and Management Information Systems and honorary Senior Wicklander Research Fellow at the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics. He is a researcher, consultant, speaker and author of more than a dozen books. He has served as a senior corporate finance officer for several international public companies and accounting firms. But above all, Verschoor is a passionate advocate for business ethics.

At an age when most people are enjoying retirement, he is still on top of his game after being named a thought leader on trustworthy business practices by Trust Across America. His latest book, “Curt Verschoor on Ethics,” compiles some of his most important and relevant articles about management accounting and finance best practices from his monthly column in Strategic Finance Magazine. DePaul Accountancy Professor Belverd Needles, one of the foremost experts in international financial reporting and auditing, served as the editor, helping to select articles for inclusion from hundreds that Verschoor has penned.

Ethics is universally important to everybody,” says Verschoor.

“That is why I started this column. It benefits organizations, as well as individuals.”

Verschoor has been writing an ethics column for Strategic Finance since 1999. Topics range from whistle-blowing, executive compensation and sustainability to ethical case studies involving companies such as Volkswagen, Uber and Toshiba. His focus remains topical; he recently explored how millennials’ approaches to ethics differ from those of other generations. While Strategic Finance targets financial professionals, employees in any industry can find value in ethics, Verschoor believes.

“In all my research, I’ve found that organizations with a strong ethical culture are more successful than those that have a weak organizational culture,” says Verschoor. “Companies with ethical cultures avoid reputational damage that comes from unethical practices and are usually better off financially. A strong ethical culture is a keystone or underlying core value of a well-managed, well-organized entity.”

Verschoor also hopes that students and academics will be able to use his collection of articles as a resource. “There is something that happens in everybody’s life every day that has ethical implications,” says Verschoor. “That’s why ethics is so important.”

By Andrew Zamorski

Financial Executives and Risk

What skills do financial executives need to manage risk successfully in a rapidly changing business environment? To answer this question, Ezerski Chair Mark L. Frigo of DePaul’s Driehaus College of Business and Paul L. Walker, Schiro/Zurich Chair in Enterprise Risk Management at St. John’s University, conducted interviews with financial executives from top companies.

“The scope of CFOs’ responsibilities toward enterprise risk management has been expanding,” Frigo says. “We wanted to identify the capabilities that CFOs need to have today, as well as tomorrow, to manage risk and anticipate disruptions before they impact organizations.”

CFOs and other executives from Microsoft, Oracle, Boeing, Dow Chemical, Martin Marietta, Coca-Cola and Pitney Bowes were among the leaders interviewed. Based on these interviews, the researchers identified four things financial executives must be able to do:

• Proactively recognize the sources of enterprise
• Develop insights and an enterprise-wide understanding of their organizations’ risk profiles and capabilities to manage risk.
• Think and communicate strategically.
• Create a forward-thinking, strategic finance organization.

Frigo and Walker’s research report, “The Strategic Financial Executive: Managing Enterprise Risk in a Disruptive World,” was sponsored by Grant Thornton and published by the Financial Executives Research Foundation.

Read the report summary.

Can Siri Become Your New BFF?

Science fiction is full of stories about robots that become so lifelike that people can’t tell they’re not human. As our digital products increasingly take on the characteristics of people, researchers are looking to see whether science fiction may be morphing into science fact.

“We are anthropomorphizing more and more of our products,” says James Mourey, assistant professor of marketing. “The best examples are Amazon’s Alexa or Siri on your iPhone. The theory we had is that if we make these increasingly humanized, to what extent do they start potentially replacing human-to-human interaction? And through a series of studies we show that, yes, scarily enough, products that do have humanized qualities can fulfill social needs, like the feeling that you belong, that are typically fulfilled by interpersonal interaction.”

But don’t worry—these “robots” are not really replacing your friends and loved ones. “Most people immediately jump to the doomsday scenario in which we are not going to be interacting with humans anymore. But what we find is that once you are told that your device is not human these effects go away.

“While there’s no replacing people with products,” Mourey says, “tech companies do need to be aware of the effect that these products can have on interpersonal relationships.” Mourey and two co-authors published their findings in the Journal of Consumer Research last January.|

By Robin Florzak

Minimum Wage Hikes = Automation = Fewer Jobs? Not So, Study Says

Opponents of minimum wage hikes often argue that the move will only cause employers to reduce headcounts in various ways, including through automation.

To find out if this assertion is true, DePaul Assistant Professor of Economics Brian Phelan teamed up with Daniel Aaronson, director of microeconomic research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, to examine the effects of past state-based minimum wage hikes. Their forthcoming Economic Journal study yielded some unexpected results.

“Minimum wage hikes in the early 2000s did cause employment declines in occupations that involved routine tasks susceptible to automation,” Phelan explains. “Somewhat surprising to us, however, was that states that increased their minimum wages tended to experience employment growth in other types of low-wage employment that largely offset the losses in routinized employment during the first two years after the minimum wage hike.” For example, a grocery chain may cut cashier jobs after introducing self-checkout kiosks, but create new customer service positions to help shoppers navigate the system.

“Thus, while our results suggest that higher minimum wages are expediting the automation of low-wage jobs,” Phelan says, “we found that the costs of this automation on individual low-wage workers do not appear to be particularly large in the short run due to the concurrent growth in other types of low-wage employment.”

The 606 Trail Raises Home Prices and Affordability Concerns

Homebuyers are paying more green to be near the greenery of the new Bloomingdale Trail, also known as The 606, on Chicago’s Northwest Side, according to research by the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul.

Home prices have risen dramatically around the linear park the City of Chicago opened nearly two years ago on 2.7 miles of disused elevated railroad tracks that span the Logan Square, Humboldt Park and West Town communities. Prices of single-family homes adjacent to the lower-income western half of the park jumped 48.2 percent since the project broke ground and another 9.4 percent after the trail opened. Home prices also went up in the areas adjacent to the higher-income eastern half of the park, but more modestly—13.8 percent since construction started and 4.3 percent after completion.

Rails-to-trails projects like The 606 are growing in popularity internationally because reclaimed green spaces offer many benefits to urban neighborhoods. However, rapid gentrification around linear parks can price lower-income residents out of the neighborhood, caution the study’s authors, Geoff Smith, Sarah Duda, Jin Man Lee and Michael Thompson.

“The lessons from what happened in the neighborhoods surrounding The 606 can help community members and policymakers identify, prioritize and target a balanced set of policies that will allow cities and neighborhoods to benefit from the success of public investment projects,” the study concludes, “while also preserving housing affordability and limiting the potential displacement of lower-income residents.”

The full report is posted at housingstudies.org.

By Robin Florzak

Robert Rubin, professor of management, says the rankings shows the DePaul business faculty’s commitment to evidence-based teaching practice.

Driehaus College of Business faculty members are among the world’s most prolific scholars of research about business education, according to two new studies.

DePaul business professors ranked No. 2 for producing research about marketing education and No. 6 overall for generating business and manage­ment education (BME) research among approximately 1,900 institutions surveyed internationally.

Management Professors Robert S. Rubin and Dan Koys, Associate Professor of Management Erich Dierdorff, Marketing Chair Stephen Koernig (MBA ’94), Associate Professor of Marketing Joel Whalen and Associate Professor of Accountancy Cindy Durtschi were among DePaul faculty members whose research was noted in the survey.

“These studies highlight the growing recognition of business and manage­ment education research as a critical business discipline in its own right,” says Rubin, an associate editor for the premier management education journal Academy of Management Learning & Education.

“That Driehaus faculty are so prominently represented among this scholarly community is evidence of the overall commitment that the college of business makes not only to good teaching, but also to engaged, evidence-based teaching practice.”

Rubin, whose research focuses on MBA curriculum and quality, noted that “it’s not enough to experiment with new teaching methods; we have a professional obligation to examine the effectiveness of such methods.”

One of the study authors, Ben Arbaugh, management and human resources chair at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, said the purpose of the survey was to identify and cultivate a cross-disciplinary community of scholars who share best practices for business school teaching and program management.

“Our hope is that scholars increasingly will engage in BME research, that business schools increasingly use such work to inform their educational practices, and that BME-active schools will articulate to their external stakeholders how such research informs and improves their educational practices,” he says, “thereby presenting highly compelling cases for why parents, employers and other stakeholders will want to send prospective students to these schools.”

The findings were presented at the Academy of Management’s annual meeting in August and will be detailed in forthcoming journal publications. Arbaugh co-authored the studies with Charles Fornaciari, Alvin Hwang, Regina Bento, Carlos Asarta and Kathy Lund Dean.

By Robin Florzak

Sophisticated data analysis and creative thinking are essential for designing a successful marketing campaign today, no matter if the goal is to elect a president, sell a product or raise funds for a nonprofit. Market­ing Professor Bruce Newman explores these ideas in his new book,“The Marketing Revolution in Politics: What Recent U.S. Presidential Campaigns Can Teach Us about Effective Marketing” (Rotman-University of Toronto Press), which is scheduled for release in January.

The book offers seven lessons that marketers in any industry can learn from recent U.S. presidential campaigns, focusing primarily on what Newman calls the “Obama Model,” the ground­breaking marketing strategies that Barack Obama’s marketing team used to win the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. Newman also ties the lessons to innovative marketing methods used by organizations and leaders outside of politics, including Disney, Google, IBM, Procter & Gamble and even the pope.

“Political campaigns at the presidential level in the United States have become full-blown marketing campaigns,” observes Newman, the founding editor of the Journal of Political Marketing. “They are raising the bar on the use of the standard marketing techniques by incorporating technological advances in big data, customer analytics, microtargeting and social media. The innovative use of these techniques is so creative that it establishes a blueprint for profit and nonprofit organizations to follow.”

The Obama campaign revolutionized marketing, Newman explains, by basing all its strategies on measurable information, including more than 1,000 variables on the attitudes and behaviors of millions of voters. “Through complex analysis of this data and statistical modeling, the campaign was able to identify what message and narrative would resonate with a particular target market.”

Beyond the data-centered decision-making, Newman’s book underscores the importance of drawing creative ideas from diverse sources to develop a winning marketing formula, as the Obama campaign team did by bringing together experts in analytics, polling, fundraising, branding, advertising, customer relations and crisis management from the for-profit and nonprofit worlds.

“It is incumbent on CEOs to reach out to experts who understand the integrative nature of marketing in all fields, and not to be afraid to experiment with new strategies and tactics,” Newman says, adding that these innovations also “serve as a foundation from which to establish innovative MBA programs that educate our students and future business leaders on cutting-edge marketing practices in an effort to prepare them to compete in an increasingly more complex, interconnected world.”

Lack of Self-Awareness at Work Hurts Team Performance

Self-assessment tests are a mainstay of corporate training and development programs that seek to make employees more aware of their strengths and weaknesses on the job. But when you rely on employees to judge their own abilities, are the results accurate?

To find out, Associate Professor of Management Erich Dierdorff and Management Professor Robert Rubin collected data from work teams and leaders who participated in a business simulation in a Fortune 10 company’s executive development program. The research revealed gaps between how workers perceive their own contributions to team goals and how their teammates assess them. More strikingly, teams with a significant number of members who overrated the value of their contributions reduced team success by half.

“With no external data, the results of self-knowledge assessments are presumed to be accurate, when instead they may reinforce inaccurate perceptions of ourselves,” Dierdorff and Rubin wrote in a Harvard Business Review article about their findings. “The net result can be harmful to development and performance and, as we observed, the effectiveness of teams.”

To address the issue, Dierdorff and Rubin recommend that managers tie self-awareness tools to performance. “Use external benchmarks: measure how someone’s self-view compares to others’ views and measure how assessments directly relate to outcomes, like increased learning and job performance,” they suggest. Managers also should clearly communicate why accurate self-awareness about one’s capabilities is relevant, and follow-up with self-development training that closes the “knowing-doing gap.”

Award-Winning Research Sheds Light on Shareholder Activism 

Assistant Professor of Finance Jason Sturgess

Assistant Professor of Finance Jason Sturgess’s paper “The Role of Institutional Investors in Voting: Evidence from the Securities Lending Market” won the Global Challenge Award for Innovation in Corporate Governance sponsored by BlackRock Inc. and the National Association of Corporate Directors. The research examines shareholder activism through an analysis of securities lending market data and proxy record dates to see how institutional investors influence the proxy voting process.

Sturgess and his co-authors, Reena Aggarwal from Georgetown University and Pedro Saffi of the University of Cambridge, found that investors who lend out equities recall their shares to vote on important company issues, such as executive compensation, takeover threats and corporate control.

“Overall,” the researchers conclude, “our findings imply that institutional investors value their vote and use the proxy voting process as an important channel for affecting corporate governance.” The study appears in the October 2015 issue of the Journal of Finance.

By Robin Florzak

Marketing Professor Al Muñiz studies communities that form among people devoted to popular brands, including LEGO.

When DePaul Marketing Professor Al Muñiz completed his dissertation back in 1998, he didn’t foresee that his research would eventually change the way the marketing discipline and industry—and even other social sciences—thought about brands.

Muñiz’s dissertation was the basis of a Journal of Consumer Research article that introduced the concept of “brand community.” The term describes people who, united by their loyalty to a particular brand, feel a responsibility to share brand narratives and offer support and solutions associated with the brand. Examples include devotees to the Apple, Saab and Volkswagen brands.

“It was the first paper to acknowledge explicitly the social nature of certain consumer brands,” says Muñiz, who co-authored the article with University of Wisconsin Marketing Professor Thomas O’Guinn. “Prior to that, the field of consumer research viewed brands rather narrowly as summations of attitudes and conceived brands and their consumers as a simple consumer brand dyad. Our work called attention to the consumer-to-consumer relationships centered around the brand and showed that these relationships were just as important. It made the social aspect of brands explicit.”

Since its publication in 2001, the article has been referenced more than 3,000 times by other scholars, and Thomson Scientific named it as one of the most frequently cited articles in the business and economics disciplines in 2007. This past fall, the Association for Consumer Research recognized the lasting impact of this pioneering work by presenting Muñiz and O’Guinn with the prestigious Sheth Foundation/ Journal of Consumer Research Long-Term Contribution Award.

Muñiz continues to build on the work. He is currently researching the LEGO brand community, which has helped the toymaker develop new product ideas.

Beyond its contribution to business scholarship, Muniz’s research provides broader insight about human nature.

“A lot of cultural criticism has lamented the loss of community associated with modernity and the advancement of the marketplace,” Muñiz says. “Our work demonstrates that humans, as social beings, find and create community where they will. Sometimes, they will find it around a shared brand. Such a community form is a testament to the durability, resilience and centrality of community to human existence.

By Robin Florzak

Why Do We Buy What We Buy?

Why will you buy a T-shirt for $29.99, but not $30? Who buys the bizarre items—for example, a replica of Gandalf’s staff from “Lord of the Rings”—offered in the airline magazine SkyMall?

These and other questions are pondered by Assistant Marketing Professor James Mourey in his book, “Urge: Why You Really Want What You Want (And How to Make Everyone Want What You’ve Got).”

“It turns out that knowing who buys what or why people buy isn’t nearly as straightforward as you think,” Mourey writes. “Some people buy products because they like them.

Others buy products because other people like them. People often buy products they don’t need (we’re all guilty of that), and some even buy products they may not even want…but if we dig a bit deeper, we can start to uncover some systematic consistencies that help us make better predictions about why consumers do the weird things that they do.”

Workplace Bullies Aim at Star and Subpar Performers

Workplace bullies most often target colleagues who are high or low performers, according to a study co-authored by Assistant Professor of Management Jaclyn Jensen for the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Low performers tend to be the focus of overt hostility, such as yelling, while high performers are more likely to be victimized by subtle aggression, such as backstabbing and sabotage.

“Although good performance is often emphasized,” the study notes, “these results suggest concern for high performers and whether or not they ‘have a target on their back.’” To defuse bullying, managers should avoid performance metrics that compare employees directly and mentor low performers, Jensen and her co-authors suggest.

Fifty Alternatives to Downsizing

“Organizational downsizing fails to achieve two major goals: increases in effectiveness and efficiency,” writes Associate Management Professor Marty Martin in a study he co-wrote for the International Journal of Business and Social Research. “Alternatives are warranted to achieve these two goals without resorting to organizational downsizing.”

Martin and his research colleagues offer 50 alternatives to downsizing, from furlough days and retirement incentives to asking employees, customers and suppliers for their ideas for reducing costs and generating revenue.

“There are times when downsizing is necessary and appropriate. There are also times when downsizing is not the best solution,” the authors note. “These differences should be squarely addressed by the key decision makers within organizations to lay out a decision-making model that includes alternatives.”

A Supportive Work Culture Helps Women “Lean In”

Research co-authored by Assistant Professor of Management Alyssa Westring offers new insights into the debate sparked by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling book about the need for women to “lean in” to their careers to succeed.

Westring says, based on her research, “If we truly want more women to ‘lean in,’ we need to focus on the larger context— to think hard about how to create workplace cultures where women have the opportunity to thrive.”

Westring and her colleagues “made a remarkable discovery” when they surveyed 133 women physicians and biomedical researchers about work-family conflict for a study published in Academic Medicine, Westring writes in a Harvard Business Review blog. “Women working 60 hours a week in the most supportive departments fared significantly better than those working 45 hours a week in work units viewed as less supportive.”

The research found that supportive departments had four main characteristics: they recognized and appreciated nonwork aspects of life; provided equal access to resources and opportunities, such as administrative support, research space and funding and committee participation; addressed subtle and overt gender biases organizationwide; and were led by supervisors who actively supported women’s careers.

Low Interest Rate Mortgage Financing Challenges Housing Market Rebound

Millions of households that purchased homes or refinanced mortgages during the last four years, when interest rates were at historic lows, could challenge a housing market recovery if long-term interest rates were to rise quickly in the coming years, according to research from the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University. Increases in mortgage rates are expected due to continued pull back in the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policy, the study’s authors note.

“This research shows that locked-in households will be reluctant to sell their homes and finance other purchases at higher interest rates,” says Patric H. Hendershott, a senior research fellow at the institute, who coauthored the study with Jin Man Lee, the institute’s research director, and
James D. Shilling, professor and the Michael J. Horne Chair in Real Estate Studies.

Hispanic-Owned Businesses Bloom in Illinois

Hispanic-owned businesses are a small but growing force in the Illinois economy, according to a white paper sponsored by the Richard H. Driehaus Center for International Business in collaboration with the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and its Center for Hispanic Entrepreneurship.

Hispanic-owned ventures account for just 5 percent of the state’s businesses, but their number grew by 43 percent, compared with 16 percent for all other companies, from 2002 to 2007. During that period, payroll for Hispanic businesses rose by 28 percent, eight times that of other businesses, according to the research, which was based on U.S. Census data.

– Business Exchange Staff