Advances in Business Research

Brand Personification and Money: The Effect of Collective vs. Solo Brands on Monetary Decisions

2024-06-25T09:01:54+00:00

For decades, marketing professionals have crafted brands with human-like traits, like Mr. Clean and Tony the Tiger, to create emotional connections and influence buying behavior. Scholars have explored brand personification, examining its effects and mechanisms. This research investigates anthropomorphic collective branding, which involves using multiple anthropomorphized brand entities to create a collective brand presence. Two experiments revealed that consumers evaluate collective brands more positively than solo ones, particularly in financial decisions such as Buy Now Pay Later services or donations. Trust was found to mediate this effect, enhancing positive evaluations. These findings contribute to the understanding of brand anthropomorphism, highlighting the effectiveness of collective branding strategies in specific decision-making contexts. Future research could explore how these strategies influence consumer behavior in diverse financial settings, like gambling or other financial transactions. For marketing professionals, this study emphasizes the nuanced impact of different types of brand anthropomorphism on brand evaluation, depending on the consumer decision context. Leveraging these insights can help optimize branding strategies to better engage consumers.

The Role of Gender in Transformational Information Technology Leadership: Extending the Glass-Cliff Theory

2024-05-28T10:05:34+00:00

The glass cliff phenomenon refers to a tendency to appoint women to leadership positions when organizational performance is declining, often resulting in lower levels of female leader success. This phenomenon is well documented in management literature, however, the social and psychological mechanisms that lead to these appointments are still poorly understood and have not been investigated in the Information Technology (IT) field. Therefore, this study fills a gap in the literature by developing a model of predicted IT leadership success and predicted transformational IT leadership. Results of a scenario-based experiment indicate that expectations tend to be higher for female candidates. Additionally, when members of a leader hiring team score higher in terms of sexism, they tend to rate transformational information technology (IT) leadership of female leaders higher. This may explain the glass cliff phenomenon since transformational IT leaders are believed to be better suited to turning around poor-performing teams. Implications of gender for IT researchers, hiring teams, and leader evaluation boards are discussed.

Boldly Going Where No AACSB Standard Has Gone Before: How AACSB Business Colleges Are Complying with the New Standard 9

2024-04-18T14:07:06+00:00

In July 2020, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) released its 2020 Guiding Principles and Standards for Business Accreditation, which consists of nine standards centered around the three pillars of engagement, innovation, and impact. To emphasize the importance of considering all business stakeholders, the updated standards included the new Standard 9: Engagement and Societal Impact, centered on business schools incorporating societal impact into their curriculum, scholarship, and activities. However, because many schools have not undertaken a Continuous Improvement Review (CIR) visit since this new adoption, many are struggling to meet Standard 9. This first-of-its-kind study reports the findings of a survey sent to AACSB-accredited business schools to investigate their United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) selection and measurement rubrics. The findings as to which SDGs were chosen, why they were chosen, and how they will be measured elicit valuable discussions regarding accreditation compliance in general and societal impact more specifically. The results also illuminate potential issues such as refusals to align societal impact with the suggested SDGs, schools selecting too many SDGs, and measurement rubrics that are too broad to evaluate success. The results of this survey will help AACSB business schools comply with this new standard and hopefully produce a lasting impact in the business community beyond just the bottom line.

Millenials in the Mirror: Work Motivation Factors for Generation Z (Gen Z)

2024-06-25T07:40:12+00:00

At twenty percent of the population, Generation Z (Gen Z) will soon become a substantial segment of the workforce in the United States. Gen Z has unique characteristics apart from their predecessors, the Millennials. This creates a challenge for organizations as they seek to recruit and retain both Millennials and Gen Z. This study applied the Work Motivation Inventory, used by Calk & Patrick (2017) to examine Millennials’ workplace motivating factors, to determine the motivating factors for Gen Z and how Gen Z differs from their predecessors. Results show that Gen Z is more primarily motivated by factors such as salary and benefits and meaningful work while the previous study showed Millennials being primarily motivated by the desire for recognition and the opportunities for interactions while working as part of a team.