Reflections from Employers on the Disabled Workforce: Focus Groups with Healthcare,Hospitality and Retail Administrators

Historically, employment rates for people with disabilities have been low. Despite legislation that prohibits the discrimination of this group in work settings, employers are reluctant to hire people with disabilities. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of employers with workers with disabilities. Three focus groups were conducted with 21 administrators from three business sectors (i.e., healthcare, hospitality, and retail). Content analysis indicated five primary themes: (1) importance of disability employment agencies and disability advocates; (2) persistence of manager bias; (3) lack of promotion opportunities; (4) costs associated with having workers with disabilities; and (5) benefits associated with having workers with disabilities. Implications include the need for intervention studies that address the challenges experienced by individuals with disabilities, particularly during hiring and promoting phases of employment, and educational efforts to inform administrators and managers of the few costs and numerous benefits associated with having workers with disabilities.     

Weathering the storm: best practices for nonprofits in crisis

• Nonprofit organizations are as susceptible to crisis as any organization as exemplified by Livestrong's attempts to outlive Lance Armstrong's downfall and Planned Parenthood (PP) overcoming Susan G. Komen for the Cure's (SGK) policy to defund organizations under investigation. The public battles held on social media during crises such as these have forced organizations onto new battlegrounds. Supporters for each of these nonprofits proudly shared their thoughts via tweets (e.g. #IstandwithPP) and status updates, as the organizations raced to control the situation. PP had tweeted SGK's policy change creating a bevy of support while sending SGK into a reversal that is still costing racers. Surveys were distributed following Armstrong's performance-enhancing drug use confession and SGK's funding policy announcement to determine attitudes toward giving after organizational crisis. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was used to assess the strength of attitude, social norms, and perceived behavioral control on the intent to donate to these organizations. The use of TPB expands nonprofit marketing horizons by helping better understand stakeholder intentions and their causes. On the basis of the findings, best practices for nonprofits handling crisis were identified. In particular, organizations need to know their target audiences, know what will make supporters remain, look at crises as opportunities for renewal, be honest, and apologize when appropriate.

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Entrepreneurial intent in a transitional economy: an application of the theory of planned behavior to Romanian students

This study examines entrepreneurial intent in Romanian students using the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, Adv. Exp. Soc. Psychol., 20:1–63, 1987). Using multiple regression analyses to test for mediation, we analyzed survey data from 324 Romanian students. Some of our findings were consistent with the Theory of Planned Behavior, while others were not. As expected, we found that self-efficacy and the desirabilities associated with creating a venture were positively related to entrepreneurial intent. However, surprisingly, we found that the more supportive the students’ referents were, the less likely the students were to have intentions of starting a business.     

Mission-first social enterprises: A case study of how three nonprofit organizations avoided mission drift when forming and operating social enterprises

The purpose of this study was to examine how leaders of nonprofit social enterprises manage the tension between social mission and financial goals to avoid mission drift. The study employed a case study/cross-case analysis design and used the qualitative research methods of interviewing, document review, and participant observation. We found tremendous variation in the strategies created for the organizations included in the study (n = 3). We labeled strategies as (a) structured ignorance, (b) problem reframing, and (c) defensible trade-offs. Further research is needed to identify a comprehensive typology of strategies; however, there are immediate practical and social implications of this study. Specifically, the strategies identified here can be considered by nonprofit practitioners struggling with the mission/money tension. Additionally, these strategies challenge commonly held beliefs about the relationship among nonprofits, social service, and revenue generating activities.     

Employer responses to disability: Preliminary evidence and a research agenda

Representatives from 50 New Jersey private-sector businesses that had accommodated one or more workers with disabilities were interviewed about their experiences. This purposive sample included large and small businesses from a variety of industries located in every section of the state. Respondents were asked about the nature of the individual’s disability, how the accommodation was determined, what accommodations were considered and implemented, the costs of the accommodations, their success, and the performance level of the accommodated individual. Most respondents reported positive experiences in hiring, accommodating, and evaluating the performance of workers with disabilities. Fifty-four percent of the respondents who made accommodations reported that the accommodations cost nothing; another 16% spent less than $500 on the accommodation. Because so little research exists on the subject of accommodating workers with disabilities, a research agenda is proposed.     

Strategies for competitive advantage in nonprofit organisations

In the commercial sector, a range of strategies has been proposed for competitive advantage. Many of these strategies are inappropriate for nonprofit organisations. (The terms ‘nonprofit’, ‘not-for-profit’ and ‘charity’ are used interchangeably in this paper.) This paper proposes four generic strategies for competitive advantage in nonprofit organisations: externally driven, niche, differentiation and awareness. The niche strategy has two sub-strategies: the issue or emotional niche and the geographical niche. Differentiation has three sub-strategies; differentiation by audience, differentiation by product and differentiation by belief. These four strategies are not mutually exclusive and many nonprofit organisations move from one strategy to another. A development model for these transitions is proposed.     

Do social enterprises attract workers who are more pro-socially motivated than their counterparts in for-profit organizations to perform low-skilled jobs?

Abstract

The literature highlights that social enterprises (SEs) attract workers who are motivated to help others and to meet the social aims in which they believe. However, this assumption is challenged in the case of low-skilled jobs. Therefore, we have performed an empirical study in the quasi-market of service vouchers in Belgium to know if SEs attract workers who have a different motivational profile than their counterparts in for-profit organizations (FPOs) to perform low skilled jobs (N = 217). No significant differences were found. Next, we have compared FPOs with two types of social enterprises, Home Care Services Organizations (HCSOs) and Work Integration Social enterprises (WISEs), and again no significant differences were found for the whole sample. However, it seems that a selection effect exists in WISEs when the sample is reduced to people who were not previously unemployed. In others words, when WISEs deviate from their initial mission of ‘hiring the most vulnerable people on the labor market’, it is only to hire workers whose are highly motivated to achieve the organization’s mission and who fit with the values defended by the organization.     

高职学生信息交互行为的影响因素研究

在高职学生的发展过程中,信息交互是高职学生获取隐性信息的重要方法之一,可以提高学生的可持续发展能力。然而由于其自身的特殊性,隐性信息的获取是及其困难的。因此本文以计划行为理论为基础,以高职学生为研究对象,深入了解高职学生对待信息交互的态度,在此基础上,拟定问卷并进行调研,最后利用SPSS13.0对调研的数据进行信度和效度分析,从而得出影响高职学生信息交互行为的要素。     

The fundraiser's journey: A developmentally informed,grounded theory analysis

Fundraisers play a vital role in the success of nonprofit organizations, yet relatively little is known about the experiences, motivations, and thought processes that inform their career choice and development. This exploratory, cross-comparative case study of 3 fundraisers addresses this gap in the literature by examining some formative influences on fundraisers' careers, their professional growth aspirations and opportunities, and how, if at all, they engage in personal philanthropy. Results suggest that fundraisers' aptitudes, skills, and abilities may influence their career choice more than a sense of connection to the nonprofit sector or organizational mission. Further, fundraisers seek opportunities to exercise leadership at the individual, organizational, and community levels. Additionally, their personal philanthropy and social embeddedness play integral roles in their professional development. Although not large enough for generalization, these results suggest the need to study fundraisers holistically, including their psychological development and social embeddedness over time. We argue for the need to move beyond traditional marketing and public relations perspectives to explain fundraising. Instead, future studies should adopt a service-dominant logic framing that considers fundraisers as part of a larger philanthropic ecosystem. We conclude with several questions to guide future studies toward this line of inquiry.     

The shape of hiring and separation costs in France

In this article, we estimate the structure of costs of hiring, terminating, and retiring employees in France. We use a representative panel data set of French establishments that contains direct measures of these various costs as well as measures of entries and exits for the years 1992 and 1996.First, we show that our panel data source is able to reproduce results obtained by Abowd and Kramarz (2003) when we use the cross-section dimension. Our estimates show that collective terminations are much more expensive than individual terminations: legislation, namely the requirement to set up a “social plan” in case of collective terminations, magnifies firing costs. Collective terminations entail very large fixed costs. Termination costs are essentially linear in the number of terminated workers, with collective terminations being much more expensive. The costs of retirement are concave in the number of retired workers with a fixed cost component which is smaller than the one estimated for terminations, and quite smaller than that obtained by Abowd and Kramarz (2003). Finally, we find that hiring costs are small and seem only present when hiring on CDI; costs of hiring on short-term contracts are almost zero. Finally, the fixed (firm-specific) component of hiring costs is very small.     

CSR and service quality in nonprofit organizations: the case of a performing arts association

• The relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and marketing performance has been widely investigated recently, but mostly in relation to for-profit companies. This paper highlights the importance of this topic for nonprofit organizations (NPOs). Focusing on an Italian NPO operating in the performing arts and entertainment industry, two empirical studies (a quantitative survey and a qualitative exploratory enquiry) prove the strategic relevance of CSR in nonprofit contexts. The results demonstrate that CSR can be considered an additional dimension of the customer perception of service quality in NPOs and reveal that customer perception of the social responsibility of the studied NPO is strongly linked to its institutional mission and to the modalities through which it pursues that mission.

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Buying into the ‘good worker’ rhetoric or being as good as they need to be? The effort bargaining process of new migrant workers

A great deal of attention in the literature has focused upon employers' stereotypical perceptions of Central and Eastern European workers as ‘good workers’, and the impact such views have on hiring processes in low‐skilled employment. Drawing on multiple case studies, this paper examines the good worker rhetoric through the lens of the effort bargaining process and hard HRM strategies that target marginalised workers in the labour market. In particular, the extent to which migrant workers buy into the rhetoric is explored. It is argued that migrant workers do not fully buy in to the good worker rhetoric because of issues such as high levels of education and personal aspirations and importantly, issues related to employers' strategies, bullying, discrimination, and the segmentation of migrant workers in each organisation.     

Iterated weak dominance and subgame dominance

In this paper, we consider finite normal form games satisfying transference of decisionmaker indifference. We show that any set of strategies surviving k rounds of elimination of some weakly dominated strategies can be reduced to a set of strategies equivalent to the set of strategies surviving k rounds of elimination of all weakly dominated strategies in every round by (at most k) further rounds of elimination of weakly dominated strategies. The result develops work by Gretlein [Gretlein, R., 1983. Dominance elimination procedures on finite alternative games. International Journal of Game Theory 12, 107–113]. We then consider applications and demonstrate how we may obtain a unified approach to the work by Gretlein and recent results by Ewerhart [Ewerhart, C., 2002. Iterated weak dominance in strictly competitive games of perfect information. Journal of Economic Theory 107, 474-482] and Marx and Swinkels [Marx, L.M., Swinkels, J.M., 1997. Order independence for iterated weak dominance. Games and Economic Behavior 18, 219-245].     

Chance Events and Executive Career Rebranding: Implications For Career Coaches and Nonprofit HRM

We conducted and analyzed interviews with 20 executives from the for‐profit sector who had transitioned into second careers in the nonprofit sector. Our qualitative study provides an in‐depth analysis of the critical events that triggered career agency and stimulated the change process. At each stage of transition, the executives revisited their personal brands, deciding how to best position their skills, knowledge, and values within the context of their new nonprofit organizations. This research contributes to academic and practitioner knowledge of new career paths open to mid‐ and late‐career executives and insights for nonprofit leadership, as many nonprofits can anticipate major shortages of qualified executives. Each stage in the career transition process provides opportunities for human resource professionals to contribute to successful nonprofit leadership change: first, by creating opportunities for “chance events” motivating transition, followed by career coaching opportunities before and throughout the transition. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Taking the quantum leap: nonprofits are now in business. an Australian perspective

The fact that they need to deliver more essential social services is accepted by most professionals working in nonprofit organisations. Yet, needing to become more competitive, increasingly ‘businesslike’ and to start creating partnerships with profit‐driven businesses may require a quantum leap to take place. This hard reality imposed by recent changes in government policy is challenging for many social service workers still coming to terms with a decade of turbulent and changing times. From origins of ‘she'll be right mate’ and a community‐held belief that it is the government's responsibility to finance all essential social services, today's nonprofits are increasingly fighting over smaller funding budgets and feeling the pinch as they have to implement business practices that will ultimately make them more accountable, profitable and attractive to prospective business partnerships. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to present an option to larger Australian nonprofit organisations keen to move away from a dependency model of service delivery and open to exploring the possibility of implementing a marketing communications charter which includes the appointment of a business development manager. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Nonlinear Structural Equation Models with the Theory of Planned Behavior: Comparison of Multiple Group and Latent Product Term Analyses

Nonlinear relationships in structural equation analysis became moreinteresting for applied researchers since the implementation of nonlinearconstraints in software programs (i.e., LISREL). This article provides acomprehensive application of the expectancy × value part of the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) including interactions of latent variables.The main purpose of the study is to overcome limitations of similarprevious analyses of Baumgartner and Bagozzi (1995) and Yang Jonsson (1997,1998) with an empirical example from representative survey data. Nonlinearrelationships of the theories' constructs (Attitude toward the behavior, subjectivenorm and perceived behavioral control) are analyzed one upon another withmultiple group comparisons and latent interaction models. Results confirmthe strategy to use multiple group techniques for preliminary analyses(i.e., detection of an interaction effect). With latent interaction models thestrength and the significance of the interaction is estimated under controlfor random measurement error. Parameters, standard errors, andgoodness-of-fit statistics are compared between three estimationtechniques (ML, GLS and WLS). Multiple group analyses and latentinteraction modeling detect a significant interaction for perceivedbehavioral control but not for attitude toward the behavior and subjective norm. Variations of the estimators of the perceived behavioral controlsubmodel is proved by bootstrapping. Further model improvements andalternative model techniques are discussed in the final chapter.     

The moderating role of anticipated affective ambivalence in the formation of entrepreneurial intentions

Students’ predictions of the affective consequences of starting their own business encompass, simultaneously, positive and negative thoughts and feelings (anticipated affective ambivalence). We theorize that anticipated affective ambivalence constitutes a significant element in the entrepreneurial process holding a central role in the realization of entrepreneurial intentions. In the herein presented research, we propose and test a model within which anticipated affective ambivalence is expected to moderate the impact of attitudes towards entrepreneurship (ATT), subjective norms (SN), and perceived behavioral control (PBC) on entrepreneurial intention. Results from a large sample of university student participants found that anticipated affective ambivalence moderated the effects of ATT and SN on entrepreneurial intention (INT) but not the effect of PBC on INT. Theoretically the findings introduce affective ambivalence in the area of nascent entrepreneurship and within the Theory of Planned Behavior model. Practically, the study highlights affective ambivalence in the context of universities’ increasing interest to promote entrepreneurship and to develop suitable educational programs.     

Understanding social influence in Facebook fundraising: Relationship strength,immediacy of needs,and number of donations

Crowdfunding through social media has presented challenges and opportunities for nonprofit and voluntary sector organizations. To better understand how organizations can harness the power of social media in fundraising, the current research examined the effects of different types of Facebook fundraising posts on donor engagement. Based on Social Impact Theory, three factors of social influence were investigated, including relationship strength with the fundraiser creator, immediacy or urgency of the fundraising need, and number of donations. An online experiment was conducted using samples recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. A repeated measures test was performed to explore the effects of three social influence factors on perceived source credibility, feeling of social presence, attitude toward the post, and intention to click, share, and donate. Strongest main effects were found for immediacy of needs. Facebook fundraising posts for an urgent need generated much more positive responses than posts for a nonurgent need. Interaction effects were also found among three variables in perceived credibility and intention to click. Personal relevance and perceived risk moderated the effects of number of donations on intention to donate. Implications for nonprofit and voluntary sector organizations were discussed.     

A conceptual framework for understanding and developing entrepreneurial behaviour: implications for social marketers

• Inculcating entrepreneurial behaviour is beneficial to both individuals and the society at large. The Theory of Planned Behaviour has been generally applied to understand and examine entrepreneurial behaviour. However, as the underpinnings of this theory are not adequate for understanding the entire process of the development of entrepreneurial behaviour, a more comprehensive theoretical framework is required. Combining the Theory of Planned Behaviour with the Stages of Change Theory provides such a comprehensive theoretical framework. The Stages of Change Theory is used in the social marketing field to facilitate behavioural change, which has also been recently applied in organizational‐related studies, such as change management. A methodological and analytical approach is also suggested for empirically validating the framework developed in this study. The implications of this framework for theory and practice are discussed, as are directions for future research, which would be of use to researchers and practitioners in the social marketing field.

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.