Workers with Disabilities: Exploring the Hiring Intentions of Nonprofit and For-profit Employers

Using the Theory of Planned Behavior as a conceptual framework, focus groups were held with nonprofit and for-profit employers in order to examine behavioral intentions to hire workers with disabilities. Content analysis revealed the following main themes: (1) For-profit hiring strategies were driven by a mission to sell a product or service; (2) Nonprofit hiring strategies were driven by a mission to serve the community; (3) Forprofit hiring and nonprofit hiring were impacted by the economy; (4) Although driven to have diverse workforces, the number of workers with disabilities was largely unknown; and (5) Employer attitudes mattered and impacted job opportunities for people with disabilities. Implications of this qualitative study highlight the utility of the Theory of Planned Behavior and the role that nonprofit managers and leaders may play in improving employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities.     

Explaining Market Heterogeneity in Terms of Value Perceptions

In the past decade, companies and academics have become aware of the great benefits of creating value for customers. However, little empirical research has yet been conducted in the area of services with respect to how customers may differ in their perceptions of value and what variables can explain such differences. This article provides an insight into how three relationship-based contingencies are likely to explain market heterogeneity in customers' perceptions of value. In particular, we explore how special treatment of the customer by the service provider, the level of customer involvement with the service, and the customer's accumulated experience with a particular company may act as predictors of market heterogeneity in the customer's perceptions of value within a service setting. Results offer evidence for the important role of relationships and experience in a service context mainly characterised by standard encounters, and provide interesting managerial insights to tailor strategies that effectively respond to market heterogeneity.     

Examining the influence of control and convenience in a self-service setting

The constructs of perceived control and convenience have been identified in previous qualitative studies of self-service technology (SST) use as important factors; yet empirically their effects are relatively unknown. Based on the theory of planned behavior, this study explores how control and convenience perceptions influence customers’ utilitarian (speed of transaction) and hedonic (exploration) motivations for using an SST. In addition, we explore how trust in a service provider influences customers’ future SST intentions. Two studies were undertaken to assess both users and nonusers’ evaluations of an SST. The results revealed that perceived control and convenience do impact the intentions of customers to use an SST in the future; however, their impact was mediated through the constructs of speed of transaction, exploration, and trust. Increased control and convenience perceptions influenced exploration, trust and speed evaluations, which in turn were associated with stronger perceived value, higher SST satisfaction judgments, and increased SST usage intentions. Managerial implications stemming from the empirical findings are discussed along with directions for future research.     

Project selection and audited accrual measurement in a multi-task setting

This paper studies monitoring and accrual measurement in a principal-agent setting. The advantage of the principal-agent setting is that it allows accrual measurement to be explicitly connected to monitoring and to encompass questions of managerial behaviour and communication incentives. It also allows the analysis to take place in a setting where competing and complementary sources of information are available. Here the accrual measurement is used to discipline other, perhaps more timely, sources of information and to carry information itself. The argument rests on a two-period agency setting. The usual moral hazard story is expanded to include the agent also observing .a potential project opportunity (e.g. an additional customer, a labour-saving opportunity or whatever). This creates an interest in monitoring the agent's project selection. This monitoring may, it turns out, be useful for purposes of controlling the familiar short-run versus long-run tension or for better managing short-run incentives. Accrual questions enter in terms of allocating the project's up-front cost across the two periods, thereby separating expenditure from expense. In information-content terms, though, this turns out, given that cashflow is observed, to be equivalent to a monitor story that reports on project selection.     

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