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- Doctoral Thesis (19)
Given the profound changes in the demand for new innovative ways of developing and delivering services, the so-called “personal services” are responding to the digital challenge by using different approaches and at varying speed. Personal services are those services that can be found in sectors such as education, retail, hospitality (hotels, restaurants), craftmanship, art and entertainment. These are services that have been for so long designed around the idea that they only require “high-touch” personal encounters. However, due to the fact that the world today is becoming more digitalized and is heading towards what is known as a “digital revolution”, firms from this sector must look for new and alternative ways on how to adapt their business models, organizational structures, and service offerings, especially by taking advantage of the use and application of digital technologies. Thus, leading these firms to avoid what could be a long-term business collapse.
Despite the fact that it is true that certain companies within this industry such as Airbnb, VR-All-Art, or HelloFresh have managed to disrupt traditional business paradigms, even leading to building billion-dollar businesses, the reality is that personal services represent one of the few service sectors struggling the most to achieve the transition from analog to digital and thus, primarily rely on traditional and analog business models. Guidance regarding the path towards becoming digital is lacking.
To fill out this gap, this Ph.D. thesis aims to introduce a maturity model as a strategic and systematic instrument that help personal service firms to assess their current developmental digitalization stage and show trajectories for improvements to guide the transition from an analog towards a stage of “digital maturity” in a holistic and well-structured manner.
Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are economic mechanisms to compensate actors for providing environmental services.
Distributed Ledger TEchnologies (DLTs) are a system of electronic records that enables a network of independent participants to establish a consensus around a set of transactions. They are distributed databases organised as a chain of ordered information blocks, recorded by a network of computers.
DLTs enable the appearance of innovative applications (such as smart contracts, tokens, wallets and programmable money) to tackle recurrent PES issues and implement PES design advice found in the scientific literature. They also promise to facilitate new collaboration infrastructures for independent actors that pursue a common environmental goal. Through a common authoritative ledger that serves as a synchronizing backbone for managing interactions between independent network participants, DLTs enable coordinated collaboration efforts based on the transparent transaction of financial resources, the collective management of information regarding the state of the environmental resources and the management of activities that impact its transformation.
This study investigates how blockchain technologies might contribute to the success of PES schemes by lowering information asymmetries and transaction costs, by enabling the appearance of blockchain-supported applications that tackle specific PES deficiencies and by providing new institutional alternatives for governing the interaction of individuals for a common (environmental) purpose.
This study proposes that blockchain-supported applications are likely to improve current PES schemes by making them more transparent, by reducing the costs associated to maintaining trust and by reducing the need for certain intermediary services. It also envisions new types of peer-to-peer payments for environmental services emerging as a consequence of decentralization and distributed ledger technologies.
Digital platforms (DPs) drastically change how users derive their value from offerings and how corporations interact with each other across fading global and organizational boundaries. The rapid development of DPs has already disrupted industries such as retail, entertainment, hospitality, transportation and fueled social and political controversies across the globe.
To evaluate the design of DPs in this thesis, I mainly rely on the concept engagement platforms (EPs). EPs are physical or virtual touchpoint designed to enable and ease the integration of resources. Thereby, co-creation of value between actors is facilitated. Such EPs utilize functionalities to attract users and build loyalty. As time and attention of users are limited, EPs providing the best fit and experience attract and bind the largest user base, thus further increasing their usefulness to users due to network effects. In an increasingly globalized and digitalized world, this leads to an increased occurrence of “winner takes all environments”. To cement their status and keep users on their EPs, platform operators implement features that constantly seek the user’s attention. Yet, these practices may impact users negatively, e.g., through addictive potential or stress.
Consequently, platform operators and designers who try to create impactful and supportive EPs should not solely focus on traditional marketing metrics, such as retention, and maximizing daily usage. Instead, understanding the intended value that users seek to derive provides more appropriate and sustainable solutions for engagement platforms users. This dissertation derives design knowledge for EPs of both the B2C and the B2B sectors. To derive design knowledge for operators and designers, this dissertation follows the Design Science Research approach to provide practitioners with actionable knowledge on how to inform platform design with insight based on the Service Logic.
This thesis analyses pricing and market design to allocate network access and recover network cost in electricity distribution networks with distributed generation and flexible consumers. The challenge of coordinating new, flexible, and increasingly active network users is the overarching motivation for the analyses in the four different papers. First, an introduction gives an overview of the background, main contents and conclusions. This is followed by the four academic papers, each picking up a separate, topical aspect of coordinating new network users in distribution grids.
The first paper contributes to the ongoing debate on integrating self-supply into the tariff structure of distribution grids and provides options to prevent a potentially inefficient, self-reinforcing dynamic. By analysing the evolution of self-supply shares in distribution grids depending on network charges, several options are revealed that adjust common charging parameters in order to maintain or restore financial stability. Paper 2 analyses the theoretical efficiency limits of the two-part tariff which is common in practice and trades-off economic efficiency with other requirements for the design of network charges. A formal comparison to the efficient benchmark of peak-load pricing reveals specific circumstances under which a two-part tariff simply cannot deliver fully efficient incentives. Paper 3 applies this to the practical challenge of steering investments into new technology for network users efficiently with network tariffs, thus broadening the perspective of the thesis from just self-supply and mere financial stability to efficient integration of active network users. The analysis shows how common uniform pricing distorts not only operation of existing assets, but also investments into new ones and thereby may lead to developing the distribution system inefficiently. The last paper focuses on access rights allocated by market mechanisms as an alternative or complement to regulated, listed access prices. Thus, it presents an account of different dimensions of access and the design of products and market rules for market-based allocation of access to electricity distribution grids. The paper finds that while differentiated access rights can theoretically be allocated efficiently by regulated, listed prices as well as in a market-based setting, pricing requires information on demand which network users ideally reveal in a market setting. A discussion of options for product and market design for access auctions carves out the potential benefits, as well as remaining challenges with market-based allocation.
In today’s world, corporate teamwork is increasingly characterized by co-creation and dispersed stakeholders that need to collaborate for specific purposes, such as innovation development (Frow et al., 2015; Yoo, 2013). The dispersed setting of team members motivates a virtual instead of an on-site performance of teamwork to increase the possibility of uniting multiple and suitable stakeholders for specific tasks, while reducing the efforts to commonly be in the same place at the same time (Lipnack & Stamps, 1999). To meet the needs of a contemporary, systematic procedure for Innovation Management in a globalized world, the collaborative and co-creative innovation development approach Design Thinking (DT) needs to be facilitated toward a virtual performance (Furmanek & Daurer, 2019; Gräßler et al., 2017; Gumienny et al., 2011).
In order to prepare the foundation for a Virtual Design Thinking (VDT) approach, an in-depth examination of commonly analog-performed DT was conducted, and its underlying principles identified. The examinations on DT enabled to further investigate how the innovation development approach can be applied virtually. This undertaking was accompanied by measurements that indicate the success of the VDT performance in adhering to a socio-cognitive view on effectiveness (Gilson et al., 2015; Hjørland, 2002).
With the aim to enable VDT, the research methodology Action Design Research was applied, which deploys practical, recurring, and meaningful interventions to gain insights regarding the collaboration of team members in a process of improving Information Systems in corporate problem contexts from a user-centered perspective (Sein et al., 2011; Veling et al., 2016). The emerging ensemble artifact, the VDT approach, mirrors an improved setting of given, real-life corporate problems (Purao et al., 2013). As a result, this dissertation presents an applicable VDT approach for companies that is perceived as satisfying and effective by the team members.
This dissertation investigates how cross-functional teams build and maintain trust. Teamwork is challenging and requires trust, a complex process created in the interaction of team members, and embedded in the organizational system. But there is limited research on how cross-functional teams build and maintain trust in practice, and on the meanings and interpretations that team members, managers, and consultants ascribe to trust. Much research explains how team members gather and signal trustworthy information, but not how they interpret this information during team interactions. To address these research gaps, this thesis draws on social practice theory and offers empirical evidence for a practice approach on trust in teams. Team members, managers, and consultants were interviewed and a cross-functional team kick-off was observed to find out how trust as a practice is conceptualized and produced. Qualitative content analysis, metaphor analysis, and interpretive analysis were used to analyze the data. Research findings include several metaphors of trust in cross-functional teams, specific trust-building and maintenance practices, and illustrations of how these practices are produced and reproduced in team interactions. Trust as a social practice thus moves research from the path of demonstrating that trust in teams is important in contexts of high vulnerability and uncertainty, to the path of how trust becomes important in these contexts by meaning and interpretation. Considering these findings, future studies should focus more on the collective patterns of meaningful activities that build and maintain trust, the use of metaphors to study trust in teams, and the nonverbal cues that build and maintain trust.
The Role of Individual Differences in the Prediction of Cooperation, Deviance, and Performance
(2019)
The present dissertation contributes to a deeper understanding about the effects of individual differences on three outcomes crucial for social and organizational functioning – cooperation, deviance, and performance. Chapter 1 describes the use of individual differences in predicting these behaviors in more detail, explains the most important individual difference (i.e., personality) and its conceptualizations, and provides an overview of the remaining chapters. In Chapter 2, it is shown that the relation between social value orientation (SVO) and cooperation is partially mediated by expectations of others’ behavior. In Chapter 3, the predictive validity of SVO for deviant behavior is demonstrated, whereas Chapter 4 meta-analytically examines the relations between broad personality domains and workplace deviance and shows that HEXACO Honesty-Humility is the strongest predictor out of all Big Five and HEXACO personality domains examined. In Chapter 5, it is demonstrated that the negative relation between age and workplace deviance is mediated by personality and negative affect. As such, findings of this chapter for the first time test the mechanisms underlying the negative relation between age and workplace deviance. The last empirical chapter of this dissertation examines how another important demographic characteristic – gender – relates to firm financial performance. Female representation on corporate boards and firm financial performance are neither positively nor negatively related. Together, these five empirical chapters provide valuable insights into the study of individual differences as predictors of behaviors that crucially determine social and organizational functioning. Chapter 7 summarizes the main findings, discusses theoretical and practical implications, and deduces directions for future research.
Since people spend around one third of their day at work, the question of which factors enhance their well-being and their motivation at work is an important one. Moreover, organizations have to face several challenges, such as a quickly changing global economic market, digitalization, and continuous need for innovation (Cascio & Montealegre, 2016; Frese, 2008; Leibold & Voelpel, 2006). Work engagement is a construct that is an asset for both employees and organizations. This dissertation aims to answer the question which factors may foster work engagement within organizations and how this is related to individual and organizational performance across different organizational levels. In order to shed light on these questions, this dissertation investigates how constructive and destructive leadership is related to work engagement and which role leaders’ work engagement itself may play for followers’ tendency to engage in their work. Additionally, since a lot of organizations are interested in the topic of work engagement, a new engagement assessment – the Engagement Index (ENG-I) – is introduced that faces both, scientific and organizational requirements. Finally, the link between individual and organizational work engagement and performance is analyzed by considering causality issues. In sum, this dissertation can show that indeed, leadership is an important lever for work engagement, that the ENG-I shows to be a statistically validated and well accepted measurement of work engagement, and that individual and organizational work engagement leads to individual and organizational performance.
Conserving the Earth’s natural resources is of great importance to the future of all living things. The science behind conservation is dominated by the natural sciences although it is clear that human behavior is at the root of most environmental degradation problems as well as the solutions. The behavioral social sciences offer relevant theory and valuable methodological tools to understand human behavior. Yet, research on human behavior remains underrepresented in the conservation sciences. Voluntary contributions are widely accepted mechanisms for promoting conservation and for measuring individual economic behavior. This thesis aims to address several aspects of human behavior and how they relate to contributions to marine conservation. This thesis consists of an introduction followed by three self-contained chapters and a conclusion.
Proximate stressors such as destructive fishing are key drivers damaging coral reef public goods. Conservation strategies that marshal local action and are tailored to the preferences of the target group are thus needed to sustain coral resources. Research 1 uses data from field experiments with a fishing community in Indonesia to test economic theory regarding preferences for giving time and money to environmental and other charitable causes. Each person is subject to one of four treatments: monetary donation, monetary donation match, volunteer time donation, and volunteer time donation match. Contrasting with the existing literature, we find that participants give significantly more when donating money compared to time. We also find that matching donations increases the percent of people giving but does not increase the amount donated. This research furthers our understanding of what motivates resource users in a developing country to contribute to the provision of public goods.
Using data collected from the same study population, research 2 examines the effect of social and psychographic characteristics on giving to public goods
Organizations are faced with a number of challenges for effectively managing their workforce, such as maintaining and developing employees’ knowledge against the background of demographic shifts, ensuring employees’ pro-organizational behavior, and conducting work in self-managed teams. Across four empirical chapters, the present dissertation investigates learning (studies 1 and 2) and leadership processes (studies 3 and 4) related to these organizational challenges, with an emphasis on the influence of the group context. Particularly, drawing from social identity theory and the information elaboration lens, studies 1 and 2 investigate processes and boundary conditions of knowledge development in age-diverse groups. In studies 3 and 4, I consider the group context when investigating leaders’ effect on followers’ pro-organizational behavior and the development of group members into informal leaders in self-managed teams. The studies showcase qualitative as well as quantitative approaches; they rely on multiple sources of data (i.e., supervisor/trainer/mentor narrative, employee ratings, information on team composition, behavioral data) as well as different forms of data collection (interviews, survey measures, experimental and field studies, interaction coding). The results were obtained using a range of analytical methods (qualitative content analysis, moderated meditation index, and micro-level interaction analysis). The findings have important implications for conceptualizing and designing learning in organizational groups in a way that promotes active sharing and integration of knowledge. Moreover, this thesis emphasizes the conceptual and empirical value of understanding leadership as a relational process coming into place through the interactions between leaders and followers. The results are also highly relevant for HRM practitioners who are in charge of training employees in diverse learning groups and responsible for selecting and developing leaders.
