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This study aims to extend service climate research from its existing focus on routine service for external clients into a knowledge-intensive, internal (KII) service setting. This extension was important because internal knowledge workers may operate from a monopolistic perspective and not view themselves as service providers because of the technical/professional nature of their work.

Two surveys were distributed in participating organizations. One survey, completed by employees in information technology (IT) service units, contains measures of service climate, climate antecedents and technical competence. The second survey, filled out by members of their corporate customer units, taps their evaluations of service quality.

Service climate in IT service units significantly predicted service evaluations by their respective customer units. Importantly, service climate was more predictive than IT service employees’ technical competency. Role ambiguity, empowerment and work facilitation were also found to be significant service climate antecedents.

These results provided strong empirical evidence supporting an extension of the existing service climate research to KII service settings. To the extent that front-line service employees rely on internal support to deliver quality service to external customers, managers should work to enhance the service climate in internal support units, which ultimately improves external service quality.

This is the first study that establishes the robustness of the service climate construct in KII service settings. It makes service climate a useful managerial tool for improving both internal and external service quality.

This study was undertaken to discover working public thoughts about roles of United States women in leadership positions and to test the relationship between managerial leadership styles and organizational effectiveness. A survey of perceptions of leadership roles and effectiveness distributed 700 randomly selected entities from industries in the United States. Findings suggest approximately 50% of women leaders perceive barriers that prevent women for entering management positions and lower advancement rates for women. This study shows that aspiration in women exists whether or not they take action and motivate themselves to advance for top management positions. However, barriers like discrimination, family-life demands, prejudice, and stereotyping result in fruitlessness in many cases. The majority of women and men felt education and training could increase the preparedness of women for leadership roles. Respondents expressed overwhelming support for a participative leadership style. A positive association existed between participative leadership style and organizational effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an insurance framework to address the challenge of managing default risk for lenders providing credit to small and micro businesses.

A theoretical model is developed showing how mircrofinance lenders can better manage the default risks of small and micro businesses, which assists lenders in sustainably providing affordable microfinance.

The model explains how to determine the feasible range of insurance premiums to advise lenders on the appropriate price for microinsurance protecting against small and micro business default. This will enable microfinance institutions to better manage default risk, and thereby provide sustainable and accessible microfinance assistance to small and micro businesses.

The need for microfinance is essential to support small and micro businesses. The insurance framework assists financial institutions in managing default risk of small and micro businesses, enhancing sustainability of these critical financing channels, and supporting the economic development of society in both the developed and developing worlds. The insurance framework proposed will help both policymakers and financial institutions to make better economic decisions, thereby serving small and micro businesses.

This is the first study in the area of microfinance to propose a way to solve the challenge of providing sustainable mircrofinance services and mitigating small and micro businesses’ difficulty in receiving the financial help they need.

In this paper, I synthesize the prior psychology literature on ego depletion and apply this literature to an auditing setting. Ego depletion refers to a reduced desire or ability to use self-control in task performance due to using self-control on prior tasks. I focus on the likely causes and consequences of depletion in an auditing setting, as well as means of mitigating depletion and recovering self-control resources. While ego depletion theory is prevalent in the psychology literature, little is known about whether or how ego depletion affects professionals on meaningful task performance. As a result, this synthesis is aimed at stimulating future ego depletion research in accounting, and specifically auditing, by surveying existing literature and applying this literature to an auditing setting. Further, I develop 13 questions for future research to investigate. My synthesis reveals that ego depletion likely has a pervasive effect in an auditing setting, and can hinder auditors’ judgment and decision-making (JDM) quality. Therefore, this synthesis helps to provide a greater understanding of the impact of auditing tasks on individuals, and refines both auditor JDM and ego depletion theories.

Beneficiary photos on charity appeals are believed to engender prosocial behavior. This study explores photo framing of healthy and unhealthy beneficiary photos in the context of photo-rich online medical crowdfunding. Based on framing theory, emphasis framing effect (i.e. unhealthy photos only vs both healthy and unhealthy photos) and equivalency framing effect (i.e. healthy photos prior to unhealthy photos vs unhealthy photos prior to healthy photos) are identified.

A scenario-based experiment with 135 participants was used to empirically test the proposed research hypotheses. The subjects were randomly assigned to three treatment groups, with 45 subjects in each group. ANOVA, linear regression, and multiple mediation analysis were used to analysis data.

The results reveal that disclosing both healthy and unhealthy photos can elicit stronger sympathy and perceived need than merely disclosing unhealthy photos. Moreover, the order of unhealthy photos prior to healthy photos leads to a higher level of sympathy than the order of healthy photos prior to unhealthy photos. Furthermore, sympathy and perceived need are positively related to donation intention.

First, this study extends the photo-related research limited to certain characteristics of a single photo to the sequence effect of multiple photos. Second, this study contributes to framing theory by introducing photo framing, particularly the equivalence and emphasis framing effect of beneficiary photos. Finally, this study reveals the emotional and cognitive routes through which beneficiary photos stimulate prosocial behavior. It also offers practical guidance in the aspects of the framing effect of beneficiary photos for crowdfunding management.