Overview

The faculty of the Gonzaga University School of Business Administration prides itself on the quality and amount of research it produces. Ultimately we believe that research makes us better teachers, for it requires us to stay up-to-date not only in our discipline but also with current events. This Knowledge Center is designed to share with each of you the thoughts and research of our faculty. Our goal is to present what our faculty are doing in an informative and interesting way. We wish to spark your curiosity and help you think about a variety of subjects. We are also interested in hearing what you would like to know more about. Please let us know how we are doing. Thank you.

Recent Work by SBA Faculty

Molly Pepper and Peggy Sue Loroz recently published an important study on women, work lives and stress. This research examines three proactive exercises which can be used to avoid and overcome burnout. Although stress from the many competing roles a professional woman typically embodies can be a cause of burnout, one potential avenue for reducing emotional exhaustion and bolstering a sense of personal accomplishment lies in determining, through reflection, the concrete ways that she can make a positive difference in each of these roles (find a PowerPoint presentation here). 

Scott Bozman, Dan Friesner (North Dakota State University), Matt McPherson and David Ching-I Teng (Chang Gung University) looked at how differences in brand equity impacted online auction behavior. Results indicated that auction participants used different strategies across a number of variables, most notably when bidding on preferred brands. You can find the title page and abstract here and results tables here.

In a paper currently under review, Scott Bozman, Dan Friesner (North Dakota State University), Matt McPherson and Nancy Chase present a simple framework to analyze the tangible and intangible benefits of an university athletics department.  Using the Gonzaga University (GU) Athletic Department as a case study, they found the brand equity associated with the Department to be approximately $5.8 million in 2006.  Of this, between $926,000 and $2.71 million can be ascribed to a specific type of tangible brand equity; namely, the impact of GU athletic events on the economic vitality of the local community.  The remainder is attributed to intangible brand equity benefits, which are yet to be specifically identified and monetarily assessed. You can find the survey instrument here and the IRB approval letter here.

By using survey data collected from supply chain management and manufacturing professionals, Kevin Henrickson, Ashish Thatte and Erica Johnson found that a firm's use of mass customization (MC) is positively influenced by customer relationship practice, postponement, and product and process modularity. Existing literature on trade-offs between firm objectives is limited by the number of empirical studies.  This article contributes to the literature by analyzing how a firm's MC strategy impacts their ability to compete based on product quality, delivery performance, product innovation, and time to market of new products.  The results indicate that MC and product quality represent trade-offs to firms as competitive goals, while MC and both delivery dependability and product innovation are compatible firm objectives which can be pursued in tandem (read more here).

Molly Pepper and two Gonzaga colleagues recently authored an article on transparency and diversity. According to Pepper, once upon a time organizations could keep secrets from their stakeholders. Back when information was less accessible and bad news traveled more slowly, organizations could sometimes sweep their misdeeds "under the rug" and hide them from sight. Nowadays, with employees and other stakeholders connected to the organization and each other 24/7, keeping secrets is often no longer an option for organizations. Transparency is the new buzzword of business. Many organizations voluntarily report their missteps. Others are forced by their stakeholders to own up to mistakes. This study examined how a group of stakeholder's perceptions of an organization's transparency around bias incidents affect stakeholder trust and perceptions of the organization's commitment to diversity. Results suggest that transparency is important to building and maintaining perceptions that the organization is committed to its stated diversity goals (read more here).

Dan Lawson and his colleagues examined the extent to which individual demographic characteristics of owners influence the use of debt and equity.  The effects of traditional capital structure determinants and manager age, gender, business experience, education, wealth, and sophistication were examined for their impact on the capital structure of single-owner corporations.  The authors calculated the marginal contribution of personal risk tolerance and demonstrated that owner preference contributes meaningfully to the explained variation in capital structure decisions (read more here).

Erica Johnson, in conjunction with Trudy Ann Cameron (University of Oregon) and J.R. DeShazo (UCLA), is working to better understand the benefits of environmental, health, and safety policies.  Individuals cannot easily show their demand for policies that provide health risk reductions in a market like they can show their demand for most other goods.  In this paper, we investigated whether adults who have children have a different demand for risk reductions than adults who do not have children.  We found that demand for risk reductions for the adult increase with each additional young child in the household.  We think this is because young children are dependent on their parents, so the parent needs to be in good health to care for them and thus there is a higher demand for their own health risk reductions.  We found the demand for health reductions decreases with each additional teenager in the household and we guess that this is because teenagers are typically more independent than younger children.  Plus, teenagers may be expensive with cars, car insurance, weddings, and college costs looming, so parents may choose to spend less on their own health and direct more money to their teenagers.  Knowing the benefits of a prospective environmental or health policy is important since it helps determine whether the tax dollars being used to fund the program are worth it or if these dollars could be better spent elsewhere (read more here).