Rebrand Like a Butterfly: Preparing Organizations to Make Rational Rebranding Decisions

Harsanyi, Maria A University of Maryland University College ProQuest 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Rebranding is forecasted to cost as much as 140 billion dollars reflecting 20% of the global marketing budget in 2020 (Lauck, 2019; Wieser, 2019). As the success of rebranding initiatives is diverse, and many, in fact, fail, it seems that organizations are engaging in risky rebranding initiatives before they are prepared to make a rational decision (Muzellec, 2004). The purpose of this dissertation is to determine whether and how considering key factors will prepare organizations to make rational rebranding decisions. The research question addressed is Will considering the three factors: stakeholder advocacy, brand identity, and brand strategy prepare organizations to make rational rebranding decisions? This dissertation expands on the current body of evidence in positioning organizations to make informed rebranding decisions by investigating the possible cumulative impact of the three factors. The research method is a systematic review and thematic synthesis of the empirical evidence across 47 articles. The three main findings: (1) considering stakeholders, especially employees, is critical in the rebranding decision process; (2) establishing brand identity facilitates better rebranding decision-making; and (3) leveraging brand strategy challenges and opportunities support improved rebranding decisions provide the evidence necessary for improving the rationality of rebranding decisions. The recommendations derived from this research are that organizations should ensure stakeholder involvement and buy-in starting with the employees, focus on the brand identity, and be prepared to reevaluate the organizational rebranding decision readiness.

Intergenerational Mentoring: A Systematic Review of Facilitating Knowledge Transfer in a Multigenerational Workforce

Pruett, Candace Christine University of Maryland University College ProQuest 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

The business problem addressed in this study is the failure of some organizations to adopt mentoring programs, which are necessary to transfer knowledge in a multigenerational workforce. The workforce is becoming generationally more diverse. Over 36.5 million employees will become eligible for retirement within the next 10 years, leaving many leadership positions vacant in the workplace. Due to the gap in both knowledge and experience within the remaining workforce, many organizations will struggle to fill vacant, senior-level positions. Mentoring is a tool to enact knowledge transfer throughout the workforce. This qualitative study synthesizes the literature on how mentoring programs influence knowledge transfer throughout a multigenerational environment. In addition, this study examines the best strategies regarding implementing mentoring programs. The theoretical framework for this study includes knowledge-based theory, social exchange theory, and generational cohort theory. The systematic review identifies 699 articles, and the snowballing method is implemented to locate five additional articles. Duplicates are removed, leaving 487 articles for abstract review, of which 209 move to the full-text review stage. Inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied, and 43 articles meet the requirements and critical quality assessment for coding key themes. The general findings of the study are that mentoring influences knowledge transfer through the formation of collaborative relationships, mitigates negative stereotypes, builds larger social networks, enhances tactic and explicit knowledge for both mentor and mentee, and increases technological adaptability. Findings for best strategies to consider when implementing mentoring programs include management support, the creation of a knowledge-sharing organizational culture, and intergenerational mentoring. This study contributes to the development and replacement of leadership positions and comprises a valuable tool for organizational succession planning. The development of intergenerational mentoring programs can lead to increased knowledge sharing across organizations.

Optimizing Performance through Leadership Decision-Making

Sims, Naomi DeShields University of Maryland University College ProQuest 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Pressures to remain agile and flexible while struggling with costly operations and sustaining competitiveness in the global market have forced leadership to make complex, organizational decisions quickly. This study explores best practices in decision-making for senior leaders to improve organizational performance by re-engaging middle management, the hidden gem in strategic decisions. Ludwig Von Bertalanffy's general system theory and Herbert Simon’s decision-making theory guide the research. Combined, this theoretical framework views the organization as an entire system and effective decision-making as an integrated subsystem. Findings revealed five emerging themes: (1) Leadership styles influence decision making; (2) relevant information is necessary to make rational, quality decisions; (3) advantages and disadvantages exist for engaging middle managers in senior executive decision making; (4) adopted best practices lead to effective decision making and improved organizational performance; and, (5) internal and external factors impact organizational decisions and how they are made. Three recommendations are presented: Perform an assessment of individual leadership styles; create a standard decision-making process; and engage middle managers in senior leadership decision-making. A concept called “Middle Management Optimization” is introduced to management practice to help leaders optimize decisions that enhance organizational performance.

The Role of Leadership and Organizational Culture in Influencing Employee Silence: A Systematic Review of the Evidence

Flanagan-Benedict, Geneva University of Maryland University College ProQuest 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Employee silence is a silent killer of organizations, stripping them of lost revenue, productivity, and divergent thought. If organizations wish to reduce employee silence behaviors, they need to understand the factors in their organizational culture and leadership that have an influence on employee silence. This research uses a systematic review to find these organizational culture and leadership factors. Systematic review identifies, analyzes and synthesizes existing research relevant to a research question. Sixty-nine research articles were analyzed after excluding research that was duplicative, not relevant, and did not meet the defined quality criteria. The evidence suggested organizational cultures that are ethical, open, supportive, and provide a participative climate led to reduced employee silence behaviors. The evidence also suggested that the leadership factors influencing reduction in employee silence are high levels of honesty, inclusivity, two-way communication, role clarity, accountability, and solicitation of feedback. These results imply that to reduce employee silence organizations should design and maintain organizational cultures that provide many ways for employees to participate in the decision-making process, are open to hearing feedback, fair to employees, and are supportive. The results indicate that a reduction in employee silence behaviors can also be achieved through leadership. The leaders who want to reduce employee silence need to have high ethical standards for themselves and others, encourage and ask for employee participation in decision-making, provide clear direction to employees of their role, and act when given feedback.

Combatting White Supremacy on Campus: Racialized Counter-Memory and Student Protests in the 21st Century

Farzad-Phillips, Alyson Beata University of Maryland, College Park ProQuest Diss 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Over the past two decades, we have witnessed an abundance of student protests at colleges and universities in the United States. Many of these protests cluster around the issues of white supremacy and anti-Black racism as they function in higher education settings—issues that have historically and contemporarily plagued United States colleges and universities. In this project, I analyze the arguments produced by college student protestors during race-based controversies at the University of Missouri, the University of Maryland, and the University of Georgia between 2015 and 2020. In each of these cases, college student activists have addressed racist cultures, actions, and policies upheld by their white peers, faculty, and university leadership. The student protest discourses developed during these controversies illuminate a theory of racialized counter-memory, which I define and elaborate throughout each chapter. Racialized counter-memory, as a rhetorical concept, brings together scholarship concerned with race, memory, and place/space, and it is best understood as public memory that centers race and racialized experiences in a way that counters dominant or institutional memory and promotes an anti-racist perspective. This study shows how racialized counter-memories—and the students that create, negotiate and circulate them—can combat the challenges of hegemonic white supremacy on college campuses by making white supremacy known, by marking racism’s existence on campus, and by envisioning anti-racist solutions. I also illustrate the ways in which students’ use of racialized counter-memory re-constituted the places and spaces of campus towards anti-racist ends, such as redistributing campus resources, constructing memory sites, and altering town-and-gown relations. Overall, this dissertation analyzes specifically how and in what way college students demonstrated the power of racialized counter-memory, in theory and in practice. I posit that rhetorical scholars should further develop and study racialized counter-memory, enacted in anti-racist protests and social change, as a rhetorical lens that can address and combat the assumed white standpoint and white supremacist systems imbedded in U.S. institutions and landscapes, including higher education institutions and their campuses.

Exploring Beyond Standard Model Physics With Cosmological and Terrestrial Probes

Das, Saurav University of Maryland, College Park ProQuest Diss 2023 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

The standard model for particle physics has been extremely successful as a description of nature. Despite this success, there remain many unsolved puzzles both observationally and theoretically. In this thesis we explore a few ideas in search of beyond the standard model physics, especially we focus on the Higgs mass, magnetic monopole and vector dark matter.In the first part of the thesis, we show that the Goldstone bosons of discrete symmetry can be parametrically lighter than otherwise expected. While non-linear realizations of continuous symmetries feature derivative interactions and have no potential, non-linear realizations of discrete symmetries feature non-derivative interactions and have a highly suppressed potential. These Goldstone bosons of discrete symmetries have a non-zero potential, but the potential generated from quantum corrections is inherently very highly suppressed. We explore various discrete symmetries and to what extent the potential is suppressed for each of them.In the second part, we showed that in the early universe, evaporating black holes heat up the surrounding plasma and create a temperature profile around the black hole that can be more important than the black hole itself. As an example, we demonstrate how the hot plasma surrounding evaporating black holes can efficiently produce monopoles via the Kibble-Zurek mechanism. In the case where black holes reheat the universe, reheat temperatures above ∼ 500 GeV can already lead to monopoles overclosing the universe.In the last part of the thesis, we showed that vector Dark Matter (VDM) that couples to lepton flavor (Le, Lµ, Lτ) acts similarly to a chemical potential for the neutrino flavor eigenstates and modifies neutrino oscillations. VDM imparts unique signatures such as time and directional dependence with longer baselines giving better sensitivity. We use the non-observation of such a signal at Super-Kamiokande to rule out the existence of VDM in a region of parameter space several orders of magnitude beyond other constraints and show the projected reach of future experiments such as DUNE.

Simulating Bursty and Continuous Reionization Using GPU Computing

Hartley, Blake Teixeira University of Maryland, College Park ProQuest Diss 2023 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Reionization is the process by which the neutral intergallactic medium of the early universe was ionized by the first galaxies, and took place somewhere between roughly redshift 30 and redshift 6, or from 100 Myr into the universe to 1 Gyr. The details of this transition are still not well understood, but observational constraints suggest that reionization happened faster than naive estimates would suggest. In this thesis, we investigate the theory that galaxies which form their stars in short bursts could complete reionization faster than galaxies which emit their photons continuously over their lifespans.We began investigating this theory with a semi-analytic model of the early universe. We used analytic methods to model the expansion of H II (ionized hydrogen) regions around isolated galaxies, as well as the behavior of the remnant H II regions after star formation ceases. We then compiled assortments of galaxies matching dark matter simulation profiles and associated each with an H II region that could either grow continuously or grow quickly before entering a dormant period of recombination. These tests indicated that the remnants of bursty star formation had lower overall recombination rates than those of continuously expanding H II regions, and that these remnants could allow for ionizing radiation from more distant sources to influence ionization earlier.We decided that the next step towards demonstrating the differences between continuous and bursty star formation would require the use of a more accurate model of the early universe. We chose a photon conserving ray tracing algorithm which follows the path of millions of rays from each galaxy and calculates the ionization rate at every point in a uniform 3D grid. The massive amount of computation required for such an algorithm led us to choose MPI as the framework for building our simulation. MPI allowed us to break the grid into 8 sub-volumes, each of which could be assigned to a node on a supercomputer. We then used CUDA to track the millions of rays, with each of the thousands of CUDA cores handling a single ray. Creating my own simulation library would afford us complete control over the distribution and time dependence of ionizing radiation emission, which is critical to isolating the effect of bursty star formation on reionization.Once we had completed, we conducted a suite of simulations across a selection of model parameters using this library. Every set of model parameters we selected corresponds to two models, one continuous and one bursty. This selection allowed us to isolate the effect of bursty star formation on the results of the simulations. We found that the effects we hoped to see were present in our simulations, and obtained simple estimates of the size of these effects.

Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Black Hole Accretion

Avara, Mark J University of Maryland, College Park ProQuest Diss 2017 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Black holes embody one of the few, simple, solutions to the Einstein field equations that describe our modern understanding of gravitation. In isolation they are small, dark, and elusive. However, when a gas cloud or star wanders too close, they light up our universe in a way no other cosmic object can. The processes of magnetohydrodynamics which describe the accretion inflow and outflows of plasma around black holes are highly coupled and nonlinear and so require numerical experiments for elucidation. These processes are at the heart of astrophysics since black holes, once they somehow reach super-massive status, influence the evolution of the largest structures in the universe. It has been my goal, with the body of work comprising this thesis, to explore the ways in which the influence of black holes on their surroundings differs from the predictions of standard accretion models. I have especially focused on how magnetization of the greater black hole environment can impact accretion systems.

Analogue Cosmology Experiments with Sodium Bose-Einstein Condensates

Banik, Swarnav University of Maryland, College Park ProQuest Diss 2021 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Due to their high degree of controllability and precise measurement capabilities, ultracold ensembles of neutral atoms are a leading platform for performing quantum simulations. In this thesis, I will describe the design and construction of an analog quantum simulator based on 23Na Bose-Einstein Condensates (BEC). Our system can produce and trap BECs in arbitrary-shaped quasi two-dimensional optical dipole traps, which can be dynamically altered during an experimental sequence. Such controlled variation of the BEC's spatial mode enables exploration of open questions in superfluidity, atomtronics, and analogue cosmology. I will describe the implementation of our system to study the inflationary dynamics of the early universe and report our recent results on the simulation of cosmological Hubble friction. We expand and contract a toroidally shaped BEC and analyze the time evolution of its collective phonon modes. These excitations are analogous to fluctuating scalar fields in an expanding universe. The changing metric of the expanding or contracting background BEC results in dilation of the phonon field through a term dependent on the expansion speed, similar to Hubble friction in inflationary models of the universe. We conclusively demonstrate the analogy by experimentally measuring Hubble attenuation and amplification. Our measured strength of Hubble friction disagrees with recent theoretical work [J. M. Gomez Llorente and J. Plata, Phys. Rev. A 100 043613 (2019) and S. Eckel and T. Jacobson, SciPost Phys. 10 64 (2021)], suggesting inadequacies in the current model.

Dark Matter and Neutrino Masses From a Composite Hidden Sector

Doshi, Sanket Nikunj University of Maryland, College Park ProQuest Diss 2023 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Despite the remarkable success of the Standard Model in explaining the interactions of the elementary particles, there is now indisputable evidence that it is incomplete. Although the Standard Model predicts that neutrinos are massless, over the last few decades experiments have established that the masses of the neutrinos, although very small, are nonvanishing. Furthermore, cosmological and astrophysical observations have established that about 80% of the matter in the universe is composed of some form of non-luminous dark matter, but there is no particle in the Standard Model that can play this role. Any explanation of the origin of neutrino masses and the nature of dark matter therefore requires physics beyond the SM. In this thesis, we present a novel class of models that can explain both the origin of neutrino masses and the observed abundance of dark matter. In these models, the particle that constitutes dark matter arises as the composite state of a strongly coupled hidden sector that couples to the Standard Model through the neutrino portal. A discrete symmetry ensures that the dark matter particle is stable and does not decay. The hidden sector is in thermal equilibrium with the Standard Model in the early universe. The abundance of dark matter is set by its annihilation into final states containing neutrinos. The neutrino portal coupling also gives rise to small Majorana masses for the neutrinos through the inverse seesaw mechanism, with the role of the singlet neutrinos being played by composite states. The Standard Model neutrinos mix with the singlet neutrinos, and so the Standard Model neutrinos are partially composite in this framework. The dynamics of the hidden sector is taken to be approximately conformal in the ultraviolet, and a relevant deformation leads to breaking of the conformal symmetry in the infrared. Since the hidden sector is uncharged under the Standard Model gauge groups, the compositeness scale can lie below the weak scale, leading to striking experimental signals.We employ the AdS/CFT correspondence to construct a holographic dual of this scenario. This takes the form of a Randall Sundrum model with two branes. Within this framework we explore the signals of these models at various current and future experiments. These include searches for lepton flavor violation in µ → eγ and µ → e conversion experiments, direct and indirect detection of dark matter and searches at colliders and beam dumps. We determine the current bounds on this scenario and show that future experiments can significantly expand the reach.