Turner Faculty Trailblazers

Social Media Messaging and Firm Reputation

Recent research by the Turner College’s Joshua Brooks, an assistant professor of Finance, points out that it has now become a normal part of the consumption journey for consumers to share their positive and negative service encounters with firms on microblogs such as Twitter. Brooks’ research, co-authored with Jennifer Barhorst of the College of Charleston, and Alan Wilson and Graeme McLean, both of the University of Strathclyde, explores the comparative effects of positive and negative valence “service encounter microblog word of mouth” (SEMWOM) on receivers’ perceptions of firms’ reputations, and the factors that are particularly salient to receivers’ perceptions of firm reputation upon exposure to SEMWOM.

The study, titled “Service Encounter Microblog Word of Mouth and its Impact on Reputation,” and published in a 2020 issue of the Journal of Services Marketing, includes an experiment that exposed 372 Twitter users to positive and negative valence SEMWOM related to the U.S. airline companies. The research finds that both positive and negative valence SEMWOM affect, to varying degrees depending media type, receivers’ perceptions of airlines’ reputations on exposure.

“Through social media, even relatively isolated individuals can inflict a meaningful amount of damage or benefit to a company's reputation,” Brooks explained. “Our study examined the characteristics of social media mentions that caused the biggest impact on a company's reputation.”

Coral Reef Revenue, or Coral Reef Rash?

Recent research by Turner College associate professor of Economics Tesa Leonce addresses particular risk of overexpoitation and extinction faced by coral reefs due to negative externalities from productive sectors such as tourism and fisheries. Her study, titled “Coral Reef Conservation incentives and Revenue Sharing,” and published in Tourism Economics, proposes a community-based approach to conservation based on a bioeconomic model that addresses the difficult trade-offs stemming from increased reliance on tourism revenues.

Leonce’s bioeconomic model explores whether or not effort-dependent revenue-sharing incentivizes local residents to engage in conservation activities. The short answer is that revenue-sharing proposals can promote local engagement in coral reef conservation. The Tesa Leonce key variables leading to this potential include, as Leonce’s research explains, the relative size of reward, the degree of reliance on coral reefs as a source of revenue, and whether the coral reefs are perceived by local residents as a commodity or a nuisance.

The Complex Role of Corruption in Mexico’s Formal Economic Sector

A new study appearing in Small Business Economics by Kirk Heriot, professor of Management and Crowley Chair of Entrepreneurship in the Turner College, and colleagues Andres Jauregui of Fresno State University and David Mitchell of the University of Central Arkansas, evaluates the impact of corruption on firm births in the formal sector in the 32 Mexican states. The study, titled “Corruption and Formal Sector Entrepreneurship in a Middle-Income Country: Spatial Analysis of Firm Births in the Mexican States,” ultimately finds a strong spatial component to new firm formation using a variety of modeling approaches.

After controlling for socioeconomic factors previously linked to entrepreneurship, Heriot and his colleagues show that corruption is positively correlated with the formation of new formal-sector firms, but that the positive impact of corruption on firm formation diminishes as corruption increases. This finding suggests that there are diminishing returns to corruption with regard to new firm formation in Mexico’s formal sector.

“We believe this [result] implies that some corruption helps entrepreneurs navigate complex rules and bureaucracy [in Mexico], but too much corruption hinders entrepreneurship [there],” said Heriot.

Turner Faculty Trailblazers

The Demoralizing Effect of Workplace Politics

In their 2020 study titled “The Impact of Politics on Emotional Exhaustion, Satisfaction and Turnover Intention,” Turner College associate professor of Management Mark James and his colleague Joanne Chan of the University of Macau note that relatively little is known about how organizational politics is related to emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction.

Their study, which appears in Anatolia: An International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, examines how hospitality employees’ experience of organizational politics, emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and turnover intention are linked.

Analysis of employees in the hospitality industry, a group that is particularly subject to emotional exhaustion, reveals a complex link between the antecedents of turnover intention. For example, group-level politics are found to be positively linked to emotional exhaustion, yet unrelated to job satisfaction. Individual-level politics, on the other hand, are not significantly linked to emotional exhaustion, but are found to be negatively linked to job satisfaction.

What Drives Intentions to Fexit, and Why do Businesses Care?

A new study by Turner College assistant professor of Marketing Alisha Horky appearing in a 2021 issue of the Journal of Business Research explores the impact of waning public trust in Facebook on users’ frequency and intensity of engagement with the social media platform. According to the study, titled “Fexit: The Effect of Political and Promotional Communication from Friends and Family on Facebook Exiting Intentions,” many brands rely on social media, but consumers’ changing behaviors, coupled with Facebook’s algorithm changes, may force brands to switch social media marketing strategies.

Horky’s research, produced in collaboration with Mark Pelletier of the University of North Carolina – Wilmington and Alexa Fox of the University of Akron, uses exiting behavior, social capital, and closeness as theoretical lenses to explore why Facebook users decrease or eliminate their use of the site in the “post-trust era” of Facebook. Their findings suggest that Facebook users feel freer to express themselves and are less likely to leave Facebook over their interactions with non-family than with family. Moreover, some users are exiting Facebook while others are decreasing the intensity and frequency in which they engage with the site.

Lastly, while brand-focused and political posts negatively affect future Facebook use, Horky’s research suggests that there are important differences regarding aligned versus opposing political content from family and non-family.

Alisha Horky

Building a 21st Century Cybersecurity Workforce

In their study titled “Educational Modules and Research Surveys on Critical Cybersecurity Topics,” TSYS School computer scientists Lixin Wang and Jianhua Yang, along with their colleague Peng-Jun Wan of the Illinois Institute of Technology, develop four course modules on critical cybersecurity topics that can be adopted in college-level cybersecurity courses in which these topics are covered.

“Our goal for developing these course modules with the hands-on labs is to increase students’ understanding and hands-on experiences on these critical topics that support cyber skills development for college students,” Wang said.

Cybersecurity comprises all of the technologies and practices that protect data as well as computer and network systems. As Yang explains, “The hands-on labs are designed to enhance students’ engagement and provide them hands-on experiences with real-world cyber activities to augment their cyber education of both foundational and advanced skills.”

Lixin Wang

In producing the study, which appears in a 2020 issue of International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, the scientists conducted surveys on cutting edge research in these critical cybersecurity fields. They hope that their work will help university professors enhance and update Jianhua Yang their cybersecurity course content, activities, hands-on lab exercises, and pedagogical methods, as well as emphasize the cyber skills needed to meet today’s pressing cybersecurity education and build the nation’s cybersecurity workforce.

Servant Leadership and Employee Turnover

A new study by Turner College associate professor of Management Kevin Hurt and researchers from the University of North Florida provides insights into the effect of servant leadership on turnover intentions. Hurt and co-authors Tobias Huning and Rachel Frieder of the University of North Florida investigate the mediating effects of perceived organizational support, job embeddedness and job satisfaction on the relationship between servant leadership and turnover intentions.

Based on data collected from the administration of 150 surveys, the study finds that both perceived organizational support and embeddedness are mediating mechanisms through which servant leadership is related to employee turnover intentions. The study is titled “The Effect of Servant Leadership, Perceived Organizational Support, Job Satisfaction and Job Embeddedness on Turnover Intentions: An Empirical Investigation” and appears in a recent issue of Evidence-Based HRM.

“[The results] provide answers to the questions of how and why servant leadership affects employee outcomes,” Hurt said. “[The research represents] an important step towards more fully understanding the complex ways by which followers respond to servant leadership.”