American Journal of Management

Finding Fulfillment: An Examination of the Fulfillment of Maslow’s Needs Among Traditional, Remote, and Hybrid-Setting Employees

Jason McConnell — 2024-03-22

The traditional office paradigm has shifted in the wake of COVID-19 and the Great Resignation. Workplace flexibility is no longer an employee benefit but rather an expectation. To explore the effects of this change, this study applied Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory to elements of organizational job design. Specifically, this study sought to determine if traditional, remote, or hybrid work settings influence employees’ fulfillment of Maslow’s five fundamental human needs. As a result, this study found that hybrid-setting employees have statistically greater levels of satisfaction with physiological needs, safety-security needs, belongingness needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs than when compared to traditional and remote-setting employees. These results affirm the benefits of hybrid-setting employment, likely attributed to heightened workplace flexibility compounded with the maintenance of in-person collaboration and social contact.

Informal Business Practices: Some Early Evidence

Andre Dellevoet — 2024-03-22

The paper introduces a new management theory, “Informal Business Practices” (IBP), focusing on micro-level business practices that are informal, illegal, unregulated, or unethical. Evidence for IBP is found in general literature on taxes, shadow economies, corporate governance, accounting, and human resource management. It also references the World Bank’s ‘doing business’ indicators and enterprise surveys, further confirmed by a small survey among retired managers in emerging markets. This led to formulating an economic theory of IBP focused on minimizing business costs and a behavioral theory linking IBP to business attitudes and behaviors.

In 2022, a field study in Uganda used over 80 Likert variables for a survey among 18 SMEs to determine the economic drivers of formality and establish the “formality gap” with full regulatory and legal compliance. Insights were verified through semi-structured interviews with business managers/owners, providing further evidence for the economic and behavioral theories of IBP. The paper concludes that this preliminary result justifies more extensive research into the concept of IBP.

Millennials’ CSR Adoption: A Stakeholder Approach and the Impact on Profit

Mark R. Reavis — 2024-03-22

Business education emphasizes an analytical approach to decision making and strategy development. However, certain factors, such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), are challenging to quantify in corporate strategy. The consideration of CSR, including Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance, by Boards of Directors, is among these difficult-to-quantify factors. Business schools now teach students to focus more on a CSR/stakeholder approach, in line with updated standards such as Advance Collegiate Schools of Business Standard 9, which has increased the focus on societal impact in curricula. The CSR/stakeholder approach has emerged as a global strategic management option but is not without challenges, including non-homogeneous CSR issues and potential greenwashing. Moreover, a measurable stakeholder approach might lead to decreased profitability. Individual differences, particularly among millennials, influence support for or against CSR initiatives. This paper evaluates these differences and their impact on decision-making, which will significantly influence society as millennials rise to leadership roles.

Supply Chain Inventory Optimization With Multiple Types of Customers and Equal Priorities: A Study Using Heuristic and Simulation Methods

Bo Li — 2024-04-26

In this study, the optimal inventory policies for a supply chain with multiple types of customers is investigated to minimize the total inventory cost. Each customer type has specific demand patterns in terms of ordering frequency and order quantity; moreover, there is no difference in priority among the customers. Due to the computational complexity of this optimization problem, we develop a reduced form of the original problem and propose a heuristic that is easily implementable by practitioners. In addition, a simulation model is developed on the same problem setting as a benchmark. To illustrate the implementation and the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic, a numerical example is studied, followed by a sensitivity analysis of the key parameters. The numerical results show that our heuristic provides a comparable performance as simulation-based optimization (a 2.6% difference), and the sensitivity analysis shows a reliable robustness of the model (less than 5.2% difference).