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This paper discusses the benefits of using student portfolios in undergraduate leadership education at Saint Michael’s College. There appears to be a natural link between the use of portfolios as a tool to facilitate and document leadership growth and development. The Business Administration and Accounting Department at Saint Michael’s College adopted the portfolio concept to provide students with a vehicle for introspection, self-reflection, and to learn from successes and failures as they provide evidence of satisfying the business department’s goals for graduating students and document their growth and development as leaders.

This paper examines the relationship between a prime contractor's financial health and its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) spending in the defense industry. It aims to provide models that give the United States Department of Defense (DoD) indications of future M&A activity, informing decision-makers and contributing to ensuring competitive markets that benefit the consumer.

The study uses panel data regression models on 40 companies between 1985 and 2021. The company's financial health is assessed using industry-standard financial ratios (i.e. measures of profitability, efficiency, solvency and liquidity) while controlling for economic factors such as national productivity, defense budgets and firm size.

The results show a significant relationship between efficiency and M&A spending, indicating that companies with lower efficiency tend to spend more on M&As. However, there was no significant relationship between M&A spending and a company's profitability or solvency. These results were consistent with previous research and the study's hypotheses for profitability and solvency. However, the effect of liquidity was the opposite of the expected result, possibly due to the defense industry's different view on liquidity compared to previous research.

The paper provides insights into the relationship between a prime contractor's financial health and its M&A spending, a topic with limited research. The findings can inform policymakers and regulators on the industrial base's future M&A activity, ensuring competitive markets that benefit the consumer.

This cross-sectional study (1) described the views and practices of a national U.S. sample of high school coaches on the education and training of team captains in leadership; and (2) examined if their views and practices differed as a function of leadership behavior and coaching efficacy. Results of 255 online surveys showed nearly 90% of coaches thought formal captain leadership development programs were beneficial; only 12% used such a program. Coaches with higher character-building and motivation efficacy more strongly endorsed the intentional education and training of their captains and perceived fewer barriers to this process. These findings encourage coaches, others working directly with scholastic athletes, and leadership educators more broadly to leverage and examine sport, including captaincy, as a valuable leadership development opportunity for youth.

Some employers contend that the college graduates they hire should have stronger communication and critical thinking skills upon arrival from their various college/university programs in which they majored. As higher education continues its efforts to meet the demands for employers, the authors contend that the benefits of participation in debate exercises can be incorporated into various courses as a teaching tool to increase facility with these soft skills. A practical application of debate in a specific organizational leadership course is presented, along with highlights of the student participants’ reflections upon the experience, and the initial signs of positive impact on these skills. Suggestions of future application of debate into curricula are also shared.

The purpose of this paper is to examine student performance on both criterion- and norm-referenced measures, linked with teacher and student communication orientations.

The study used a pre-post design. During the pre-study phase, teachers underwent three days of intensive training in the Process Education Model®. In total, 21 middle and high school teachers at an independent school were the subject group. Each teacher identified ten students, five of whom they classified as “easy to communicate with” and five others whom they classified as “difficult to communicate with.” Approximately, 200 students participated in the study. Teachers and students provided communication preferences via the Kahler Personality Pattern Inventory® (1996). Performance data were gleaned from student grade point averages (GPAs) and grade-appropriate versions of ACT instruments.

The PPI reveals, in part, perceptual preferences in an assessing matrix. Intrinsic and extrinsic orientations were one set of distinctions. Most (more than 85 percent) of the teachers had intrinsic orientations, compared with 63 percent of the “easy” students and 47 percent of the “difficult” students. Both GPA and ACT comparisons were significantly different (p<0.001) on both pre- and post-measures, with the easy students outstripping their difficult counterparts. No significant differences were observed on the ACT Aspire, taken by students in grades 6–9.

The study was conducted at one site.

Student performance appears to be linked with connecting with teachers’ preferred delivery and communication styles. The more like their teachers the students are, the better their performance. Reinforcing new knowledge and skills was recognized as an important component of training.

If connecting better with students is tied with performance, teachers who learn how to shift their delivery methods may foster better outcomes. Also, attention should be paid on how distress may impact teacher performance, especially as they interact with students whose communication preferences may differ from theirs.

The aim of this paper, which analyses the use of sports celebrities in advertising discourse, is to understand the strategic use to which brands put them in their commercial and corporate communication on Instagram.

To this end, a content analysis was performed on the Instagram posts of the brands Santander, Movistar, Red Bull and Iberdrola during the period 2021-2022.

The results indicate that, strategically speaking, these brands use the celebrity endorsement strategy to pursue emotional objectives and to adopt a position depending on the type of user. Likewise, these findings show that they single out uniqueness as the principal celebrity characteristic, while also mainly leveraging sports values, especially competence. These values represented by sports celebrities are markedly social in nature, which implies that they enjoy a degree of public recognition that is transferred to the brand to which they lend their image.

The conclusions connect celebrity endorsers with strategic branding issues and aspects of sports.

An empirical approach is followed here to study the representation of sports celebrities in the advertising of well-known brands linked to the sports world.

Digital technologies have fundamentally changed organizations, industries, and even the society. Although institutional theory provides rich array of perspectives to both the content and dynamics of such changes, research at the intersection of institutional scholarship and digitalization has remained scarce. In this essay, I draw on the institutional logics perspective to elaborate digitalization as involving a new set of interconnected managerial beliefs and norms, organizational practices, and diverse material and social structures that together complement and challenge the established logics in organizations and institutional fields. I draw attention to two central organizing principles in the logic of digitalization: the pursuit of digital omniscience – the efforts to represent and conceive the world through digital data – and digital omnipotence – the efforts to bring activities inside and outside organizations under the control of information systems. I conclude the essay by elaborating how the institutional logics perspective can help understand organization-level efforts to leverage digitalization by incumbent corporations and new digital-native companies.

The importance of information systems (IS) professions is increasing. As personality–job fit theory claims, employees must have suitable personality traits for particular IS professions. However, candidates can try to fake-good on personality tests towards the desired personality type. Thus, the purpose of this study is to identify archetypal IS professions, their associated personality types and examine the reliability of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test in IS recruitment decisions.

The authors reviewed academic literature related to IS professions to identify job archetypes and personality traits for IS professions. Then, the authors conducted an experiment with 452 participants to investigate whether candidates can fake-good on personality tests when being tested for a particular IS profession.

The identified job archetypes were IS project manager, IS marketing specialist, IS consultant, IS security specialist, data scientist and business process analyst. The experimental results show that the participants were not able to fake-good considerably regarding their personality traits for a particular archetype.

The taxonomy of IS professions should be validated further. The experiment was executed in an educational organisation and not in a real-life environment. Actual work performance was not measured.

This study enables a better identification of suitable candidates for a particular IS profession. Personality tests are good indicators of the candidate's true personality type but must be properly interpreted.

This study enhances the existing body of knowledge on IS professions' archetypes, proposes suitable MBTI personality types for each profession and provides experimental support for the appropriateness of using personality tests to identify potentially suitable candidates.

Awareness raising campaigns have been used to promote HIV prevention messages, including the expansion of HIV testing, but initiating such campaigns de novo can be costly. Both the Bronx, New York and Washington, DC have significant local HIV epidemics and a history of efforts to scale-up HIV testing. To build on prior HIV testing campaigns and create new messages based on consultation with diverse stakeholders, a partnership with a community-based clinical trial to enhance HIV testing and treatment was established. The purpose of this paper is to describe the history of HIV testing campaigns in the two jurisdictions, the awareness raising conducted in collaboration with the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) study (HPTN 065) and provide evidence of its effect in these two communities.

The foundation of prior campaigns allowed for expansion of social mobilization efforts to specific priority populations (gay men and other men who have sex with men), the most severely affected groups in both communities, and to expand the efforts to include clinical settings. New compelling and acceptable messages were shaped through engagement with community members and based on input from focus groups with target populations in each city.

By engaging the target population in the development of new messaging, HPTN 065 study successfully built on campaigns that were already underway in both jurisdictions and was able to use those messages and platforms to further normalize HIV testing.

Modifying and adapting existing messages saved time and resources, which can be important factors to consider in settings with limited resources or high media purchasing costs.

Efforts of this kind may ultimately help to decrease HIV transmission in large urban settings.

If your community is looking for more committed and competent leaders, what type of educational intervention will get the best results? U-Lead, the University of Minnesota Extension’s community leadership program, engages with organizations and communities to strengthen leadership. As the educational provider of U-Lead, Extension has a responsibility to provide quality programs as well as honor time and resource constraints. The primary question of this study is: what impact, if any, does the program duration have on participant outcomes? Key Observations include (a) the longest duration programs consistently had the most improvements in skills and knowledge, (b) after completing programs, more people are committing to leadership positions. This does not appear to correlate to program duration, (c) using evaluation data for modifying programs and starting additional programs leads to more significant participant change, and (d) community leadership theory and measurement can lead to better programs with greater results.