A Close Look at Trust Among Team Members in Online Learning Communities

Trust is one of the important factors either fostering or damaging students’ online teamwork learning experience. Building trust among team members has become a necessary step for a successful collaboration experience. The purpose of the article was to understand students’ learning and teamwork experiences and further to investigate the relationships of learner-centered instructions, team trust, and social presence in an online learning community. Also, this article adds to the research on the role of social presence in promoting cognitive and affective trust. The results indicated there were positive correlations between learner-centered instructions and trust, between learner-centered instructions and social presence, and between trust and social presence. The study could provide suggestions for instructors teaching online courses for the implementation of learner-centered instructions and the importance of creating a social presence and building trust for students in a collaborative online learning environment

Earnings management and fraud

The purpose of the chapter is to provide a rounded discussion of the concept of earnings management and theories underpinning this behavior. The chapter presents an overview of the concept, with a discussion of alternative definitions and the theories related to this behavior, including the commonly discussed agency theory as well as some less-researched theories such as socioemotional wealth theory and upper echelons theory. The chapter also presents incentives that can lead to this behavior and evidence in the academic literature, followed by some examples in developed and developing countries of earnings management that spilled into fraud. The chapter concludes with a summary and some potential extensions to the academic literature

Mixed Methods Research online: Problems and Potential in Business Ethics Research

Contributing to the ongoing debate in research on sensitive issues such as business ethics, this chapter provides a discussion of mixed methods research design, examining the processes and challenges of developing and deploying an online survey tool using technology within an interpretive mixed methods design. This chapter provides pointers on how to deploy this approach through technology to research business ethics using the example of researching ethical mindsets and its components, including spirituality and aesthetics. It is found that mixed methods research is an effective approach because it allows often sensitive issues (i.e. business ethics, aesthetics, spirituality) relating to questing individuals' inner values and ethical propensities, which are usually subtle and difficult to measure and analyse constructs. While this tool was developed in the Australian context, it has the potential to form a foundation for wider examination and research in business ethics. The chapter contributes to the collective discussion of research methods using a framework that has both practical relevance and theoretical rigor