The Impact of COVID-19 on Students’ Perceived Justice, University Support, Professor Support, and Intentions to Drop Out

Postsecondary education significantly contributes to individuals’ career opportunities, lifetime earnings, and social mobility; therefore, understanding the factors that contribute to student retention in higher education has positive economic and societal implications. In this study, with the purpose of contributing to student retention with actionable findings, we focus on factors over which universities exercise reasonable control. We collected data from 430 students in the college of business of a southwestern public university in the U.S. before and during the remote instruction period of the COVID-19 pandemic. We exploit the natural experiment created by COVID-19 to examine group differences in the relationships of perceived organizational support, professor support, fairness of treatment, fairness of outcome, and intentions to drop out. After conducting measurement invariance tests, both samples were fitted to a multigroup structural equation model. Our data revealed that in contrast to the before-COVID sample, during COVID-19, students’ perceptions of professor support uniquely and strongly influenced their intentions of dropping out of their studies. Our findings have important implications for student retention

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Leadership Preferences of the Millennial Generation

As more graduates enter the workforce, organizations must be able to manage and attract younger workers, particularly Millennial employees, those born between 1982 and 2004. Further, firms recognize the importance of the role of the leader in maintaining worker organizational commitment and thus increasing employee retention. Through survey data collected from students at a public university in Southeast Texas, this paper examines Millennial leadership preferences. We found that Millennials value leaders who provide coaching, caring, and information as well as participation in decision-making and fairness. Despite previous conclusions, this study finds that Millennials are not so different from previous generations

Exploring the Effects of Managerial Ownership on the Decision to Go Private: A Behavioral Agency Model Approach

This paper utilizes the behavioral agency model to investigate why many formerly public companies have been converted to privately held corporations. Using a matched pairs sample and categorical binary regression, and controlling for effects found in previous studies, we explore how the equity ownership of those entrusted to manage firms, the firms’ executives, might affect their perceptions of the risks of going private and might therefore affect the decision to take a company private. This study complements prior research examining the predictors of public to private transactions and illustrates how behavioral agency theory can provide insight into a major decision regarding the firm’s corporate structure. It also extends the behavioral agency model to decisions involving organizational form

CEO duality: Balance of Power and the Decision to Name a Newly Appointed CEO as Chair

We examine CEO succession and CEO duality within the context of the balance of power among three central parties in the process: board of directors, incumbent CEO, and incoming CEO. Drawing on upper echelons thinking (Hambrick & Mason, 1984) we analyze the impact of board, incumbent CEO, and incoming CEO power on the appointment of the CEO to the position of board chair. Findings demonstrate that CEO duality is more likely to occur under conditions of outside CEO succession when the successor has prior chair experience and that tenure of the CEO predecessor reduces the likelihood of CEO duality

What Attracts Directors to Boards of Small-and Mid-Sized Companies

This paper explores the reasons why outside corporate directors choose to serve on the boards of small- to mid-sized companies. Resource dependence theory explains the importance of outside directors on corporate boards, especially for small- and mid-sized companies. Attracting qualified board members is both an important and sometimes difficult task for such companies. Using a sample of 102 NASDAQ companies, we find that firm performance, financial incentives, and time constraints influence the decision of an outsider to accept a board seat