Research

Amy Bartels, associate professor of management, and her co-authors walk through the powerful role emotions play in the dynamic of the leadership-follower relationship through daily interactions. Displays of emotion from a leader can ripple throughout an organization and influence follower performance, the relationship between a leader and follower, and the leader’s behavior.

Children who receive education from Head Start, a federally-funded preschool program for disadvantaged kids that prepares them for success in elementary school, find improved chances of having financial independence in adulthood. Research also shows this greatly decreases the odds that those children require public assistance from federal programs, ultimately generating revenue, rather than costs, for the government.

Although cash flow hedge derivative transactions have become common practice for corporations wanting to mitigate risk, adjusting financial statements to account for them often confuses investors. Dr. Jimmy Downes, associate professor of accountancy, published an article recently to help provide a full picture of financial statement adjustments needed when considering hedge derivatives.

“Companies use cash flow hedges to protect themselves from changes in commodity prices, foreign exchange rates and interest rates. What we look at in my recent paper is how debt investors understand the accounting for cash flow hedges,” said Downes. “The accounting for those transactions is difficult to understand. Prior literature, including one of my own papers, documents that investors and equity analysts don’t understand the accounting for these transactions.”

Schools close, elderly populations isolate and businesses shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. Dr. Özgür Araz, associate professor of supply chain management and analytics, believes decisions imposed to change the way we live in the short-term stem from critical research analysis now in the hands of government and health care providers.

Araz’s research examines decision sciences specifically related to health systems, like pandemic decision-making. He teaches predictive analytics and knows his work impacts lives in a time of crisis.

Everyone knows the frustration of not having the right change to complete a purchase. Dr. Yunxia (Peter) Zhu, assistant professor of supply chain management and analytics, believes his research exploring the supply chain of currency may contain solutions to a situation made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, consumers were faced with shortages in toilet paper and other products,” said Zhu, who came to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2018. “For these products, the flow in the supply chain is one direction – manufacturers produce products and then retailers sell those products to customers.”

Dr. Todd Thornock, assistant professor of accountancy, investigates how only the knowledge of peer managers’ environments, without knowing peer actions, affects managerial behavior. Utilizing a two-part experiment in a participative budgetary reporting setting, Thornock and his co-author show managers project their decision-making process onto peer managers who share similarities in role and reporting environment. These self-projected group norms create a sense of validation. In viewing themselves as one of many, managers perceive their peers’ behavior to be a mirror image of their own desired behavior.