Virtual teams are increasingly expanding across the workforce facing many challenges to remain competitive. Like traditional "brick-and-mortar" workforces, there may be challenges within virtual teams that affect organizational success such as employee engagement, job satisfaction, commitment, leadership, trust, and knowledge sharing. However, it is uncertain how virtual teams maintain long-term sustainability. This research study brings together two constructs, employee engagement and computer-mediated communication, to examine their importance and relevancy in virtual team's effectiveness (success). Further, social exchange theory (SET) theoretical foundation explained employee motivation and satisfaction behaviors. This research employed a quantitative, non-experimental explanatory research design and used two instruments to investigate the relationship between computer-mediated communication (CMC) competence and employee engagement in telecommuting knowledge workers in the US. To measure dimensions of employee engagement, the researchers used the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-9) and the Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) competence model to measure 5 subscales of computer-mediated communication, i.e. expressiveness, attentiveness, efficacy, knowledge, motivation. The target population was a random sample of 134 teleworkers. Demographic information collected included age, gender, education level, and number of years of service. The findings suggest that the most significant predictor of engagement is attentiveness, followed by expressiveness, and then motivation. Thus, leadership can engage in telecommuting knowledge workers to increase and maximize productivity.

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In this study, the indicators of computer-mediated communication that affect engagement among remote knowledge workers were analyzed. After conducting an online survey of 133 remote knowledge workers in the U.S., a multiple regression statistical model was used to answer the research question seeking the extent to which empathy, expressiveness, and motivation contributed to remote employee engagement. Our findings suggested the existence of a statistically significant relationship between the independent variables Empathy, Expressiveness, and Motivation, and the dependent variable Engagement. This study contributed to knowledge by filling the gap in current literature as no previous attempt had been made on analyzing the relationship between engagement and the items identified here. Our findings have implications for researchers and practitioners in that they may assist in guiding future research and work design for remote knowledge workers in the digital and pandemic era. This study can help managers identify remote workers who need the most help. This comes from the observation that remote employees work away from their managers and colleagues and the absence of casual conversations that tend to provide directions or remind them of things to do could hinder their performance in the absence of self-determination.

Organizations in the 21st century deal with constant changes such as globalization, technological evolutions, regulatory changes, competition, and other unexpected events, among others. These challenges can be viewed and addressed through the lenses of contemporary theories. This paper selected three contemporary theories namely chaos, complexity, and contingency theories, and presented their foundations and characteristics by comparing and contrasting their key concepts. These concepts include nonlinearity, feedback, bifurcation, strange attractors, fractals, and self-organization for chaos theory; nonlinearity, dynamism, feedback, self-organization, emergence, and adaptability for complexity theory; and adaptation, equifinality, effectiveness, and congruency for contingency theory. Examples of studies and organizational applications of these theories were provided, and implications for scholars and organizational leaders were discussed. By explaining notions such as how the capacity of a system could be greater than the sum of the capacities of its subunits, this paper can act as a starting point for anyone seeking to understand the three theories or use them for research or organizational purpose.

Small businesses are the predominant contributors to the U.S. economy, yet they face many challenges to remain competitive and sustainable. There are several reasons a small business could fail, including a lack of human resources, limited financial resources, competition, technological advancements, disaster, and globalization. Improving employee performance by getting them engaged and productive in their work is an issue that cannot be overlooked for small businesses to function and remain competitive. There is limited empirical evidence that explains the dimensions of performance management and employee engagement in small businesses. However, how small businesses sustain their long-term performance remains uncertain. This study sought to bring together two previously distinct constructs: overall employee engagement and overall performance management, characterized by performance goals and development, a climate of trust, and feedback and recognition. The research was correlational in nature. A survey was conducted to generate and analyze data gathered from 121 employees of small businesses located in the United States. A series of Pearson correlation analyses confirmed the existence of statistically significant positive relationships between employee engagement and each variable of performance management, namely performance goals and development, feedback and recognition, and climate of trust. Notwithstanding these positive correlations, a multiple regression model with the three performance management variables as independent variables and employee engagement as the dependent variable suggested that there was a statistically significant regression model F(3, 117) = 32.34, p < .001, R2 = .453, explaining 45.3% of the variability in employee engagement. Nonetheless, this model confirmed that the variables performance goals and development and climate of trust were not statistically significant in the model (p > .05). In other words, only the feedback and recognition variable was statistically significant in the regression model, suggesting that it explained most of the variability in engagement, including that already explained by the other two variables. Overall, the outcome of this study suggests that small businesses implementing performance management processes have more engaged employees. The conclusions drawn from these findings suggest that overall performance management and overall employee engagement contribute to small business productivity and organizational success.

With the ongoing pandemic and technological evolutions, remote work has become the new normal. However, existing employee engagement instruments do not take the remote aspect of work into account. This paper proposes a nine-item instrument for assessing employee engagement in general, and remote worker engagement specifically. The instrument was named EENDEED, for enhanced engagement nurtured by determination, efficacy, and exchange dimensions. It was grounded on three theories: (1) self-determination; (2) self-efficacy; and (3) social exchange. After generating the proposed scale grounded on the literature and theory, data were collected from 600 participants in the United States through an online survey. The dataset was split in two random samples of 405 and 195 cases, respectively. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on the larger sample helped discover its two-factor structure, namely PERFORMANCE and SELF-RELIANCE. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed on the second sample, which confirmed the two-factor structure of EENDEED. A final study assessed the reliability and validity of EENDEED. Data were collected through an online survey of 162 employees in the U.S. A CFA was conducted, validating the two-factor structure of the instrument. Construct reliability of the factors and reliability of the scale were ascertained. Face validity, content validity, construct validity, and criterion validity were confirmed. This study fills the gap in current engagement measurements by including the remote worker dimension. Organizations will be better able to identify and address challenges faced by traditional workplace employees and remote workers.

In analyzing complex products, this study selected the company Goldman Sachs and one of its product offerings, the synthetic collateralized debt obligation (synthetic CDO). The study later analyzed the ethical implications of providing such a complex product to customers. A review of the literature indicates that researchers identified this product and other associated derivatives of the mortgage backed securities as the main causes of the 2008 financial crisis in the United States of America. As such, Goldman Sachs’ offering of the product posed ethical and moral issues. An analysis of the company and its offering was done under the lenses of various ethical theories such as Kohlberg's theory of moral reasoning, the Kantian ethics, the utilitarian perspective, Friedman’s shareholder theory, the stakeholder theory, the market approach to consumer protection, and the contract view of consumer protection. Besides Friedman’s shareholder theory, all other theories judged the product offering morally wrong and unethical. At the end of the study, the author suggested a contribution to knowledge regarding Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning in its application to organizations. The author also suggested further research to validate the outcome of Friedman’s shareholder theory regarding this case.

Many customer satisfaction studies in the service industry use SERVQUAL, an instrument developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1998). Similarly, many studies on customer loyalty use the Net Promoter System™ (NPS®) developed by Reichheld (2003). Even though researchers acknowledge a relationship between satisfaction and loyalty, there is currently no empirical evidence demonstrating such relationship using SERVQUAL and NPS. In that regard, this study analyzed the antecedents of satisfaction measured by SERVQUAL that influence loyalty as measured by NPS in the context of the residential broadband service industry. To that effect, 208 broadband customers in the U.S. Midwest region were surveyed online. A confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the latent structure of collected data, validating the use of the five SERVQUAL factors as predictors. An ordinal logistic regression (OLR) model built on the collected data confirmed the existence of a statistically significant relationship between Empathy (one of the factors) and customer loyalty, suggesting that increasing empathy by one point increased the odds of becoming a promoter by 11.73%. The final model was validated using the Akaike information criterion (AIC), a single sample cross-validation model.