Motive Imagery And Corporate Success

Motive Imagery and Corporate Success Organizational Studies Honors Thesis Explanatory Presentation September 16, 2008

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Hypothesis • Motive imagery (affiliation, achievement, power) links to corporate metrics – Motive imagery is a proven psychological metric that looks at language and assesses it in three categories • Affiliation – The motivation for “togetherness” • Achievement – The motivation to succeed • Power – The motivation to assert oneself

– Corporate Metrics • • • • • • •

Stock Price Profit Margin Revenues EBITDA Employees Dividends MorningStar Ratings 2

Research Design • Corporations provide goods and services • Each year, corporations that are publicly traded have to produce a document called a Form 10-K for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) summarizing corporate data • Along with this financial data is typically a “Letter to the Shareholder” 3

Research Design •

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The Letter to the Shareholder contains a carefully assembled message from the CEO or Chairman of the Corporation about the corporations performance over the previous fiscal year It will contain significant occurrences from the previous year and will establish and articulate the corporations strategy for the coming years The way that this information is conveyed is at the core of the research you will be conducting 4

Research Design • As a research assistant, I would need you to read through between 28 and 42 company’s Letters to the Shareholders for a 3 year span • While reading, you would score passages for types of motive imagery (power, achievement, affiliation) • The purpose of doing this is to achieve unbiased inter-rater reliability 5

Research Design • When two unbiased raters code for the same thing, a coefficient is determined as to how reliable the scores for motive imagery actually are, which makes for much stronger thesis argumentation • Writing a thesis is very much like developing a prosecution or defense in a court case; it’s all about filling in the holes 6

Why Would You Do This Study? • •

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Opportunity to read and learn all about corporate strategy Familiarize yourself with the numbers of certain industries – The air filter industry is 10B/year? The wrapping paper industry is 2B/year? These are fun things to know – The companies I am using are drawn from a random sample from the NYSE. You will be amazed at the diversity in types of organizations that exist Get acquainted with a phenomenal and proven psychological metric – Motive imagery (power, achievement, affiliation) has already been proven by Professor David Winter (at the University of Michigan) to correlate to outcomes in Politics Take part in a completely original study that has never been performed in the history of the world – Imagine if we actually find something? Learn what it would be like to perform your own Honors Thesis research experiment 7

Why Would You Do This Study?

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