Research Highlights

The Graduate School of Business is dedicated to serving all its stakeholders, and as such its research is focused on sustainability.

Research currently concentrates on: business sustainability (strategy, management and efficient production, distribution, planning etc); a sustainable society (corporate governance and ethics in business and government together with management and planning in higher education to mention a few examples). The Graduate School of Business is currently expanding its research program and is especially keen to collaborate with business, government and industry. Below is a list of current research activities taking place at the GSB.

For further information regarding the details of research being carried out and any other information please contact the GSB Director - Research, Professor Miles Nicholls

Quality Performance Index

The development and testing of a composite quality performance index for use in a heuristic research benchmarking methodology for higher education academic units for the forthcoming RQF. The developed composite index will include quality measures associated with publications, research income and higher degree completions. The objective is to provide a benchmarking measure and methodology to assist academic units to better position themselves for the full transition to a Research Quality Framework (RQF) and the associated research funding consequences.

Contact: Professor Miles Nicholls

Strategy Evaluation Methodology

The development of a strategy evaluation methodology that incorporates tangible and intangible factors (both independent and dependent) using a combination of hard and soft models. The developed methodology aims at providing a systematic approach that will allow competing research quality enhancement strategies (developed in higher education academic units) to be evaluated far more stringently and thoroughly compared with what currently occurs using the traditional expected value approach using only tangible costs and benefits.

Contact: Professor Miles Nicholls

Corporate Coaching

Research is currently underway leading to a book on corporate coaching that focuses on the interplay between personal identity and organisational challenges.

Contact: Dr Paul Gibson

MBA Student Survey on Ethics

A survey of MBA students is being conducted to determine why they don't do ethics courses. This could have implications for future courses as well as the need for potentially making businesses aware of the necessity for the inclusion of such courses in MBAs.

Contact: Michael Segon

Australian Companies and Ethics

Research is currently being undertaken with a large Australian management consulting firm in order to determine what are Australian companies doing with respect to ethics.

Contact: Michael Segon

Business Ethics Teaching in Australian Business Schools

A comparison of Australian business school MBA, Human Resources and Industrial Relations Degrees is being undertaken in order to ascertain whether business ethics is taught and what potentially the implications of this might be.

Contact: Michael Segon

Cost of Workforce Turnover

Research into the cost of workforce turnover is currently being conducted. The data collection (almost complete) has been sourced so far are from three companies in China, each in different manufacturing industries and regions> A company y from Singapore has also been surveyed. As well as developing data to semi-quantify the financial cost of turnover to businesses, and hence the investment warranted to reduce resignations, it is intend to explore cultural/situational drivers and draw some conclusions as to future trends.

Contact: John Eady

Transforming Difficulties from Entrepreneurial Ownership to Professional Management

An investigation into transitioning difficulties from entrepreneurial ownership to professional management is currently underway; Case studies are in preparation for two companies, one in Singapore and one in Australia. One is an established manufacturer that now needs external investors to grow while the other is a high-tech start-up transitioning from a scientific idea to commercialisation. Both are suffering the same painful issues.

Contact: John Eady

Skills Development of Hotel/ Hospitality Workers

Research into skills development of hotel/hospitality workers for CAUTHE [Council of Australian Universities Hospitality and Tourism Educators] conference being run by Victoria University in 2006 is currently underway.

Contact: Heather Mallinson

Decision Making

Decision making and what affects decisions has attracted intense interest and is a widely researched field. There are many well-established processes and heuristics for facilitating sound decisions, such as decision trees, probabilistic consequence analysis, determination of Pareto optimal frontiers, game theory etc. These techniques apply well when one has the time to analyse the problems and prepare before the decision needs to be made - and when the problems lend themselves to quantification. Much more intuitive factors impact decision making when decisions must be made in very restricted time frames, with inadequate data, mixed quantitative and qualitative effects, conflicting considerations and where involvement of other parties is a factor. The occurrence of some, or even all, of the issues in this catalogue of complicating factors is not at all uncommon in business decisions. The current study reflects on outcomes and underlying decision processes where these unfavourable conditions and conflicting considerations generate a difficult environment for sound, well developed decisions.

Contact: Dr Jim Lewis

Factors Influencing Negotiation Outcomes

There has been a huge body of literature generated in the past two decades or so on negotiation and factors that influence negotiation outcomes. Translation of this learning to the context of impersonal, electronic communication is not at all straight forward. This project, an investigation into the efficacy of negotiation via electronic interchange, is aimed at elucidating and evaluating some of the techniques that can be employed in these situations to mitigate the less than ideal circumstances involved in most electronic negotiation.

Contact: Dr Jim Lewis