MGMT 9000M Week 3 Chapter One Pass Example

Cutting Chapter One to What the Dissertation Delivers: A Revision Pass on the Introduction to a Study of CEO Backgrounds and R&D Spending, With the Revised Significance and Nature Sections and a Cut Ledger Giving Each Removed Passage Its Promise and the Chapter That Failed to Keep It

Student Name

Walden University

MGMT 9000M: Doctoral Dissertation

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Cutting Chapter One to What the Dissertation Delivers: A Revision Pass on the Introduction to a Study of CEO Backgrounds and R&D Spending, With the Revised Significance and Nature Sections and a Cut Ledger Giving Each Removed Passage Its Promise and the Chapter That Failed to Keep It

Why Chapter One Needed a Pass

Chapter one was written as part of the proposal, two years before the analysis was complete. It promised more than the dissertation delivers. The study examines whether the functional backgrounds of chief executives at US medical device manufacturers are associated with their firms' research and development spending, using archival data on 214 firms from proxy statements and annual reports. The pass applied one rule: every promise in chapter one must be kept by a later chapter, or it is removed. The revised sections appear below, followed by the cut ledger.

Revised Significance Section

This study contributes to upper echelons theory. Hambrick and Mason (1984) proposed that organizations become reflections of their top managers, because executives' backgrounds, such as their functional training and career paths, shape how they interpret situations and the choices they make. Hambrick (2007), revisiting the theory, noted that later research had found support for links between executive characteristics and organizational outcomes, and urged studies that examine the mechanisms and conditions behind those links. The present study tests one such link, between a CEO's functional background and the firm's investment in research and development, in an industry where that investment is central to competition.

The findings also bear, more briefly, on the governance and innovation literatures, since boards choose CEOs and research spending shapes innovation. The study does not test governance mechanisms or innovation outcomes, and it offers its findings to those literatures as context rather than as contributions.

Revised Nature of the Study

The study uses an archival, quantitative design. Data on each CEO's career history were coded from proxy statements, and research and development intensity, research spending as a share of revenue, was drawn from annual reports for fiscal years 2015 through 2023. The analysis estimates the association between CEO functional background and research intensity while accounting for firm size, age and prior performance. The design examines associations and does not establish that backgrounds cause spending choices.

The Cut Ledger

Table 1

Passages Removed or Changed in Chapter One

Nine entries in all. Five defined terms remain, each used in at least two later chapters.

What Stays and Why

The frame stays. Hambrick and Mason's premise that executives' backgrounds shape strategic choices is used in every later chapter: the review organizes its studies around it, the method operationalizes background as functional track, and the discussion interprets the results through it. Finkelstein et al. (2009), whose synthesis of research on strategic leadership treats functional background as one of the most studied executive characteristics, supports keeping it as the organizing idea.

One assumption, that tenure data in proxy statements are accurate, is kept because the analysis depends on it, and it is now cross-referenced to the limitations section, where the possibility of errors in self-reported executive histories is discussed. The assumption about consistent reporting of research spending is also kept, with a note that firms may classify some development costs differently.

How the Promises Were Checked

Each sentence in the earlier chapter one that made a promise, whether a contribution, a method, a definition or an assumption, was copied into a list. For each, the later chapters were searched for the place where the promise is kept: the discussion paragraph that makes the contribution, the method section that carries out the design, the passages that use the defined term. A promise with no matching place went into the ledger. The search was done by reading, not only by keyword, because a contribution can be made without repeating the words used to promise it. Two promises that looked unkept on a keyword search, about firm age and prior performance as controls, turned out to be kept in chapter three under different wording, and they stay.

Effect of the Pass

The revised chapter is about four pages shorter. Its claims now match the study's. A reader who finishes chapter one expects a study of CEO background and research spending, framed by upper echelons theory, using archival data, and that is what the remaining chapters deliver. The two removed contribution claims were not wrong to raise in a proposal, but a completed dissertation is judged on what it shows, and promises its later chapters cannot keep weaken the claims they can.

References

Finkelstein, S., Hambrick, D. C., & Cannella, A. A., Jr. (2009). Strategic leadership: Theory and research on executives, top management teams, and boards. Oxford University Press.

Hambrick, D. C. (2007). Upper echelons theory: An update. Academy of Management Review, 32(2), 334-343. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2007.24345254

Hambrick, D. C., & Mason, P. A. (1984). Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its top managers. Academy of Management Review, 9(2), 193-206. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1984.4277628