Tour guides allow students an insight into universities around the country, helping students to make their college decision a little easier. Does the charisma a tour guide showcases make a difference in the students decision? Throughout watching the Devils' Advocates of Arizona State University we were able to see a trend towards students being more likely to say they were going to Arizona State with the more charismatic qualities that the tour guide exemplified.

In recent years, public service has confronted the challenge of decreasing employee well-being, evidenced by increased burnout and turnover. One of the threats to employee well-being is the challenge of balancing increasing job demands and decreasing job resources. The imbalance between public servants’ job demands and resources has been exacerbated during a time of heightened stress due to a global pandemic. This perfect storm of imbalance along with the stressors from a global pandemic offers an opportunity to examine how public organizations and leaders can help employees maintain or improve workplace well-being. One way public employees can handle this imbalance between job demands and job resources is by relying on coping resources. Coping resources are personally and environmentally produced assets that work in conjunction with coping mechanisms to increase employee well-being. All job resources can be considered coping resources, but not all coping resources are job resources. Public organizations can leverage certain types of coping resources to reduce the impact of job demands and job resource imbalances, including resources that emanate from the organization itself, like leadership. Instrumental leadership helps employees address stressors by monitoring the environment, facilitating goal achievement, offering constructive feedback, and providing visionary leadership. To investigate the relationship between coping resources and employee well-being, I examine the relationship between coping resources and employee well-being, focusing on the relationship between instrumental leadership and burnout. In Chapters 1 and 2, I discuss my dissertation and review the theory behind this relationship. Chapter 3 examines the different types of coping resources (instrumental leadership, affective organizational commitment, self-efficacy, and social belonging) and the connection between each of the coping resources and markers of employee well-being (i.e., burnout and stress) as well as the mediating role of two coping mechanisms (self-distraction and planning). In Chapter 4, I review the dataset, which is a repeated measures design with two data points from city employees working in a large city in the southwest United States. Chapter 5 presents the analysis of these relationships. Chapter 6 summarizes my findings, shares the limitations of this research, and presents future ideas for research.

I study the technology transfer process at universities and federal laboratories, based on 49 interviews of postdoctoral scientists and their supervisors (principal investigators or PIs) at two large U.S. research universities and four major National Institute of Health and Department of Energy federal laboratories. This dissertation is unique in three respects. First, with rare exceptions, most studies of technology transfer have focused on tenure track faculty at universities. Second, there have been few recent studies of technology transfer at federal laboratories. Third, most studies of technology transfer have ignored “micro” topics as identity, championing, and leadership. This dissertation fills those voids. Specifically, in this thesis, I focus on boundary work conducted by postdoctoral scientists and micro-institutional work of their Principal Investigators as change agents, in consideration of different institutional constraints of universities and federal laboratories which can affect the entrepreneurial activities of scientists. Having universities and federal laboratories as study contexts, I demonstrate 1) how institutions constrain yet enable individual agency; 2) how individuals engage in a new role that can potentially create conflict with their central identity; and 3) the role of the institutional change agents, or institutional entrepreneurs, who can lead to changes in the attitudes and perceptions of their subordinates, in the face of tensions derived from conflicting yet coexisting norms.

An information influx and numerous modes of content delivery has resulted in local governments competing for the public's attention. A recent poll from the Public Technology Institute discovered that although 85% of Local Governments use social media to disseminate information to their constituents, only 37% have an enterprise-wide social media strategy (PTI, 2017). Without a clear approach towards social media, Local Governments are failing to maximize their voices and often ineffective when reaching out to their constituents. Research has suggested, charisma is a successful tool for capturing an audience's attention and conveying a memorable message. Charisma can also be taught and executed not only through spoken rhetoric but in online social media platforms. Within this study, 18 local government employees participated in an educational workshop on the use of nine non-verbal "Charismatic Leadership Tactics". Participants completed a pre-workshop assignment which was later compared to a post-workshop assignment. Results showed, participants on average, increased their use of Charismatic Leadership Tactics by a mean of 61%. Researchers collected social media analytics one month prior and one month following the workshop from the City's social media accounts in which participants managed. Collectively, of the thirteen social media accounts, the overall total engagement was greater the month after the educational workshop compared to the month before the workshop. These results suggest charisma can be taught, charisma can be conveyed through micro-blogosphere platforms such as Twitter, and the use of Charismatic Leadership Tactics could be responsible for increasing follower engagement with social media content.