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

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 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”

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Research Design
• 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

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 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
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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

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Why Would You Do This Study?
• 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

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Why Would You Do This Study?

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Thanks For Looking!

Call or Email Me:

847.322.5420
Tmschiff@umich.edu