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Article Excerpt
The current study examines the hope level of franchisees, top level executives, and franchisors to add to our understanding of the construct in improving overall motivation that could improve how franchises are managed. The concept of hope is a psychological construct that has been studied thoroughly in the academic and athletic areas, as well as in the psychological literature. It has not been studied in the context of franchising. The relationship between entrepreneurship, franchising, and organizational behavior is discussed and future studies explored. Key Words: Hope level, traits, franchising, entrepreneurship, positive organizational behavior.
Franchising
Franchising is widespread-one out of every 12 retail businesses in the U.S. is a franchised business and more than 8 million people are employed in these franchised businesses. According to the International Franchising Association, franchising accounts for greater than 40% of all retail sales and totals more than a trillion dollars in revenue annually (International Franchise Association, 2004a).
Franchising has been one of the fastest growing methods of doing business in the U.S. and abroad for the last half century. It is a less expensive, less risky form of doing business than developing a start up company (Taylor, 2000). Because of the dominance of this form of doing business, the exploration of franchisees' and franchisors' perceptions as well as the perceptions of the top executives that work with them is needed to investigate the differences between franchising and other types of business, but also in order to increase the effectiveness of franchised organizations. This exploratory research is the first step in ascertaining self-assessed hope levels between franchisees, top executives, and franchisors. This trait could further our understanding of organizational behavior within firms and the role that hope potentially plays in motivation at all levels of the franchise organization.
Hope
The term hope has been defined as the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways (Snyder, 2002). A theory measuring hope and the usefulness of hope was developed in 1991 (Snyder, et al., 1991). Snyder determined that hope, beyond wishful thinking, is represented by a person's ability to use their willpower or desire (agency) to get something (goal) accomplished and that person's ability to then create various pathways (waypower) to get the goal accomplished. These two components (agency and pathways) help determine how successful someone will be at achieving their goals. Hope has been a construct that has been researched in academics, athletics, and physical and mental health areas and has been positively related to positive performance outcomes, but has lacked empirical research in business settings to date beyond Peterson and Luthans' (2003) exploratory study using "state" hope with managers in a single fast food restaurant chain; Adams, Snyder, Rand, King, Sigmon, and Pulvers (2002) who examined some emerging concepts of hope in the workplace; and Luthans, Van Wyk, and Walumbwa (2004) who studied the development of hope in South African organizational leaders. The concept of hope has not been fully explored relative to business leadership and performance, and has never been studied in the context of the franchise organization.
Positive Traits and Work Performance
In current management literature, the trend has been to start looking at the positive traits that people have and not as much at the negative traits that have been prevalent in the literature regarding work performance. Luthans (2001, 2002a, 2002b) introduced the term positive organizational behavior (POB) and positive approach to leadership (PAL) (Luthans, Luthans, Hodgetts, & Luthans, 2002) to describe the construct of trying to encourage managers and leaders to support people in developing their strengths instead of reprimanding and criticizing people for their weaknesses. The traditional positive organizational behavior constructs most related to hope are: self-efficacy and optimism.
Self-efficacy (confidence) theory is similar to hope theory (Bandura, 1977). The theories are related in that agency or willpower is similar to efficacy expectancies and pathways or waypower is similar to outcome expectancies. The concept of hope is different in that Snyder (2002) has determined that agency and pathways are equally important to goal accomplishment and operate in a combined, iterative manner, while Bandura (1977) posits that efficacy expectancies are the most critical component of self-efficacy.
Hope is different from...
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