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The present study aims to explore the impact of managerial attributes on cash holding and investment efficiency and the mediating role of cash holding for companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange.

Information about 178 companies in 2014–2021 was examined. In the present study, managerial overconfidence, managerial myopia and managerial ability were considered as the managerial attributes.

The present findings showed that managerial attributes (i.e. overconfidence, myopia and ability) have a significant effect on investment efficiency. In addition, cash holding has a significant positive effect on investment efficiency. Furthermore, cash holding plays a mediating role in the relationship between managerial attributes and investment efficiency.

There is a gap in the impact of managerial attributes on cash holding and investment efficiency and investigating the mediating role of cash holding. This gap creates an opportunity for studying these variables in depth. The present study contributes to the identification of factors influencing investment efficiency to advance future studies and support practical efforts. This study contributes to a better understanding of the effect of managerial attributes on investment decisions in the context of diverging opinions about manager-specific effects on company’s outcomes.

This study explores the applicability of the resource‐based view at the organizational unit level by investigating why resource utilization, as measured by efficiency, might differ within a firm. Using a downstream petroleum firm as the context for this study, the data envelopment analysis framework is applied to examine resource input congestion of its DCs (i.e. distribution centers). The study also provides a more granular analysis by decomposing distribution efficiency into managerial, scale, and programmatic efficiency, and examines the impact of corporate‐level decision making by including non‐discretionary variables. The analysis identifies opportunities to improve efficiency at the organizational unit level, using alternative views of the operational problem. The approach also provides practicing managers with an objective means to evaluate performance at the level of the organizational unit. Both the efficiency view and the managerial performance view are discussed simultaneously from a strategic view of firm resources.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a methodology to calculate efficiency scores for a sample of Italian primary and middle schools. The main aim is to relate these measures of efficiency to a set of “external” factors that can affect schools’ performance, such as the average socio-economic background of their students, their location in an urban/non urban setting, etc. After presenting this analysis, the paper proposes a procedure to calculate “adjusted” efficiency measures – which take in the role of external variables – in order to assess the “pure” management efficiency of each school, and so to avoid confusing the institution's performance with the aspects relating to its background.

Efficiency is defined in its technical sense that is, the ability to transform inputs (financial and human resources) into outputs (results achieved by students in standardized test scores). A two-stage quantitative procedure was used to investigate “managerial” efficiency, so that the impact of external variables on educational efficiency could be suitably taken into account.

The results show that the average efficiency score is quite high in the sample of schools considered, but potential savings can still be made: overall, with the schools’ available resources, achievement scores could be increased by about 20 percent. Efficiency and educational equity are complementary in primary public (state) schools, and the most efficient schools are those with the lowest internal variance between the students’ achievement scores; the same does not hold for middle school students’ results in mathematics. Lastly, several schools appeared to be efficient when the external variables were not taken into consideration, while their background actually favored them, and they are not efficient from a purely managerial perspective.

The most important piece of innovation is the investigation of managerial efficiency and its implications on policies. This study confirms and suggests that there could be an inverse relationship between apparent (baseline) and true (managerial) efficiency, that is, between the efficiency scores achieved before and after the “correction” made for external variables.

The growing emphasis on “managerialism” in police and the pressure to employ scientific methods of performance measurement warrants the need for a structured framework. The scope of police duties is large as it relates to several preventive and corrective action related to public safety and crime management. A challenge in measuring police performance is to take into consideration a range of variables that can potentially influence performance. The purpose of this paper is to provide a structured framework for measuring different facets of police efficiency, which is especially useful in managerial decision making.

This paper uses data envelopment analysis and discusses efficiency measurement in terms of the technical, managerial and scale efficiency, resources utilization patterns, returns-to-scale analysis and measurement of super-efficiency. The application of framework is based on the data of the police stations of Lahore, a large metropolitan city in Pakistan.

The paper shows the application of different measures of efficiency in making decisions pertaining resources allocation, prioritizing areas for improvement and identifying benchmarks for performance improvement. Different measures of efficiency are presented in the form of a structured framework.

Managers can use this framework to glean rich insights into different types of efficiency and sources of inefficiency. Further, a discussion of variables provided in this paper can be especially useful in determining trade-offs during the selection of inputs and outputs.

The key contribution of this paper is in providing a multifaceted efficiency measurement framework, that is capable of providing rich insights into the sources of inefficiency and helps scientific decision making. To the best of our knowledge, such a multifaceted approach has not been provided in previous publications.

This paper aims to assess the efficiency of public investment in West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) countries at both the global and sectoral level over the 2005–2015 period.

This paper estimates efficiency scores using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) models. Efficiency is divided into managerial efficiency (related to inputs management) and technological efficiency (related to production technology). A Tobit model is then used to investigate the determinants of public investment efficiency.

The findings suggest that, at the global level, WAEMU countries are less efficient than sub-Saharan African and Asian reference countries. However, the breakdown of global efficiency into managerial and technological reveals that WAEMU countries are more efficient than sub-Saharan African countries in terms of technological efficiency. Moreover, these findings are robust to nonparametric estimation. The assessment of financing sources indicates that external debt has a more positive and significant effect on public investment efficiency than internal debt does.

This paper is unique in that it disentangles managerial efficiency from the technological efficiency of public investment in WEAMU countries and highlights how financing sources of investment affect its efficiency. In terms of policy implications, the underlying message of the results is that the rules and conditions of domestic or regional debt in the WAEMU countries must be strengthened to ensure better monitoring and then better efficiency of these resources.

This paper analyses the cost efficiency of Italian football clubs using a stochastic frontier model. The frontier estimation confirmed that the model fits the data well with all coefficients correctly signed and in line with the theoretical requirements. Marketing and Sponsorship is taken into account as an explanatory variable and the factors which contributed to these findings, as well as other policy implications, are provided.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the managerial efficiency and the customer satisfaction of Parisian boutique hotels by using the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods.

In the first stage, hotels’ managerial efficiency is assessed by data envelopment analysis to establish which hotel has the most efficient performance. In the second stage, the customer satisfaction of these hotels is estimated by the ELECTRE (ELimination et Choix Traduisant la RÉalité) method to assess the hotel’s ability to satisfy their customers.

Empirical results show that there is an inverse relation between customer satisfaction and ability to maximise the Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR). In other words, trying to improve efficiency implies a reduction in guests’ satisfaction (and vice versa).

Therefore, through this research the authors can realise that hotel managers should give more attention to customer service because it has a more direct and important impact on customer satisfaction. It also positively impacts on resource management. However, there are some limitations to this study. First, this study only focuses on 12 hotels. Because the data set is very confidential, it is very difficult to have a bigger sample. Then, the evaluation is based on 2014 figures only. It could be interesting to know their performance for previous years to understand their evolution. Finally, it is necessary to know the percentage of direct reservations for each hotel. For instance, if a hotel is relying too much on online travel agents (i.e. Booking.com, Expedia, etc.), it needs to pay a significant amount of commission to these companies. As a result, it could have a good RevPAR but might pay a huge commission (for example, 20 per cent for most of sites) at the end. In terms of perspectives, it is necessary to conduct a more extensive research to test the hypothesis in a different context. Additionally, the data were taken for a single period of time. It will be very interesting to create a panel of hotels and collect data over a period of time (Barros, 2005; Barros and Santos, 2006; Barros and Deike, 2008). This would enable to better understand the relationship between managerial efficiency and customer satisfaction in a long-term prospective.

This paper presents the relationship between the managerial efficiency and customer satisfaction in Parisian boutique hotels context. Study suggests that in service industry, increase of firm’s efficiency could negatively impact the guest satisfaction. Therefore, through studying the authors can realise that why hotel managers should focus on customer satisfaction, which attributes play the vital role in customer satisfaction and how to optimize their resources. One of the originalities of this paper is that the authors use the customers’ feedback from the UGC websites (Trip Advisor and Booking.com) as the performance evaluation indicators for customer satisfaction. The data are very confidential and hard to get.

In this study, the impact of owner-operator and non-owner operator rice mills on productive efficiency is investigated.

Primary data collected from a survey of 111 rice mills in the Mwea region of Kenya are used. A metafrontier approach is employed to measure overall technical efficiency which is decomposed into managerial and organisational efficiency.

The results reveal no significant difference in overall technical and managerial efficiency between owner and non-owner operated mills. However, a significant difference exists in organisational efficiency of mills: non-owner operated mills were found to be performing significantly better than owner-operated.

The authors provide supporting evidence to the study and discuss some of the significant policy implications stemming from the study.

It is recognised that for owners to take the risk of divesting control to a hired manager rather than manage the firm themselves can have major strategic, financial and often emotional consequences. However, there is little empirical evidence on how production efficiency will develop as a result of hiring a manager with the underlying economic theory providing ambiguous guidance. Standard economic theory assumes that firms behave as profit maximisers, which can be achieved by operating efficiently. However, this may not always be the case and as the literature indicates, this may especially be so for small businesses in low- and middle-income countries.

As the pandemic begins to ease, many companies are figuring out that working remotely is the future of work and “a new normal”. This research focuses on strategic planning and practices inherent in remote work, and aims to identify the optimal balance between virtual and on-site working. Specifically, the authors investigate the moderating effects of managerial ability and Hofstede's cultural factors.

The authors build a mathematical model to locate the optimal balance between virtual and on-site working. A numerical study is presented, and additional sensitivity analysis is conducted to validate the proposed model.

This model provides organizations with a general guideline with recommended optimal percentages of remote workforce based on specific Hofstede's national scores. The authors also find that organizations with varying levels of managerial ability exhibit different adoption rates of remote working.

Because of the chosen research approach, the proposed model may lack empirical verification and require further adjustment of parameters. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to empirically and statistically test the proposed model further.

This model equips organizations and practitioners with a general guideline to identify their desired portion of remote workforce. The incorporation of managerial ability and cultural factors makes our model applicable to various business structures across different sectors.

This proposed model addresses this optimization problem from a mathematical perspective with an interdisciplinary approach. The model also considers the moderating effects of managerial ability and Hofstede's cultural factors.

1. The main contribution of this study is the theoretical development of our mathematical model that identifies the optimal balance between remote and on-site workforce in the context of managerial ability and Hofstede's cultural factors.

2. A numerical study is presented, and additional sensitivity analysis is conducted to validate the proposed model and highlight the moderating effect of managerial ability and cultural influence on the adopted percentages of remote working.

3. Our study suggests that organizational capabilities, managerial skills, and culturally suitable work arrangement are vital in successful development and implementation of remote working policy.

4. Practical managerial implications and general guidelines are offered to organizations and practitioners.

The main contribution of this study is the theoretical development of our mathematical model that identifies the optimal balance between remote and on-site workforce in the context of managerial ability and Hofstede's cultural factors.

A numerical study is presented, and additional sensitivity analysis is conducted to validate the proposed model and highlight the moderating effect of managerial ability and cultural influence on the adopted percentages of remote working.

Our study suggests that organizational capabilities, managerial skills, and culturally suitable work arrangement are vital in successful development and implementation of remote working policy.

Practical managerial implications and general guidelines are offered to organizations and practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to comparatively examine the cost and the overlooked revenue efficiency of Islamic and commercial banks in the aftermath of the crisis, operating in nine MENA-based countries during the 2010-2017 financial period, where the established empirical work is relatively limited. The authors also update the research where they use recent data sets and they provide for a targeted, structured literature review pre- and post-crisis in the Gulf region.

The authors examine cost and revenue efficiency of 25 major Islamic banks (IBs) and 25 major conventional banks (CBs). They conduct tests on the determinants of such variables. In the first stage of the analysis, they measure efficiency by using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique. The analysis performs regressions where these also reveal that the bank efficiency index is influenced by various bank type-specific attributes. It also seems that tighter restrictions on bank activities are negatively associated with bank efficiency. Second stage analysis, which accounts for banking environment and bank-level characteristics, confirms these results.

Conventional banks are both more cost and revenue efficient than Islamic banks over the period under examination. The analysis also reveals that the bank efficiency index is influenced by bank-type attributes. Greater presence of fixed capital resources has positive effects on growth in both Islamic and conventional banking. The major constraints impeding Islamic banking growth include labour costs. The authors examine whether and how bank-type orientation affects the cost and revenue efficiency of conventional and Islamic banks. They find that post-crisis Islamic banks underperform their conventional counterparts on both accounts within a mixed banking system.

This study did not include comparative data before the 2008 financial crisis. There is also a great deal of heterogeneity among Islamic banks in the samples that have been examined here and by other researchers and the constructed efficiency scores should be interpreted cautiously as divergent Islamic banks are pooled in the same samples.

This study identified factors that may help bank managers to improve their financial outlook by controlling revenue and cost efficiency profitability. These factors could as well help to understand how some indicators affect both cost and revenue efficiency, particularly in Islamic banking. It also seems that tighter restrictions on Islamic bank activities are negatively associated with bank efficiency. Islamic banks that directly compete with their conventional counterparts in the aftermath of the crisis are less efficient on both the cost and revenue frontiers. They are potentially hindered by the differential regulations of supervising authorities in dual banking systems.

The authors provide recommendations regarding regulatory and other issues that are relevant to Islamic banking and further research is suggested. Findings are relevant to a variety of stakeholders (managers, policymakers and regulators). Islamic banking authorities could re-examine the benefits of partially moving to a more standardized/conventional system of banking by lifting some trading restrictions. In addition, developing and maintaining managerial skills is an indispensable instrument for the long-term endurance of any system. A related aspect is thus an effort to determine the holistic efficiency (including managerial) of Islamic banks as a guide for policymakers to improve managerial performance.

There is relatively limited empirical work that investigates the efficiency between Islamic and conventional banking in the aftermath of the crisis in the Gulf region despite the growing importance of this region on political and economic levels. The authors also examine the revenue efficiency measure often under-researched in the literature and particularly important for comparative studies. Overseas-owned banks have attained much higher infiltration levels in middle-eastern countries over the past decade. It has also been suggested that market penetration differences may also be related to bank efficiency concerns among countries and their financial systems as opposed to types of banks.