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The purpose of the article is to shed light on how COVID-19 affects employee involvement in environmental responsibility and innovative performance in the banking industry, and whether employee engagement mediates the relationship between the variables. Thus, this study tries to understand bank employees’ perspectives in relation to the variables.

The study was collected during Time lag (1) and Time lag (2) from 156 to 216 bank employees, respectively. The study applied two types of analysis, to comprehend the impact of COVID-19 on employees, descriptive analysis and the partial least squares (PLS) are used.

The study's findings focused mainly on the influence of COVID-19 in Jordanian banks on employee innovative performance (EIP) due to pandemic, in addition to its effect on environmental responsibility engagement (ERE). The findings indicated a positive significant relationship between the variables. Meanwhile, employee engagement (EE) mediated the effect between the exogenous and endogenous variables.

The current research provide light on the value of employees' innovative performance and banks' commitment to environmental responsibility for those working in the banking industry, particularly during a pandemic. The findings have significant ramifications for the banking industry and in raising employee engagement.

This paper aims to identify and evaluate the challenges affecting the adoption of gamification practices in developing countries through the lens of the Nigerian construction industry.

A scoping literature review was conducted through which challenges to the adoption of gamification practices were identified, which helped in the formulation of a questionnaire survey. Data was obtained from construction professionals including architects, builders, engineers and quantity surveyors. Retrieved data were analyzed using several statistical tools such as percentages, frequencies, mean item scores (MIS) and exploratory factor analyses.

Based on the MIS ranking results, the top five significant challenges to the adoption of gamification were lack of capacity and expertise, lack of budgeting for innovation, lack of technical infrastructure, hesitation to adopt and limited internet connectivity. Through factor analysis, the challenges identified were categorized into five principal clusters, namely, organizational challenges, technical-related challenges, human-related challenges, data security challenges and economic challenges.

The identification and evaluation of the key challenges hindering the adoption of gamification practices would help construction organizations and stakeholders to understand the need to embrace and implement the concept into their activities, operations and processes to improve the engagement and motivation levels of employees.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind in the study area to identify and evaluate the challenges affecting the adoption of gamification practices using a structured quantitative approach.

The primary purpose of this contextual study was three-fold: (1) to study the effect of HR practices on employee lifecycle (ELC) on organisational outcomes; (2) to investigate the mediating role of employee outcomes in the relationship between HR practices and organisational outcomes; (3) to assess the differences in HR practices of the Indian and Thai food processing industries.

The study used random sampling to select 574 (278 Indian and 296 Thai) HR managers in food processing industries. A structured questionnaire was administered. The PLS-SEM was used to validate the relationships, while multiple group analysis (MGA) was employed to compare the HR practices.

The results revealed a significant influence of HR practices on organisational outcomes. Employee outcomes also mediate this influence. MGA results showed no significant variation in the effect of HR practices on organisational outcomes between India and Thailand.

HR practices must be aligned to suit country-specific business contexts to achieve organisational outcomes by improving employee outcomes. The findings would guide managers of the Indian and Thai food industries to develop tailor-made HR strategies.

This study contributes to comparative HRM in the Asian context by offering an empirically tested framework. Additionally, this comparative research offers insightful information on convergent best practices among Asian nations.

This study investigated what are the effective leadership styles and practices that boost employees’ work outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of facilities management professionals (FMPs).

Three predominant leadership styles (transformational, transactional contingent reward and disaster management) were operationalized into 38 leadership practices (X variables) and 8 work outcomes (Y variables). The explanatory sequential research design was adopted. Online questionnaire survey was first conducted on FMPs who managed facilities during the critical periods of COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. In-depth interviews were then carried out with subject matter experts to elaborate on the quantitative findings.

During the pandemic, FMPs were significantly stressed at work, but also experienced significant job satisfaction and satisfaction with their leaders/supervisors. Statistical results revealed a range of leadership practices that are significantly correlated with FMPs’ work outcomes. One leadership practice is critical as it affects 4 of the 8 FMPs’ work outcomes - frequently acknowledging employees’ good performance during the pandemic.

The study explored 3 leadership styles. There are other styles like laissez faire and servant leadership that might also affect work outcomes.

Based on the findings, suggestions were provided to organizations that employ FMPs on how to improve their work outcomes during a crisis such as a pandemic.

The novelty is the discovery that in the context of a global disaster such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the most relevant leadership styles to boost employees’ work outcomes are transactional contingent reward and disaster management leadership. The study adds to knowledge by showing that not one leadership style is superior – all 3 styles are complementary, but distinct, forms of leadership that need to work in tandem to boost FMPs’ work outcomes during a crisis such as a pandemic.

This study aims to explore how information technology (IT) professionals perceive work-life balance (WLB) in a work-from-home (WFH) setup. Additionally, it explores what emotions one may associate with such changing work environments, which have high implications for organisational success.

The two primary research questions guided this research. An online questionnaire-based survey was conducted to collect the data so that respondents’ both subjective and objective perceptions were documented. Purposive cum snowball sampling was used to collect data from 262 IT professionals. However, the data was analysed using both qualitative (content analysis) and quantitative (chi-square) techniques.

The findings of this study are interesting in nature and reported the work-life experiences at various socio-demographic levels (age, gender, educational qualification, designation, work experience, income, type of family and the number of children). The comprehensive examination of the data obtained from diverse aspects related to remote work environments has shed light on crucial facets impacting IT professionals. A predominant observation derived from the study reveals a significant disparity in working hours between male and female respondents during remote work. This discrepancy is notable, with male employees tending to work longer hours (i.e. 10 or more hours daily) than their female counterparts. The investigation into respondents’ sleep patterns revealed that the majority slept between 5 h and 7 h daily, underscoring reduced sleep hours for IT professionals during remote work. This comprehensive study thus emphasises the multifaceted nature of gender-associated influences on work patterns, health and well-being during remote work scenarios among IT professionals. As remote work is the new normal, this study has high implications for future work arrangements and organisational success.

The findings of the study will assist managers in dealing with the work conflict issue of remote workers. Importantly, these managers should try eliminating or reducing workplace conflict, emotional exhaustion and social overload associated with remote work.

This study is a humble attempt to highlight the employee’s WLB in the context of WFH in an emerging market (i.e. India). Furthermore, emphasises practical issues associated with changing work paradigms and concludes with interesting recommendations for future work arrangements.

In the reduction of food waste and the provision of food to the hungry, food banks play critical roles. However, as they are generally run by charitable organisations that are chronically short of human and other resources, their inbound logistics efforts commonly experience difficulties in two key areas: 1) how to organise stocks of donated food, and 2) how to assess the donated items quality and fitness for purpose. To address both these problems, the authors aimed to develop a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-based approach to food quality and warehousing management in food banks.

For diagnosing the quality of donated food items, the authors designed a convolutional neural network (CNN); and to ascertain how best to arrange such items within food banks' available space, reinforcement learning was used.

Testing of the proposed innovative CNN demonstrated its ability to provide consistent, accurate assessments of the quality of five species of donated fruit. The reinforcement-learning approach, as well as being capable of devising effective storage schemes for donated food, required fewer computational resources that some other approaches that have been proposed.

Viewed through the lens of expectation-confirmation theory, which the authors found useful as a framework for research of this kind, the proposed AI-based inbound-logistics techniques exceeded normal expectations and achieved positive disconfirmation.

As well as enabling machines to learn how inbound logistics are handed by human operators, this pioneering study showed that such machines could achieve excellent performance: i.e., that the consistency provided by AI operations could in future dramatically enhance such logistics' quality, in the specific case of food banks.

This paper’s AI-based inbound-logistics approach differs considerably from others, and was found able to effectively manage both food-quality assessments and food-storage decisions more rapidly than its counterparts.

This paper aims to investigate place marketing and branding at the micro-place scale through the case study of St Christopher’s Place in London (UK). This study illustrates the distinctive differences of micro-place marketing, in comparison to city and country levels.

An exploratory case study was conducted through a sequential mixed methods approach involving direct observation, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and social media analysis. Analysis of data was performed by using thematic analysis and triangulation of quantitative measures collected through the questionnaire and social media analysis.

Analysis of data illustrated noticeable differences of place management at the micro-place level compared to city or country scale of place marketing and branding. The function of emotional marketing leading to value co-creation is more effective at this level, establishing close and personal ties between occupiers and customers. Yet, measurement of micro-place marketing and branding value creation is difficult to achieve.

This study draws attention to the unique value and benefits of place branding at smaller spatial scales. Findings contribute to the place micro-brand concept by adding knowledge of micro-places through place management activities comparing them with city and country scales, and emotional marketing value co-creation practices, including challenges relating to measurement.

Original equipment manufacturers and other manufacturing companies rely on the delivery performance of their upstream suppliers to maintain a steady production process. However, supplier capacity uncertainty and delayed delivery often poses a major concern to manufacturers to carry out their production plan as per the desired schedules. The purpose of this paper is to develop a decision model that can improve the delivery performance of suppliers to minimise fluctuations in the supply quantity and the delivery time and thus maximising the performance of the supply chain.

The authors studied a single manufacturer – single supplier supply chain considering supplier uncertain capacity allocation and uncertain time of delivery. Mathematical models are developed to capture expected profit of manufacturer and supplier under this uncertain allocation and delivery behaviour of supplier. A reward–penalty mechanism is proposed to minimise delivery quantity and time of delivery fluctuations from the supplier. Further, an order-fulfilment heuristic based on delivery probability is developed to modify the order quantity which can maximise the probability of a successful deliveries from the supplier.

Analytical results reveal that the proposed reward–penalty mechanism improves the supplier delivery consistency. This consistent delivery performance helps the manufacturer to maintain a steady production schedule and high market share. Modified ordering schedule developed using proposed probability-based heuristic improves the success probability of delivery from the supplier.

Practitioners can benefit from the findings of this study to comprehend how contracts and ordering policy can improve the supplier delivery performance in a manufacturing supply chain.

This paper improves the supplier delivery performance considering both the uncertain capacity allocation and uncertain time of delivery.

Maintaining the turbine blade’s temperature within the safety limit is challenging in high-pressure turbines. This paper aims to numerically present the conjugate heat transfer analysis of a novel approach to mini-channel embedded film-cooled flat plate.

Numerical simulations were performed at a steady state using SST k – ω turbulence model. Impingement and film cooling are classical approaches generally adopted for turbine blade analysis. The existing film cooling techniques were compared with the proposed design, where a mini-channel was constructed inside the solid plate. The impact of the blowing ratio (M), Biot number (Bi) and temperature ratio (TR) on overall cooling performance was also studied.

Overall cooling effectiveness was always shown to be higher for mini-channel embedded film-cooled plates. The effectiveness increases with increasing the blowing ratio from M = 0.3 to 0.7, then decreases with increasing blowing ratio (M = 1 and 1.4) due to lift-off conditions. The mini-channel embedded plate resulted in an approximately 21% increase in area-weighted average overall effectiveness at a blowing ratio of 0.7 and Bi = 1.605. The lower uniform temperature was also found for all blowing ratios at a low Biot number, where conduction heat transfer significantly impacts total cooling effectiveness.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study presents a novel approach to improve the cooling performances of a film-cooled flat plate with better cooling uniformity by using embedded mini-channels. Despite the widespread application of microchannels and mini-channels in thermal and fluid flow analysis, the application of mini-channels for blade cooling is not explored in detail.

Introduction: Historically, the corporate governance (CG) framework was designed primarily to safeguard the economic interests of shareholders, as a result of political and legal interventions, developing into an effective instrument for stakeholders and society in general.

Purpose: The core objectives of the study include: identifying journals/publications responsible for publishing CG studies in India, key CG issues covered by CG researchers, the amount of high-impact CG literature across different time periods, sectors/industries covered by CG researchers and different research instruments (quantitative or qualitative) used in CG studies in India.

Design/methodology: The chapter used a sample of 130 corporate governance studies that fulfil the selection criteria, drawn from the repository of over 100 reputed journals that are either recognised by the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) or indexed by SCOPUS. A systematic literature review has been carried out pertaining to CG issues in India, based on various statistical tools, data, industries, research outlets & citations, etc.

Findings: The results show an overwhelming number of studies have assessed the relationship between CG variables and firm performance, which could be measured through a variety of performance metrics such as ROA and ROI. Apart from empirical analysis, many conceptual studies use repetitive basic statistical tools like descriptive statistics or regression analysis. The chapter offers insights into current achievements and future development.

Originality/value: This bibliometric study is a useful guide for policymakers, corporate leaders, research organisations and management faculty to draw insights from work produced by eminent researchers in GC in India.