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Soft skills are essential not only for students but also for employees in any workplace. Some factors influence the development of soft skills in high schools. This study investigates the effect of psychological capital (PsyCap) on soft skills through the role of psychological well-being at different students’ grade levels.

Three scales (i.e. the Psychological Capital Questionnaire, the Scale of Psychological Well-being and the soft skills assessment) were used on 707 high school students from seven senior high schools. The data were analysed using a moderated-mediation regression technique to reveal the conditional indirect effect of PsyCap on soft skills.

The results suggested that students' grade levels moderated the indirect effect of PsyCap on soft skills via psychological well-being. Students in higher grades showed a stronger impact of PsyCap on soft skills via psychological well-being.

The psychological states of students should be regarded as one of the most critical aspects of education and career advancement. Schools should assist students in developing their soft skills. Students, regardless of grade level, would begin to occupy their PsyCap, ensure their psychological well-being and finally, engage in soft skills development activities.

This current study has shifted from simply assessing soft skills to investigating some avenues for developing soft skills in various contexts and areas. If the theoretical model is well established, teachers and educators can effectively improve soft skills intervention by understanding the antecedents of soft skills.

This study aims at investigating the indirect effect of soft skills on career engagement through the role of psychological capital (PsyCap) in different age groups. The social cognitive theory (SCT) and job demands-resource model (JD-R) were employed to explain the effect of perceived skill mastery on PsyCap and career engagement.

The data were collected from 707 high school students, 150 university students and 165 employees using a three-wave data collection technique. This study measured soft skills, PsyCap and career engagement at different age groups (i.e. high school students, university students and employees). The data were analysed using a moderated-mediation technique.

The results showed that soft skills positively influenced PsyCap and eventually increased career engagement in all age groups. However, the effect was stronger for students (both in high school and university) than employees in the workplaces. Unlike most students, employees related soft skills to performance. Regardless of the effect on performance, students would be more likely than employees to perceive soft skill mastery as a source of efficacy.

First, the education system should direct more attention to developing students' non-cognitive skills. Second, people should understand that their career advancement continues in the workplace context. Organizations can foster employees' soft skills by providing more opportunities to develop new skills.

This study sheds light on the importance of soft skills beyond academic and workplace performance. This study is among the few empirical investigations that reveal career engagement factors across different career development stages.

This study aims to investigate the effect of authentic leadership and psychological capital (PsyCap) on work engagement via job satisfaction by employing the job demands-resources (JD-R) model.

Participants were 307 (52% male and 48% female) employees randomly recruited from a state-owned company in the eastern part of Indonesia. Most participants had completed an undergraduate degree with a mean age of 27.55 (SD = 7.89). The study employed a three-wave data collection technique to rule out any common method biases.

The results suggested that the theoretical model and empirical data showed a good fit (CMIN/DF = 2.19 and RMSEA = 0.06), indicating an indirect effect of authentic leadership and PsyCap on work engagement via job satisfaction. The effect of authentic leadership on work engagement was fully mediated by job satisfaction. In contrast, job satisfaction only partially mediated the relationship between PsyCap and work engagement.

First, this study did not explore any further consequences of gender equality. Second, although the data have been compared with some existing studies, this study did not collect cross-cultural data from different countries. Lastly, the data were collected from a state-owned enterprise, which may limit generalisation to other organisations.

This study offered a new perspective by examining the implications of the JD-R model in the eastern part of Indonesia, where organisation culture is predominantly influenced by Buginese values. Furthermore, the inclusion of job satisfaction into the model added new information regarding the importance of mediating variables in explaining the indirect effect of job and personal resources.

The film was a revelation to me because I was not aware of any visual record of such a culture in pre-independence Brunei. Until I saw the film, my impressions of Bruneian culture came mostly from hearsay and oral history […] to put it bluntly, Gema Dari Menara is not a very good film at all, but is nonetheless a time capsule of Brunei’s lost pop history.

Gema Dari Menara/ Echoes from the Minaret: A Conversation with Mervin Espina about the Lost Cinema of Brunei (Espina, 2013: 70)

Gema Dari Menara (1968) was intended as a mode of da’wah (the propagation of Islamic teachings) in response to the situation faced by the local community in Brunei at that time. Following its status as a medium of disseminating the Islamic values, the film embodies Islamic teachings that guide Bruneian Muslims to fully embrace Islam. This current study aims to unravel the meaning of the Islamic value of Amar Ma’ruf Nahi Mungkar (enjoining good and forbidding wrong) that is strongly depicted in the film and perceived as the enlightening Islamic value from the film. Therefore, this study examines the extent of the manifestation of Amar Ma’ruf Nahi Mungkar in the film. It is found that the portrayal of da’wahism using Amar Ma’ruf Nahi Mungkar is imbued in education, social interaction, clothing, and one’s upbringing which is the most influential factor. By applying the Islamic requisites, the scenario and sentiments in the film also encourage the audience to ponder upon the cause and effect of the characters’ actions and deeds.

The literature on warehouse performance assessments is mainly focussed on the efficiency and effectiveness of an action or activity due to customer demand and tailored fulfilment, with less attention being given to the performance measurement of each function of the warehouse and its overall productivity. Therefore, this study was aimed at revising the key warehouse performance metrics to a set of productivity measurement indicators that can be adopted internationally for benchmarking productivity performance.

A literature review and semi-structured survey questionnaire were used for this study. The importance of warehouse productivity performance was reviewed to revamp the measurement indicators. Through the use of a directed content analysis and descriptive analysis, an extensive study was carried out to analyze existing warehouse productivity indicators.

The findings of this study provide comprehensive references for practitioners and academicians for improving the classification of productivity measurements from existing key performance metrics for warehousing. Also, this paper highlights the warehouse resources related to the respective warehouse operation activities.

The study was limited to productivity performance indicators adapted from Staudt et al. (2015). Furthermore, the samples for this study comprised Malaysian academicians and practitioners in the related field. The findings can be adapted on a global scale as this study implemented general warehouse operation processes.

Consequently, the contributions of this study are that it provides relevant benchmarks for key productivity performance indicators in the warehousing sector that has worldwide applicability and the developed model provides a conceptual platform from which further theoretical and empirical developments can be carried out.

The purpose of this paper is to first review the implementation of automatic identification and data capture) technologies in library/information science, focusing on barcode technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) and near field communication (NFC). This paper then presents S-Library, a new android-based application, to enable users to perform a wide range of information science-related transactions, such as borrowing, searching, returning and viewing transaction records.

This paper presents the design process and the database and software components. For analysis, the authors used application testing, and also usability testing, with a questionnaire distributed to 343 users.

The implementation of NFC technology means that S-Library has a number of technical advantages over other approaches. It was also shown with user acceptance testing that there was a high degree of user satisfaction with S-Library.

Although the findings combine technical assessment and usability testing and are extremely positive, further user evaluation could be performed. In addition, S-Library does not currently read existing RFID tags, which would improve the application further.

The system proposed here shows that S-Library is a feasible approach taken to improve the library transaction experience and that it can replace and improve upon older technologies.

This paper provides a first successful demonstration of a functioning and tested android and NFC-based library transaction system and shows that this approach generates a high degree of user reliability.

This study analyses the challenges in implementing lean manufacturing (LM) in the wood and furniture industry. In order to facilitate the smooth implementation of LM practices in this industry, the challenges in terms of its deployment need to be analysed and observed.

Realizing this importance, this study proposes a model, using PLS-SEM, which focusses on dealing with the challenges faced in the implementation of lean in the wood and furniture industry. The model consists of ten challenges that were determined based on a survey involving 46 SMEs companies in Malaysia.

The findings revealed that the implementation of LM is significantly affected by three main issues, namely: knowledge, resources and culture and human attitude. Furthermore, the analyses also highlighted four dominant challenges which are related to culture and human attitude issues – lack of employee commitment, lack of senior management's interest and support, difficult to implement, and LM is viewed as “current trend”. Overall, the ability to deal with the challenges involving factors of knowledge and culture and human attitude determines the success of LM implementation, especially in companies that have limited resources.

This study would help wood and furniture SMEs, government agencies, professional bodies and academics to better understand the challenges when implementing LM practices.

Overall, this study aims at investigating the relationships between the three challenges to better promote LM in the scope under study. Therefore, several activities were proposed to overcome the abovementioned challenges and subsequently contribute to the current body of knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of food-related lifestyle (FRL) and food-related personality traits (FRPTs) on customer satisfaction and loyalty so that sufficient evidence for forming a new pattern of predictors of customer satisfaction and loyalty can be explored.

The research method in this study was the descriptive type and was based on the goal of the applied research methods. Data were collected from 384 sample group consumers of chain stores in the city of Tehran. The hypothesized relationships were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM).

Final results of study showed the significant effects of FRL and FRPT on satisfaction and loyalty of consumers. This indicates that aforementioned variables can create customer satisfaction and loyalty toward food. The research conceptual model was confirmed with goodness of fit.

First, the sample consisted of customers who use a wide range of food despite diverse motives and interests. While knowing that costumers’ specific traits about food would have provided a more detailed and comprehensive understanding, conducting research in a set of general food consumer without considering special foods category could be a limitation. Second, and more importantly, since the customer behavior in consumption choices is an unconscious and cognitive process, other factors and domain that are linked to customer satisfaction and loyalty would have been missed.

This study shows that understanding the behavioral aspects of food consumption can help food producing companies to adjust their production and specially to foresee changes. Marketers are advised to investigate customer traits to promote customer satisfaction and loyalty effectively. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge in food marketing.

The present study offers a unique and valuable insight into a customer’s behavior and deepens customer satisfaction and loyalty by incorporating FRL, food neophobia scale and food involvement scale as independent variables to contribute knowledge in the context of food marketing, and throws some light upon the predictive power of mentioned variables on customer behaviors.