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The extensive use of mobile money (MM) has been widely recognized as a digital engine of socioeconomic development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper aims to focus on the effects of MM use and stockouts on informal microenterprise performance and investigate whether MM use mitigates the relationship between stockouts and firm performance.

This study utilizes firm-level data from the latest World Bank Informal Sector Enterprise Surveys across six SSA countries. We employ instrumental variable-adjusted and propensity score-weighted regressions to investigate the buffering effect of MM use.

We find a significantly positive effect of MM use and a significantly negative impact of stockouts on informal microenterprise performance. Importantly, we establish that MM use attenuates the negative impact of stockouts on firm performance. We further document that the attenuating effect of MM use is more profound for firms using MM for transactions with supply chain partners, located in communities with high MM use rates, and operating in the retail industry.

Our research generates important managerial and policy implications. Future policies should capitalize on MM to foster an effective financial ecosystem in which informal microenterprises can survive and grow, thereby deepening their contributions to sustainable development.

Whereas the business benefits of MM among small, medium and large firms are well-documented, the role of MM use on informal microenterprise performance is less understood. This study fills the research gap in the literature by focusing on the influence of MM use on the relationships between informal microenterprise operations and performance.

The purpose of this study is to establish the relationship between digital leadership and academic performance. It models the digitalization process, outlining why and how digital leadership is important for better academic performance. At the same time, this study examines the role of digital culture as a moderating variable in the direct relationship between main variables of the study. The study aims to expand the domain of academic performance at the university by including a much recent leadership-related aspect and organizational context of the digital culture.

The study opted for a descriptive study, using the survey instruments to collect the data. The sample population consisted of students currently enrolled at the Faculty of Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Melaka, Malaysia. Based on the convenience sampling, 383 samples were drawn from the sample population. All items were adopted from previous literature, and expert feedback was obtained to examine the validity of the instruments. The data were analysed using SPSS and SmartPLS version 3.0.

This study provides empirical insights about how digital leadership is important for academic performance for the new millennials. Also, digital culture is found to provide significant moderation effect into the relationship. It suggests that universities must promote digitalization culture and embed the use of technology and digitalization into teaching and learning to cultivate a more effective learning process among university students. This is important as elements of digital leadership, including adaptive role, attitude, digital competency, digital skill and inspirational role, are found to significantly contribute to academic performance.

This study only focuses on samples taken from one of the faculties in one campus, thus limiting its scope. Future research is encouraged to replicate the same study setting to include larger sample size from different faculties, or perhaps from different universities. These propositions could help to better generalize the research findings on the practice of digital leadership on academic performance in the country. However, this study established a digital leadership model that can be applied to undergraduate students at the universities. Also, the inclusion of digital culture can strengthen the learning process.

This study includes implications for the development of digital leadership attributes and promoting digital culture within the university students and environment for engaging in a better academic performance. Digital leadership is found to be an important criterion of academic performance in this digital age society, and cultivating digital culture enhances students’ academic performance. These findings shall prompt the university to actively engage in fostering digitalization culture within the university. Also, the top management of the university should inform the students to be adaptive and cultivate the attributes of digital leaders, as their readiness to cope with the technological change has significant positive impact on their academic performance.

It is important to ensure that the future graduates that are being produced are ready to take on more challenges as digital leaders in the digital society. This might accelerate the country’s initiatives and efforts towards becoming a developed nation. Thus, investing in oneself to become digitally literate and competent might not only influence their academic performance, but they will also be equipped to fulfil one of the expectations of future employers of potential graduates, which is possessing digital leadership.

Digitalization is not only about the technology. It is about the people too. As the study on digital leadership is still in its infant stage, this study is unique as it is among the earliest to establish digital leadership constructs within the context of Malaysia. It informs the university that digital leadership provides significant contribution to academic performance. Thus, the university is encouraged to nurture digitalization, not only in the teaching and learning but also with the people within the university environment. Determining the right programs and plans for the curricular will help students to develop digital leadership attributes more effectively. Finally, improving digitalization among its students and culture is important, as these elements provide significant effect towards academic performance.

Light field images (LFIs) have gained popularity as a technology to increase the field of view (FoV) of plenoptic cameras since they can capture information about light rays with a large FoV. Wide FoV causes light field (LF) data to increase rapidly, which restricts the use of LF imaging in image processing, visual analysis and user interface. Effective LFI coding methods become of paramount importance. This paper aims to eliminate more redundancy by exploring sparsity and correlation in the angular domain of LFIs, as well as mitigate the loss of perceptual quality of LFIs caused by encoding.

This work proposes a new efficient LF coding framework. On the coding side, a new sampling scheme and a hierarchical prediction structure are used to eliminate redundancy in the LFI's angular and spatial domains. At the decoding side, high-quality dense LF is reconstructed using a view synthesis method based on the residual channel attention network (RCAN).

In three different LF datasets, our proposed coding framework not only reduces the transmitted bit rate but also maintains a higher view quality than the current more advanced methods.

(1) A new sampling scheme is designed to synthesize high-quality LFIs while better ensuring LF angular domain sparsity. (2) To further eliminate redundancy in the spatial domain, new ranking schemes and hierarchical prediction structures are designed. (3) A synthetic network based on RCAN and a novel loss function is designed to mitigate the perceptual quality loss due to the coding process.

This article focusses on the hybrid strategy, a simultaneous combination of cost leadership and differentiation strategy. The study aims to examine the impact of hybrid strategy on firm performance through its anticipated positive effects on process and product innovation. In addition, we study the moderating role of adaptive capacity in the direct relationships of hybrid strategy with process and product innovation.

Structural equation modelling was used to analyse 1,842 Spanish firms with fewer than 250 employees. We randomly selected small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in Spain from the Spanish Central Business Directory (2021) database. The overall sample design was based on stratified sampling.

We found that hybrid strategy is positively related to firm performance and to process and product innovation. Additionally, in firms implementing hybrid strategies, process innovation fostered firm performance. Finally, adaptive capacity strengthened the relationships of hybrid strategy with process and product innovation. This sheds light on how and when hybrid strategy is most effective in fostering SME performance.

We highlight that SMEs need to establish strategies that use diverse resources and capabilities and not just generate competitive advantage using one strategy (cost leadership or differentiation strategy). This requires an agile and flexible systems and structures.

Our research provides novel results by proposing the adoption of hybrid strategies instead of pure strategies (cost leadership and differentiation strategy) as a way for SMEs to survive during crises. Unlike “stuck in the middle” strategies, our study demonstrates the importance of hybrid strategies in a comprehensive model that links them to innovation and firm performance, with adaptive capacity being a determining factor.

This study aims to investigate the associations between emotional regulation strategies, self-compassion and adaptive functioning in families of children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) in comparison to families with typically developing (TD) children.

This cross-sectional study used a comprehensive set of validated measures to assess emotional regulation strategies, self-compassion and adaptive functioning. The study cohort consisted of 116 parents; 58 parents of children with NDD and 58 parents of TD children. The mean age of the children was 6.40 years (SD = 1.82).

The findings indicate that higher self-compassion is associated with improved adaptive functioning, evidenced by reduced levels of internalizing (depression, anxiety, withdrawal, somatic complaints) and externalizing (aggressive behaviors) problems. Parents of children with NDD reported greater levels of depression, anxiety and withdrawal compared to parents of TD children. Parents of TD children used cognitive reappraisal more frequently and exhibited higher levels of self-compassion, whereas the use of expressive suppression was more prevalent among parents of children with NDD.

These findings highlight the need for family-centered and tailored interventions that promote self-compassion and adaptive emotional regulation strategies to reduce internalizing and externalizing problems among parents of children with NDD. By providing comprehensive psychological support and accessible community resources, parental ability to cope with stress may be improved, fostering adaptive functioning that benefits both parents and children with NDD.

This study introduces a novel perspective on the importance of self-compassion and emotional regulation strategies in protecting and improving the mental well-being of parents with neurodevelopmental disorder children. It provides valuable insights for targeted interventions in NDD families, focusing on reducing the risk of mental health deterioration while promoting emotional resilience.

This study aims to theoretically discuss and empirically test the mediating mechanism of psychological distress and the moderating effects of Islamic work ethics (IWE) in the relationship between despotic leadership and adaptive performance.

A three-wave survey was used to gather the data from middle managers and their supervisors of construction firms in Pakistan. The final sample consisted of 304 respondents and data analysis was performed through SEM analysis.

Despotic leadership enhances employees’ psychological distress which results in a negative impact on adaptive performance. In addition, IWE played a buffering role in mitigating the harmful impacts of despotic leadership on adaptive performance.

The study is among the pioneers that have investigated how despotic leadership impacts employees’ adaptive performance via the underlying mechanism of psychological distress through the conservation of resources and social exchange theory lens.

This study aims to address the challenge of the real-time state of charge (SOC) estimation for lithium-ion batteries in robotic systems, which is critical for monitoring remaining battery power, planning task execution, conserving energy and extending battery lifespan.

The authors introduced an optimal observer based on adaptive dynamic programming for online SOC estimation, leveraging a second-order resistor–capacitor model for the battery. The model parameters were determined by fitting an exponential function to the voltage response from pulse current discharges, and the observer's effectiveness was verified through extensive experimentation.

The proposed optimal observer demonstrated significant improvements in SOC estimation accuracy, robustness and real-time performance, outperforming traditional methods by minimizing estimation errors and eliminating the need for iterative steps in the adaptive critic and actor updates.

This study contributes a novel approach to SOC estimation using an optimal observer that optimizes the observer design by minimizing estimation errors. This method enhances the robustness of SOC estimation against observation errors and uncertainties in battery behavior, representing a significant advancement in battery management technology for robotic applications.

The accurate prediction of driving torque demand is essential for the development of motion controllers for mobile robots on complex terrains. This paper aims to propose a hybrid model of torque prediction, adaptive EC-GPR, for mobile robots to address the problem of estimating the required driving torque with unknown terrain disturbances.

An error compensation (EC) framework is used, and the preliminary prediction driving torque value is achieved using Gaussian process regression (GPR). The error is predicted using a continuous hidden Markov model to generate compensation for the prediction residual caused by terrain disturbances and uncertainties. As the final step, a gain coefficient is used to adaptively tune the significance of the compensation term through parameter resetting. The proposed model is verified on a sample set, including the driving torque of a mobile robot on three different sandy terrains with two driving modes.

The results show that the adaptive EC-GPR yields the highest prediction accuracy when compared with existing methods.

It is demonstrated that the proposed model can predict the driving torque accurately for mobile robots in an unconstructed environment without terrain identification.

Using the upper echelons theory, this study aims to investigate the moderating effect of managerial discretion (MD) on the impact of dynamic managerial capabilities (DMCs) on established firms’ (EFs) response strategies to disruptive innovation (RStDI).

A cross-sectional study was conducted using an online questionnaire to collect data from senior management of sample firms, targeting the population of professional service firms (PSFs) operating in the Emirate of Dubai. After receiving 491 responses, data was analyzed using IBM packages (SPSS and Amos) through a covariance-based structural equation modeling technique.

As proposed, the underpinnings of DMCs (managerial human capital, managerial social capital and managerial cognitive perceptions) were associated with EFs’ strategies for responding to DIs. Surprisingly, despite theoretical predictions, MD did not moderate the relationship. These findings provided support to the main propositions of the upper echelons theory, however, not for its contextual moderator (MD).

The cross-sectional approach to testing the research model limits the identified significant effects that should be further investigated. The research sample was restricted to PSFs operating in Dubai, UAE, thus limiting the generalizability of the findings to the examined context.

The findings of this investigation are valuable to managers and hiring teams. They provide empirically supported insights on the critical role of managerial dynamic capabilities underpinnings (human capital, social capital and cognitive perceptions) in facilitating organizational RStDI. The findings also provide significant insights to policymakers, notably on the importance of innovative and well-crafted policies and regulative frameworks that enhance MD.

This study provides one of the first empirical quantitative analysis to assess MD and test its effects as a moderator, thus contributing significantly to the existing theoretical arguments on MD. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to quantify the relationship between DMCs and organizational RStDI.

The purpose of this study was to examine if team composition based on adaption-innovation (A-I) problem-solving styles is related to the teamwork quality and team effectiveness (TE) of student project teams participating in a [state-gifted program (SGP)].

A correlational design was conducted with a sample of 72 (SGP) participants, consisting of 15 project teams (n = 15), which formed three groups: (1) the homogeneous adaptive group, which consists of five homogeneous adaptive teams (n = 5); (2) the homogeneous innovative group, which consists of five homogeneous innovative teams (n = 5), and (3) the heterogeneous group (i.e. a mix of innovative and adaptive individuals), which consists of five heterogeneous teams (n = 5).

A one-way ANOVA and post-hoc test revealed that team composition based on problem-solving styles is related to teamwork quality and TE. Regarding TE, both homogeneous groups (i.e. all adaptive or all innovative individuals) were more effective than the heterogeneous group. However, regarding teamwork quality, only the adaptive group had significantly higher teamwork quality than the heterogeneous group.

We recommend that leadership educators utilize Kirton’s adaption-innovation inventory (KAI) as a tool for building effective student project teams. KAI can be used by leadership educators in two major ways: to assign students to groups (as done in the current study) or for team building, where team members share their KAI scores to better understand their problem-solving preferences.

The findings add to the literature by specifying the type of homogeneous groups (i.e. homogeneous adaptive), which may offer an advantage over heterogeneous groups regarding teamwork quality.