Search results

The existing literature suggests that employee well-being is an important concern for organizations. The purpose of this paper is to carry out an empirical examination to assess whether employee experience of workplace spirituality has positive relationships with multiple forms of employee well-being.

This paper focussed on four forms of employee well-being, namely: emotional well-being, psychological well-being, social well-being, and spiritual well-being. It specified and empirically tested, using a survey design, four hypotheses, each proposing a positive relationship between workplace spirituality and one of the four forms of employee well-being.

All four hypotheses were supported indicating that workplace spirituality has a positive relationship with emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual well-being.

This paper may encourage future research to assess whether various forms of employee well-being result from specific dimensions of workplace spirituality.

Organizations may implement workplace spirituality for simultaneously enhancing multiple forms of employee well-being.

As employee well-being is a matter of social concern, the findings of this study indicating a positive association between workplace spirituality and employee well-being have a social relevance.

To the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between workplace spirituality and four forms of employee well-being, namely; emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual well-being. As employee well-being is an important concern for organizations, the contribution of the study findings is that workplace spirituality implementation can simultaneously enhance multiple forms of employee well-being.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

This paper aims to examine the impact of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) on the academic business ethics literature with the intent of making this research more accessible to those researchers and practitioners working in business ethics and other related fields. Specifically, the authors outline the types and scope of SOX-related research, examine the extent of reliance on SOX, identify which theoretical frameworks and research approaches are used and point out under-researched areas.

Using a descriptive approach, the authors examine the theoretical perspectives, classifying these perspectives into four groupings (economics, ethics/moral, psychological and sociological). Using counts, categorization and content analyses, the authors provide an overview of 115 articles with further analysis provided for articles relying heavily (n = 14) or moderately (n = 42) on SOX.

Whistleblowing and codes of ethics are well-researched topics. However, employment of some theories (e.g. signaling theory and stakeholder theory) and qualitative approaches are used less often. Other under-researched issues in the sample include CEO/CFO certifications, cost of compliance, auditor disclosures and empirical investigation of SOX and auditor independence (or corporate culture).

The authors’ decision to use certain databases, search terms and research methods, and to focus on business ethics journals and English language articles are possible limitations.

The authors’ contributions comprise an examination of the scope of SOX topics and detailing how reliant the research is on SOX. The authors identify trends in this literature and provide evidence of the broad theoretical frameworks to better understand the breadth and depth of theories used.

This study reports an examination of the relationships between Porter's (1980) generic strategies, dynamic environments, and performance. In me study, profile deviation is used to test strategy—environment fit. A sample of 173 acute care hospitals was used to test the proposed relationship. Results from the study indicate that adherence to an externally specified ideal strategy profile has a positive effect on firm performance. From a methodological standpoint, results suggest that empirical and theoretical profiles have equal predictive validity, and both have a higher predictive validity, than a random profile. Results also suggest that profiles can not be assumed to be robust to differences in performance measures used.

The purpose of this paper is to carry out an empirical examination to assess the nature of effects an employee’s individual spirituality and organizational spirituality have on the employee’s experience of meaning in work and community at work facets of workplace spirituality.

This paper specifies and examines, using a cross-sectional survey research design, the empirical support for two alternative models – a direct effects model and a moderating effect model – of the likely influences of an employee’s individual spirituality and organizational spirituality on the meaning and community facets of workplace spirituality.

The findings indicate considerable support for the direct effects model but no support for the moderating effect model. Within the direct effects model, organizational spirituality had much stronger association than employees’ individual spirituality with the workplace spirituality facets of meaning and community.

This study may encourage future research to examine other antecedents of workplace spirituality, and the moderators and mediators of the relationship between organizational spirituality and workplace spirituality.

It suggests to the practitioners that for enhancing employee experiences of workplace spirituality, organizational spirituality implementation is a more effective way than developing employees’ individual spirituality.

The study indicates that employees’ spiritual needs of meaning and community at work can be better fulfilled through organizational spirituality implementation than through individual spirituality development.

This is an original empirical examination and its value partly comes from its research implications and practice implications.

This paper aims to answer following three important but not well-answered or unanswered questions in the extant trust literatures: What is the true magnitude that trust impacts on performance? Is there any consistency among the effects of trust on performance at different levels? How does vertical distance affect the trust-performance relationship?

It captures the law between trust and performance at different levels by conducting a meta-analytic examination consisting of 238 independent empirical studies, 586 effect sizes and 110,576 independent samples.

It makes a periodic conclusion that trust significantly promotes performance. Specifically, trust not only has stronger positive correlation with team performance than individual and organizational performance inside organization, but also strongly facilitates organizational performance between organizations. Moreover, consistency exits in the effects of trust on performance at different levels. On one hand, trust has stronger positive correlation with performance of contextual type than performance of innovative type than performance of task type at different levels. On the other hand, promotion effect of trust on performance strengthens when the vertical distance between trustors and trustees diminishes. Additionally, three potential moderators including publication status, measurement tool and common method variance moderate the focused relation, but moderating effect is not thorough for regional culture. Moderating directions of the above four potential moderators are highly consistent.

This paper answers the three important but not well-answered or unanswered questions.

Nowadays, innovation appears as one of the main driving forces of organisational success. Despite the above fact, its impact on the propensity of an organisation to develop and sustain a competitive advantage has not yet received sufficient empirical investigation. The purpose of this paper is to enhance the existing empirical literature by focusing on the antecedents of innovation and its impact on competitive advantage. It proposes a newly developed conceptual framework that adopts a three-step approach, highlighting areas that have rarely been simultaneously examined before.

The examination of the proposed conceptual framework was performed with the use of a newly developed structured questionnaire that was distributed to a group of Greek manufacturing companies. The questionnaire has been successfully completed by chief executive officers (CEOs) from 189 different companies. CEOs were used as key respondents due to their knowledge and experience. The reliability and the validity of the questionnaire were thoroughly examined. Empirical data were analysed using the structural equation modelling technique. The study is empirical (based on primary data), explanatory (examines cause and effect relationships), deductive (tests research hypotheses) and quantitative (includes the analysis of quantitative data collected with the use of a structured questionnaire).

Results indicate that knowledge management, intellectual capital, organisational capabilities and organisational culture have significant direct and indirect effects on innovation, underlining the importance of their simultaneous enhancement. Finally, the positive effect of innovation on the creation of competitive advantages is empirically validated, bridging the gap in the relevant literature and offering avenues for additional future research.

The causal relationship between innovation and competitive advantage, despite its significant theoretical support, has not been empirically validated. The present paper aspires to bridge this gap, investigating the impact of innovation on the development of competitive advantages. Moreover, the present study adopts a multidimensional approach that has never been explored in the existing innovation literature, making the examination of the proposed conceptual framework an interesting research topic.

Within the literature of global mindset there has been much discussion of antecedents. Few attempts have been made, however, to analyze the outcomes of a global mindset. Our chapter undertakes a thematic analysis of global mindset antecedents and outcomes in the 1994–2013 literature. Adopting an inductive approach and borrowing methods from international business and managerial cognition studies, we map, assess, and categorize 42 empirical and 10 theoretical studies thematically. We focus on the antecedents and outcomes at individual, group, and organizational levels. We conceptualize corporate global mindset as a multidimensional construct that incorporates global mindset at the individual level and is dependent on a robust communications infrastructure strategy for its cultivation throughout the organization. Our study categorizes antecedents and outcomes by level and identifies the gaps in global mindset outcomes and firm performance for future researchers to address.

The purpose of this study is to address the call for empirical research on trust and culture highlighted in the existing literature. This study empirically investigates the underlying cultural values of trust across multiple countries – the term used to describe specific cultural environments that have the potential to influence the way in which people demonstrate trust toward others – and then documents their subsequent influences on the success of organization development (OD) efforts in international contexts.

Using data from multiple sources, this study conducts a series of empirical tests to investigate the underlying cultural values of trust in a large sample of 42 countries over the past 20 years (2000–2020). Then, the study further extends the findings to propose an empirically developed framework, namely, a country classification, which can be used to assess whether cultural environments in a specific country appear to support or impede trust behavior and the likelihood of success in implementing OD initiatives and interventions in international contexts.

Trust is robustly related to cultural values. Specifically, people from countries with high power distance and uncertainty avoidance cultures tend to exhibit less trust in others, whereas those from countries with high individualistic and long-term oriented cultures are more likely to trust others. The country classification further demonstrates that Estonia, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands are the group of countries whose cultural values appear strongly consistent with the underlying cultural values of trust, implying a greater likelihood of success for OD efforts and interventions. On the other hand, Colombia, Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Mexico are the group of countries whose cultural values appear to differ significantly from the underlying cultural values of trust, suggesting potential obstacles for successful OD efforts and thus appropriate modifications of OD interventions are essentially needed. The results for other countries are also discussed.

The findings offer several practical implications for the community of OD consulting, especially those who work internationally in cross-national consulting projects or deal with culturally diverse organizations. These include a more sophisticated understanding of the cultural environments that support or impede the willingness to trust in a specific foreign country, an evidence-informed strategy to design or adopt appropriate OD interventions that align with the cultural environments of a foreign country and a framework to assess and improve the likelihood of successful OD interventions in international contexts.

To the author’s best knowledge, this is the first study to conduct an empirical examination of the influence of culture on trust in a comprehensive manner, subsequently providing a transitional bridge between two major strands of trust research in the current OD literature: trust serves as a necessary foundation for successful OD efforts and the willingness to trust can potentially be explained through cultural spheres. Second, this study explores trust behavior in international contexts and develops a country classification concerning the influence of culture on trust, both of which have never been accomplished in prior research.