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The purpose of this paper is to understand how business process configurations influence motivation among process participants.

An experiment was conducted in which business process rules complexity, work backlog, and case distribution method were manipulated. Participant motivation and its antecedents were measured using a survey.

The study finds that business process configurations influence the motivation of process participants through their effect on perceived competence. Increasing business process rules complexity reduces competence. The effect of case distribution method on competence depends on backlog. Sequential distribution undermines competence in the presence of backlog, and enhances competence when backlog is absent. However, batch distribution results in higher competence in the presence of backlog than in its absence.

The study confirms the applicability of self-determination theory for analyzing the effect of work settings, including business process configurations, on employee motivation. The study further demonstrates the applicability of the task technology fit model in the context of business process automation.

The study suggests that reducing process complexity through the use of information technology can benefit process participant motivation. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of case distribution method on performance expectations.

While much of the extant research has considered the enhancement of business processes at the organizational level, this study examines how business process design can be used to preserve and potentially enhance the motivation of human process participants.

The paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of business processes (BPs) literature by identifying and discussing key BP‐related research themes and suggesting directions for future research.

Latent semantic analysis was used to analyze the abstracts of academic articles related to BP. Over 2,700 articles that use the term “business process (BP)” in their title, abstract or keywords were identified through electronic journals database EBSCOHost and examined.

The results clearly indicate growing interest in BP research during the past 20 years. The key research themes can be classified into core and associated BP research. Core BP research deals with four cornerstones of BP change: BP design, information technology, BP implementation, and ongoing BP management. The associated BP research lies on the intersection of BP and other research areas such as total quality management, supply chain management, e‐commerce, etc.

There is a need to focus future research efforts on understanding the inter‐relationships among the four identified cornerstones of BP change. There is also a need for more inter‐disciplinary BP research and integration of BP‐related organizational practices.

The review offers a cross‐disciplinary perspective on BP research. The proposed framework can be used to identify directions for future research and practice.

By mobilizing the empirical setting of a megaproject, this study problematizes public budgeting as participatory practice. The authors suggest that megaprojects are prone to democratic legitimacy challenges due to a long history of cost overruns, which provides stakeholders with a chance to dramatize a budgetary controversy.

Through article and document data, the authors reconstructed a controversy that emerged around the budget of Stockholm/Åre’s candidature for the Olympic Winter Games 2026. The authors used Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) orders of worth to systematically analyze the justification work of key stakeholder groups involved in the controversy.

This study illustrates that a budgetary controversy was actively maintained by stakeholder groups, which resulted in a lack of public support and the eventual demise of the Olympic candidature. As such, the authors provide a more nuanced understanding of public budgeting as a controversy-based process vis-à-vis a wider public with regard to the broken institution of megaprojects.

This study suggests more attention to the disruptive power of public scrutiny and the dramatization of budgeting in megaprojects. In this empirical case, the authors show how stakeholders tend to take their technical concerns too far in order to challenge a budget, even though megaprojects generally provide an ill-suited setting for accurate forecasts.

While studies around the financial legacies of megaprojects have somewhat matured, very few have looked at pitching them. However, the authors argue that megaprojects are increasingly faced with financial skepticism upon their approval upfront.

This chapter uses multiple research methods, including quantitative science mapping analysis (SciMat) and a qualitative literature review, to provide insight into the academic debate unfolding at the intersection of big data and business processes. SciMat analysis based on keyword co-occurrence enabled identifying 12 of the most productive research themes, as reflected in a poll of 301 articles about big data and business processes. The three most important themes are: firm performance, Industry 4.0, and innovation. The traditional literature review on firm performance indicated that big data analytics (BDA) positively influence business process performance and have a beneficial impact on a firm’s performance, that is, the role of big data is viewed as critical in the context of Industry 4.0 because it enhances productivity and improves business processes. The benefits of BDA can be achieved only if the organizational obstacles related to planning, workforce attitude, and alignment with strategy are overcome. Moreover, big data is perceived as a significant source of innovation in an organization and can be conceptualized with the use of a resource-based view (RBV) of the firm. BDA positively influence business processes, which is strengthened by adequate implementation and openness to innovation.

Process improvement is a fundamental activity of the business process management (BPM) lifecycle. However, practitioners still lack concrete guidance and adequate objectives for process improvement. Moreover, improvement projects typically tie up considerable amounts of capital and are very risky. Thus, more guidance is needed on how to derive concrete recommendations for process improvement in a goal-oriented manner. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors propose a decision model that determines along which paths the instances of a process should be routed to maximize the value contribution of the process. To do so, the decision model requires a process model and a set of historical process instances as inputs.

The decision model builds on the idea that only the parameters of the process, i.e., the values according to which it is decided on which path an instance traverses the process, can be modified, without altering the structure of the process. The decision model determines the parameter setting that maximizes the value contribution of the process, which is measured in terms of the expected cash flow of the process. When determining the optimal parameter setting, the decision model considers that different instances and paths have different cash flow effects.

The authors prototypically implemented the decision model and report on the insights from a demonstration example that is based on the order verification process of an IT distributor.

The decision model complements existing approaches to process improvement as it reveals additional improvement potential by focussing on the decision points in a process without altering the structure of the process. The decision model also enables identifying an optimal parameter setting, as a concrete recommendation for process improvement, in line with the principles of value-based BPM.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the geographical distance between headquarters and subsidiaries moderates the relationship between cultural intelligence and the knowledge transfer process.

A sample of 103 senior expatriate managers working in Croatia from several European and non-European countries was used to test the hypotheses. Data were collected using questionnaires, while the methodology employed to test the relationship between the variables was partial least square. Furthermore, interaction-moderation effect was utilized to test the impact of geographical distance and, for testing control variables, partial least square multigroup analysis was used.

Cultural intelligence plays a significant role in the knowledge transfer process performance. However, geographical distance has the power to moderate this relationship based on the direction of knowledge transfer. In conventional knowledge transfer, geographical distance has no significant impact. On the contrary, data have shown that, in reverse knowledge transfer, geographical distance has a moderately relevant effect. The authors supposed that these findings could be connected to the specific location of the knowledge produced by subsidiaries.

Multinational companies should take into consideration that the further away a subsidiary is from the headquarters, and the varying difference between cultures, cannot be completely mitigated by the ability of the manager to deal with cultural differences, namely cultural intelligence. Thus, multinational companies need to allocate resources to facilitate the knowledge transfer between subsidiaries.

The present study stresses the importance of cultural intelligence in the knowledge transfer process, opening up a new stream of research inside these two areas of research.

Business intelligence (BI) has been applied in various domains to take better decisions and it provides different level of information to its stakeholders according to the information needs. The purpose of this paper is to present a literature review on recent works in BI. The two principal aims in this survey are to identify areas lacking in recent research, thereby offering potential opportunities for investigation.

To simplify the study on BI literature, it is segregated into seven categories according to the usage. Each category of work is analyzed using parameters such as purpose, domain, problem identified, solution applied, benefit and outcome.

The BI contribution in various domains, ongoing research in BI, the convergence of BI domains, problems and solutions, results of congregated domains, core problems and key solutions. It also outlines BI and its components composition, widely applied BI solutions such as algorithm-based, architecture-based and model-based solutions. Finally, it discusses BI implementation issues and outlines the security and privacy policies adopted in BI environment.

In this survey BI has been discussed in theoretical perspective whereas practical contribution has been given less attention.

A comprehensive survey on BI which identifies areas lacking in recent research and providing potential opportunities for investigation.

This study aims to explore sustainable development and business success (BS) through decision-making (DM) in Pakistan’s circular economy.

This is a co-relational study in which the researchers used cross-sectional data collected from the managers of Pakistan’s manufacturing industries. Accordingly, the authors based this study’s findings on 373 valid samples.

This study’s structural equation modeling results reveal that DM has a positive and significant effect on sustainable development, which comprises competitiveness, business performance enhancement, flexibility, customer satisfaction and technology development. Moreover, DM positively and significantly affects BS.

This study’s findings support sustainable development, strengthen the socioeconomic conditions and bring about the industries’ well-being through DM. In addition, these findings demonstrate the need for the circular economy to tackle industrial challenges and simultaneously open up economic and environmental growth opportunities for society.

This study offers the original contribution from a circular economy perspective; there needs to be more empirical evidence among managers of manufacturing industries. Besides, this study provides DM’s role in achieving sustainable development in the presence of BS, which has disappeared in an integrated way, particularly in a circular context.