Search results

This study examines the effect of human and technological resource bundling on the financial and non-financial performance of third-party logistics (3PL) firms in India.

For achieving the research aim, 248 practitioners from India based 3PL firms were surveyed. The relationships between human and technology resources and firm performance were examined using structural equation modelling (SEM).

The results of empirical tests revealed that human and technological resources significantly enhance the performance of the 3PL firm. However, the firm's logistic capabilities related to track and trace, order management and final assembly do not mediate this relationship.

This study contributes by examining resource bundling in India's 3PL industry using empirical data and providing knowledge of the relationship between resources and business performance. It guides managers to consciously develop resource capabilities that influence firm performance.

The purpose of this article is to explore the phenomena of board gender diversity and its consequences for sustainability performance, as measured by the environment, social and governance (ESG) disclosure score, in the Indian context.

The positivist paradigm influenced the research design for this study. The relationship between firm's ESG performance and female participation on the corporate boards was explored using panel data regression with a fixed effect approach. A total of 712 data points covering the Nifty 100 companies of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) were included in the data set. To add robustness to the findings and to overcome endogeneity bias, authors employed the Dynamic Generalized Method of Moments (GMM).

The results showed that, a relatively small, percentage of women directors has little impact on ESG performance, but when at least three women directors are in place, these relationships become more favourable. Despite the fact that Indian firms trail behind many developed and developing countries in promoting board gender equality, authors conclude that critical mass theory partially applies in the Indian context.

This study contributes to the field of corporate governance in the twenty-first century by investigating the subject of women's participation on boards in the context of a rising market and its potential influence on sustainability performance. The use of critical mass theory adds a fresh perspective to the literature.

Evolved from Toyota’s shop floor in Japan, lean bundles are universally accepted for boosting manufacturing performance. However, extant literature shows mixed findings on the effectiveness of lean bundles in non-Japanese settings. This meta-analysis is aimed at understanding the influence of national culture (NC) differences on the lean bundles-performance relationships.

A total of 224 effects from 12,569 observations across 48 empirical studies from 14 countries are meta-analyzed. Also, weighted least squares (WLS) meta-regression using NC scores from the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) study are conducted to test the moderating effect of NC dimensions.

The meta-analysis reveals a positive association between the lean bundles and firm performance; though, the strength of the association varies across the individual lean bundles. The meta-regression results show that lean practices are more effective in countries that value high future orientation, high collectivism, low-performance orientation and high assertiveness.

The results contribute to the literature on the role of local cultural influence on strategies and decisions related to the implementation of continuous improvement (CI) programs in cross-cultural settings.

This study responds to the calls from the literature on identifying interactions among the sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) drivers, which influence focal firms’ SSCM decisions. It also determines how the effect of SSCM drivers differs across the upstream and downstream supply chains (SCs) entities of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) companies.

We employ a multi-method design encompassing three studies: study 1 (multiple-case study), study 2 (quantitative survey), and study 3 (multiple-criteria decision-making or MCDM modeling).

The results show that the external drivers such as customer pressure, competition, and supplier pressure and internal drivers such as top management commitment interact to influence the adoption of SSCM practices, and this interaction is diverse across upstream and downstream SC entities of the FMCG sector. The study provides empirical evidence of relationships among the SSCM drivers, which influence SSCM decisions.

Understanding these interactions will help managers derive strategies to manage the overall SSCM ecosystem and recognize the multiplier effects of upstream to downstream and vice versa.

Lens of conservation of resources (COR) theory has been used to study how organizations can create resource passageways for their employees via managers. This has been examined in cross-cultural virtual work teams distributed across time and space within the high-resource loss context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Longitudinal field design was used in a transnational organization involving data collection at three times over eight months. At Time 1, qualitative methodology was used to propose a conceptual model. At Time 2 and Time 3, an online survey was used to collect data for 205 virtual work teams across 10 countries in the Asia–Pacific region pre and post “manager as coach” training respectively.

Using COR theory, the study highlights that “manager as coach” training is an effective resource for managers in the high resource depletion context of the pandemic. Access to timely support increases saliency for the resource-gain spiral and has a cross-over impact on virtual work team outcomes suggesting transferability of resources from managers to subordinates. Also, managers across all nationalities view coaching training as an equally valuable resource.

The study provides evidence for investment in timely and relevant support for managers to positively and swiftly impact virtual work teams during high-resource loss contexts.

The study expands COR crossover theory across space and time dimensions using a longitudinal field research design.

Industry 4.0-driven digitalisation is said to offer a way to redesign traditional compliance-oriented quality management (QM) models. However, despite a rising academic and practitioner interest, it is still unclear how companies transform their current QM models to meet the real-time needs of the new manufacturing paradigm. The purpose of this study is to explore practices for the digitalisation of QM and to uncover the digitalisation journey.

An exploratory research approach of an embedded case study of a multinational auto-component manufacturer was adopted to achieve the research aim.

A guiding framework called the “Quality 4.0 transition framework” was developed based on literature and expert knowledge. The framework is made up of three building blocks, i.e. the foundation of “as-is” digitalisation maturity assessment; pillars representing horizontally and vertically integrated QM processes, and roof signifying reinforcement of total quality management (TQM) principles at all levels.

The study provides empirical evidence of the case company's digitalisation journey to avert product recall due to field failure issues. The study contributes to theory and practice in many ways. First, the study uses empirical data from a real-world case to understand how digitalisation affects QM processes. Next, the guiding framework for the Quality 4.0 transition adds to the existing literature on the digitalisation of business processes.

Digitalised and interconnected production systems in the era of fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 (I4.0) have triggered the need of reshaping the traditional Quality Management (QM) models and roles of quality professionals. The purpose of this paper is to review the body of literature on QM in the I4.0 environment (also termed as “Quality 4.0”) and identify future research possibilities.

The morphological analysis (MA) framework is used to identify research gaps in a systematic manner. We present the MA framework based on a literature review of 51 papers on the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) list identified using systematic review protocol.

The MA framework, built on six relevant dimensions, namely, production and operations function, scope of QM activities, enabling technologies, latent capabilities of digitalisation, performance metrics and QM principles, and 41 associated variants, reveals 367 research gaps as an upper bound of opportunities for future research.

This paper is possibly the first to use MA for reviewing the QM literature, presenting important contributions. The MA framework acts as a ready reckoner on the QM in I4.0 literature. It documents research gaps through the construction of a cross-consistency matrix.

: Sustainability in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) supply chains (SC) is receiving greater than ever attention due to the increasing awareness of sustainability challenges such as climate change and labor rights. A definite solution is to integrate sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices all through the upstream and downstream entities of SC. This study identified and compared the drivers for the implementation of SSCM practices in Indian FMCG sector.

A methodology based on Grey-Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), a hybrid multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique and sensitivity analysis was used to envisage the complex causal relationships among the identified SSCM drivers and to identify the critical ones.

The results showed that regulatory and legislative pressure, competition pressure and innovativeness dominantly drive the implementation of SSCM practices in the upstream and downstream SC of the FMCG sector.

The study examined levers of sustainability in FMCG supply chains in an emerging market with most of the extant research limited to automotive and electronic supply chains.

The aim of the study is to develop and apply a continuous improvement (CI) framework by introducing environmental considerations into the Six Sigma DMAIC (define–measure–analyze–improve–control) cycle for a continuous identification, evaluation and implementation of promising opportunities of enhancing environmental sustainability of process-based industries.

Action research approach within the research design of a single case study was used for illustrating the application of the proposed DMAIC framework for improving operational and environmental performance in the process-industry environment of a pharmaceutical manufacturing company.

The case study illustrated the implementation of DMAIC cycle for optimizing the energy consumption of pharmaceutical plants producing bulk drugs for medication. After improving the energy distribution in the cooling tower (CTW), chilled brine (CHB) and chilled water (CHW) system, the pharmaceutical plant was able to achieve an annual economic benefit of US$97,047 and environmental benefits of mitigating CO₂ emissions of 807.44 t (CO₂) by reducing the electricity and furnace oil consumption.

The framework may be adopted for environmental considerations specific to process-based industry such as chemical plant, fertilizer units, thermal power plant and food processing industry.

Corporation's board (CB) is viewed as a vital internal corporate governance (CG) mechanism, playing a critical role in mitigating the agency problems and enhancing firm performance. Considering the mixed nature of extant CG literature on CB-firm performance link, this study aims to examine the impact of specific CB attributes on firm performance studied in varied contextual settings and investigates the moderating effects of three contextual factors, i.e. legal origin, industry type and firm type on CB-performance relationships.

Meta-analysis technique suggested by Hedges and Olkin (1985) was used to analyse a sample of 330 effect sizes reported in 148 studies published between 2000 and 2020 in 85 peer-viewed journals, studying CB-performance associations across 31 countries. The analyses were conducted in two stages: first, the authors assessed the main effect of CB attributes on firm performance and tested the heterogeneity in effect size across the primary studies. In the next stage, the authors investigated the moderating variables accounting for this heterogeneity in the CB-firm performance relationship.

Board independence, board diversity, board size and role duality are the CB attributes, which significantly and positively impact firm performance. Further, the homogeneity tests revealed variability in effect size for all CB attributes except for board committees. Subgroup meta-analyses revealed that the contextual factors related to industry-type and firm-type are substantial explanatory source of heterogeneity in CB-performance association, though legal origin of firm also partially explains the heterogeneity in this relationship.

Only empirical research reporting Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients(r), as the effect size, were considered for this study. Some of the other CB attributes such as board composition, compensation structure of board members, performance evaluation and appointment process of board members were not included due to limited empirical research on these attributes.

The paper includes implications for managers and policy makers for the development of effective corporate boards and CG mechanisms.

This paper integrates diverse empirical evidence on the associations of CB attributes with firm performance and systematically assesses the moderating factors that contributes to heterogeneity in these relationships.