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The purpose of this paper is to propose and validate a framework for improving efficiency in road transport based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and personnel participation. The use of the “Overall Equipment Effectiveness” (OEE) indicator is widespread in factories. The framework adapts OEE to transport management.

Research was divided into two phases. The first phase included development of a participative framework, which was based on the authors’ experience and a literature review related to transport KPIs. The second phase involved the validation of the framework, adopting an “Action Research” approach by leading its implementation in a Spanish retailer.

Implementation of the framework has promoted more efficient transport in the company. The framework could be extrapolated to other companies, particularly, transport and parcel companies. By applying the “Action Research” approach it has been shown that researchers and practitioners can create knowledge by resolving problems that are of interest to both parties.

The framework has been applied in one company and could achieve broader validation. Additionally, integrating only indicators of transport efficiency into the OEE proposal has meant that other perspectives, such as costs or the environment, have not been dealt with directly.

The framework is a new line of research applied to transport management. The academic and business contributions fall into three areas: transport management, organizational change and the methodology. There are few examples that illustrate “Action Research” adoption within the scope of supply chain management.

The purpose of this article is to describe multi‐tasking behaviour in the workplace; to link its cause to the increasing prevalence of low‐cost information and communications technologies and to the changing organizational structures that have evolved to meet the demands and opportunities of these technologies.

This article is a presentation of the current literature on multi‐tasking behaviour among knowledge workers with a selective bibliography addressing empirical research into the behavioural, managerial and technological aspects of this phenomenon. It then expands to comprehensive coverage of the literature on past and current thinking about task structuring, strategies for coping in a multi‐tasking environment and the changing nature of work and organizations, which fuels the need to multi‐task in response to these changes.

Among knowledge workers, multi‐tasking behaviour appears to be an inevitable consequence of the presence of increasingly easy access to information. Despite the detrimental effect that multi‐tasking has on specific task completion, the paradox is that this does not seem to have an effect on overall organizational productivity. For the USA at least, an average 4 per cent growth rate over the past several years of the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries shows that productivity has increased in tandem with an increase in multi‐tasking behaviour and information technologies.

Multi‐tasking behaviour needs to be understood in the context of its manifestation as a variable that is at least partially dependent on the existence of relatively “cheap” information. In essence, in an information economy, task completion by knowledge workers to a set deadline may be counterproductive to the interests of the organization as a whole. This article describes certain strategies that can be used to minimize the harmful aspects of continuous task switching and to maximize the returns to experience that multi‐tasking can bring to an organization.

Multi‐tasking behaviour and its link to complexity theory may lead to a new understanding of organizations as highly fluid and variable entities that are impossible to design or maintain centrally and yet whose goals lead to the moment by moment creation of micro‐organizational structures that accomplish tasks in a manner that engages the full resources of knowledge workers.

The research objective is to analyze the situation and outlook for the future of the measuring and analysis practices used to determine customer satisfaction in 305 ISO 9000‐certified organizations of the Euro‐region Galicia (Spain)‐North of Portugal.

The empirical study was conducted on a random sample of 305 ISO 9000 companies. Data were gathered by personally interviewing those responsible for quality management at the companies.

Certified companies in the Euro‐region Galicia‐North Portugal have a high awareness of the need to measure and analyze the satisfaction of their customers and a predisposition towards it but, when it comes to putting said practice into action, they fall into certain methodological deficiencies that lead to their usefulness being only moderate.

This is a basically descriptive work concerning the practice of measuring and analyzing customer satisfaction in certified companies, within the Galicia (Spain)‐North Portugal Euro‐region. The results obtained are based on evaluations given by the interviewees, so that their reliability depends, to a large extent, on sincerity and good information being provided by the same.

The work is particularly useful for practitioners. The results may act as a guideline for the companies implementing these practices and for those who will do so in the near future. It is also of interest for orientating activities involving evaluation, training and assessment by companies and official bodies related to quality management, such as consultants, certification bodies, universities, business schools, etc.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a pattern of interlocking directorates is emerging following reforms in Mexican corporations, and who, if any, are the powerful actors in this network. Drawing on the Bourdieusian notion of social capital, the paper also analyses theoretically the interlocking directorates, networks and powerful actors, and their influences on and potential implications for corporate governance mechanisms.

The data used in the study consisted of 1,442 internal and external board members of the population of 126 Mexican corporations trading on the Mexican Stock Market as of January 2011. Use of social network analysis (SNA) demonstrates individuals’ links with corporations and allows the production of spatial maps to visualise the network structure of interlocking boards.

Using the measures of SNA developed by Freeman (1979 and Bonacich (1972), the authors identify the most powerful and influential directors in the network structure of board members in Mexico. Board members with the greatest number of connections occupy central positions in the network. The authors also find a catalogue of corporate governance scandals. The inclusion of independent directors seems to have had no influence in ensuring better corporate governance.

Mapping out the directors’ links might offer excellent opportunities for policy makers to see how many companies a single director represents, how they share boards, and the implications for minority shareholders of sharing boards, and to understand the workloads of directors in carrying out the monitoring tasks expected of them.

This paper makes an important contribution by employing SNA to illustrate interlocking directorates and the positions of powerful and influential actors. Examining networks of directors from a “social capital” point of view also provides an understanding of why the role of independent directors remains toothless in family-dominated corporations.

The gap that this research attempts to fill is to analyse the explanatory factor “industry” when assessing the reputation of a corporate group. In other words, this research attempts to demonstrate the impact of the “industrial halo” on the assessment of corporate reputation, given that, to date, the academic literature has not considered industry as an explanatory variable in the assessment of the reputation of private companies.

A sample of 43 Spanish companies was used to analyse the relationship between the reputation of firms as measured by the Merco Empresas index, and the industries to which they belong, after controlling for company performance, size, turnover, public recognition of their leadership, and corporate responsibility. This involved conducting a cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between the variables for each year in the time period from 2005 to 2016. The available data were taken from the firms' annual financial reports and websites, as well as from the Merco.

The paper shows the existence of industrial halos that account for the corporate reputation of businesses in Spain. It is also shown that industrial halos are not permanent over time, and that they tend to occur in years of crisis.

It would have been desirable for this study to have had sufficient data to include other industries, but this was not possible. As for possible extensions, in addition to expanding the period considered, other analytical techniques, such as panel data models, could be applied to allow comparison with the results obtained here.

The results of this study have some practical implications. Firstly, firms that publish corporate reputation rankings should be aware of the distortion that the industrial halo can produce, especially in times of uncertainty, and seek to correct for it in their measurements. And secondly, corporate groups themselves should assume that the reputation of the industry affects their individual reputation, and consequently, they should see the other companies in the industry not only as competitors but also as “reputational allies”. They should therefore make collective efforts to improve in this respect, especially in the face of reputational crises.

This paper provides a better understanding of the relationship between the reputation of a company and the industry to which it belongs, and of its permanence over time. This relationship has been little studied in the Spanish market to date.

本研究擬分析當企業集團的信譽被評估時的解釋性因素-行業,以填補現時的研究缺口。具體來說,研究人員鑒於學術文獻至今仍未於評估私營企業的信譽時、把行業當作是一個解釋變量來看待,故擬進行研究、以顯示行業光環在評估企業信譽時所產生的影響。

研究使用的樣本為43間西班牙公司。研究人員分析以Merco Empresas 指數來測量的公司信譽與公司所屬行業之間的關係。有關的分析調控了公司的業績、規模、營業額、企業責任、以及企業領導能力的公眾認可程度所帶來的影響。研究人員對有關變量間的關係進行橫向分析 分析於2005年至2016年期間年度性地進行。現有數據取自有關公司的年度財務報表和其網站,也有取自Merco的。

研究結果表明了可解釋西班牙企業信譽的行業光環是存在的。研究結果亦顯示、行業光環不是永恆的,而且,行業光環往往會在營運極其困難的年度內出現。

本文讓我們更深入瞭解公司信譽與公司所屬行業之間的關係,以及其在時間上的永恆性。就這相關的關係而言,探討西班牙市場的研究至今為數不多。

“When James Boswell returned from a tour of Corsica in 1765 he wrote: ‘It is indeed amazing that an island so considerable, and in which such noble things have been doing, should be so imperfectly known.’ The same might be said today of Puerto Rico.” Thus began Millard Hansen and Henry Wells in the foreword to their 1953 look at Puerto Rico's democratic development. Four decades later, the same could again be said about the island.

The purpose of this paper is to explain student loyalty beyond its customary relationship with student satisfaction by including two relational variables, trust and commitment, two cognitive traits (service familiarity and communication) and one affective trait (opportunism) as moderators of the impact of trust and commitment on loyalty.

Two relational constructs (trust and commitment) are employed to improve the loyalty model and key comparisons are performed to know if career, cohort and sourcing school generate differences in the explanation of student loyalty.

Results show that the explanation chain that starts with student satisfaction but continues with the development of student trust and the reaching of student commitment culminates with student loyalty. The moderators (student opportunism, service familiarity, communication, age and available income for education) significantly contribute to the explanatory power of the model. Career is a meaningful differentiator in reaching student loyalty as are student cohort and the type of high school from which the student came.

This is one of first empirical studies on university student loyalty. Future research could test the same or new hypotheses using different samples and contexts.

University policies may benefit from the inclusion of norms regarding relational processes and outcomes such as the value of trust in the interactions and systematic recognition and awards assigned to student commitment achievements.

The explanation chain of customer loyalty was successfully applied to student loyalty, and strengthened with the addition of meaningful moderating variables.

Esta investigación tiene como objetivo explicar la lealtad del estudiante más allá de su relación habitual con la satisfacción del estudiante al incluir dos variables relacionales, confianza y compromiso, dos rasgos cognitivos (familiaridad con el servicio y comunicación) y un rasgo afectivo (oportunismo) como moderadores del impacto de la confianza y Compromiso de lealtad.

Se emplean dos construcciones relacionales (confianza y compromiso) para mejorar el modelo de lealtad y se realizan comparaciones clave para saber si la carrera, la cohorte y la escuela de recursos generan diferencias en la explicación de la lealtad de los estudiantes.

los resultados muestran que la cadena de explicación que comienza con la satisfacción del estudiante, pero continúa con el desarrollo de la confianza del estudiante y el logro del compromiso del estudiante culmina con la lealtad del estudiante. Los moderadores (el oportunismo de los estudiantes, la familiaridad con el servicio, la comunicación, la edad y los ingresos disponibles para la educación) contribuyen significativamente al poder explicativo del modelo. La carrera es un diferenciador significativo para alcanzar la lealtad de los estudiantes, al igual que la cohorte del estudiante y el tipo de escuela secundaria de la cual provino el estudiante.

Este es uno de los primeros estudios empíricos sobre la lealtad de los estudiantes universitarios. Las investigaciones futuras podrían probar las mismas o nuevas hipótesis utilizando diferentes ejemplos y contextos.

Las políticas de la universidad pueden beneficiarse de la inclusión de normas con respecto a los procesos y resultados relacionales, como el valor de la confianza en las interacciones y el reconocimiento sistemático y los premios asignados a los logros de compromiso de los estudiantes.

La cadena de explicación de la lealtad del cliente se aplicó con éxito a la lealtad del estudiante y se fortaleció con la adición de variables moderadoras significativas.

Specific research related to the study of innovation barriers in service SMEs in the Latin American region is limited. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects that external environmental, financial and human barriers have on innovation activities, particularly, within the context of Mexican service SMEs.

Three hypotheses were formulated and tested using structural equation modelling. Data were collected through an instrument that was developed based on relevant constructs adapted from the literature. The instrument was validated using confirmatory factor analysis, Cronbach’s α test and the composite reliability index to ensure reliability of the theoretical model. The instrument was distributed among service SMEs in the Aguascalientes state of Mexico, from were 308 valid responses were obtained.

In general, the results indicate that all the three barriers investigated (i.e. external environmental, financial and human) hinder innovation in service SMEs, with the external environmental barrier being the most significant of the three.

The findings of this research can inform managers of service SMEs and policy makers when formulating and implementing strategies to reduce innovation barriers.

Evidence suggests that specific research related to the study of innovation barriers in service SMEs in the Latin American region is limited. This paper fills this research gap by expanding the limited body of knowledge in this field and providing further evidence on this phenomenon. The study also enables the distinctive characteristics of innovation barriers to be understood within a particular context, expanding in this way the body of knowledge on this field.