Search results

A shared cognitive schema is the fundamental source of tacit understanding within a team. This study aims to address how such a shared cognitive schema emerges and evolves in an interdisciplinary research team.

This study uses an exploratory single case study to analyze the emergence and evolution of a shared cognitive schema in an interdisciplinary research team systematically. The authors spent more than two years collecting data from the IAM team via semistructured interviews, archival data and observation. Subsequently, a framework for the resulting mechanism model was developed by analyzing the data using a three-step process.

This study shows that as the interdisciplinary research team develops, the shared cognitive schema passes through three stages: overlapping cognitive schema, complementary cognitive schema and synergetic cognitive schema. The mechanisms of overlap, complement and synergy play important roles. The convergent roles of partner-based recruiting, knowledge categorization and following the existing institution facilitate the overlapping of knowledge structures. Complementary cognitive schema sharing is facilitated by interdisciplinary member selection, knowledge stock expansion and the effects of accomplished mentors. The synergetic behaviors of group voice, interactive cognition and adaptive learning facilitate synergetic cognitive schema sharing.

This study is the first to discuss the emergence and evolution of a shared cognitive schema at the microlevel of knowledge structure and belief structure. It offers a new theoretical perspective on the development rules of scientific research teams and provides practical enlightenment regarding the establishment and operation of interdisciplinary research teams.

A dark side of global mobility is that many immigrants have negative work outcomes. Studies have analyzed the antecedents to poor work outcomes from the immigrants’ point of view or from that of host country nationals. The purpose of this paper is to propose a relational model, which applies terror management theory to address how the economic mobility beliefs of immigrants and host country nationals interact and how these different combinations of beliefs affect the self-esteem of immigrants.

This theoretical model considers the impact of the social interactions between immigrants and host country nationals when immigrants’ mortality is salient.

In hostile environments that make immigrants’ mortality salient, lack of confirmation of immigrants’ beliefs about economic mobility from host country nationals can lead to a decrease in immigrants’ self-esteem and therefore to negative work outcomes.

As the number of immigrants grows, so do concerns about their ability to contribute to the economy. Lack of confirmation of their beliefs in a context in which their mortality is salient, is likely to lead to lower self-esteem and perhaps other negative outcomes.

This paper is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to use terror management theory to advance our understanding of the outcome of a lack of confirmation from host country nationals of immigrants’ beliefs on economic mobility under conditions of mortality salience.

Organizational learning and unlearning is a popular and important topic in business as well as academia. Even though there is a plethora of studies on organizational learning, surprisingly little is known about the conceptualization and operationalization of organizational unlearning. The purpose of this paper is to discuss organizational unlearning based on the organizational change and memory literature enhancing the organizational learning and change scholarship.

It is argued that unlearning is conceptualized as organizational memory eliminating, and is operationalized as changing beliefs and routines covariates in organizations. This is followed with a discussion of unlearning types, specifically, reinventive, formative, operative and adjustive, which are contingent on the environmental conditions. Finally, future research suggestions are proposed to leverage understanding on unlearning in the literature.

Shows that organizations first need to unlearn established beliefs and methods which have created rules and competency traps, in order to be receptive to new market and technology information.

This paper is of value in shedding light on the unlearning concept based on the organizational memory and change literature.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel recommendation method using online reviews with emotional preferences for facilitating online purchase decisions. This leads to better use of information-rich online reviews for providing users with personalized recommendations.

A novel method is developed for producing personalized recommendations in online purchase decision-making. Such a method fuses the belief structure and the Shapley function together to effectively deal with the emotional preferences in online reviews and adequately tackle the interaction existent between product criteria with the use of a modified combination rule for making better online recommendations for making online purchase decisions.

An example is presented for demonstrating the applicability of the method for facilitating online purchase. The results show that the recommendation using the proposed method can effectively improve customer satisfaction with better purchase decisions.

The proposed method can better utilize online reviews for satisfying personalized needs of consumers. The use of such a method can optimize interface design, refine customer needs, reduce recommendation errors and provide personalized recommendations.

The proposed method adequately considers the characteristics of online reviews and the personalized needs of customers for providing customers with appropriate recommendations. It can help businesses better manage online reviews for improving customer satisfaction and create greater value for both businesses and customers.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key values individuals believe in and their interpretation in the context of entrepreneurial behaviour. The study is predicated on the prior work of Krueger (2007) and specifically on the premise that “deep beliefs” underpin sense making, decision making and subsequent entrepreneurial behaviour.

The study utilised an inductive and interpretive research design within a constructivist paradigm. In phase one, Schwartz’s (1992) 54 values inventory was used to discover a core value-set associated with entrepreneurial behaviour. The results were later used as an “aide-memoire” during the second phase of in-depth interviews with 30 self-selected entrepreneurs. Interviews focused primarily on the meaning individuals attributed to those fundamental values they associated with entrepreneurial behaviour. The resulting narrative was subjected to discourse analysis and categorised into relevant themes.

Self-determined human action is based on a specific set of values which the individual uses to make decisions about how to behave in situations that are meaningful to them. Engaging in entrepreneurship is one form of self-determined behaviour that enables the individual to express and satisfy a variety of different fundamental needs. Four specific values are believed to be critical to the motivation of entrepreneurial behaviour, namely, independence, creativity, ambition and daring. The meaning attributed to each of these values is consistent with that attributed to self-determinism, self-efficacy and the identity of participants associated with entrepreneurship.

There are limitations to this research and the extension of the findings to a generalised population comprising individuals who may, or may not, behave entrepreneurially. This is not to say that such individuals hold values substantially different in other roles or areas of their lives outside a purely business context. The values rated by participants in this study had relevance to their view of entrepreneurial behaviour and were confined to a business perspective.The variability in meaning attributed to these values is however likely to produce a common thread focusing on control, creativity and goal-directed behaviour.

The study strongly suggests the presence of a specific value-set associated with entrepreneurial behaviour. The shift in emphasis to independence and being ambitious, at the expense of being creative and daring, represents one explanation for the episodic nature of entrepreneurial behaviour among individuals. The data further reveal differences in entrepreneurial behaviour within urban and rural contexts with the former being more tolerant of entrepreneurial activity because of its inherent cultural diversity

Similarly, all participants have assimilated several different identities for the different social roles they occupy. Within those varying roles there is the possibility that both individual and group values will differ from what is reported here. The purpose of the study was to isolate as far as possible entrepreneurial behaviour and its core values independently from other types of behaviour and values. However, the likelihood does exist that values held by some individuals from other spheres of their lives could take precedence over their entrepreneurial role and thus influence their survey results.

The value of this study lies in exposing the underlying motivations that cause entrepreneurial behaviour. The study also discovered that shifts occur in the belief structure causing individuals to engage in managerial behaviour in preference to entrepreneurial behaviour at critical stages in the business life-cycle. The study further identifies cultural differences in individualistic vs collectivist cultures and the degrees to which entrepreneurial behaviour is accepted within urban vs rural environments.

Health service organizations and professionals are under increasing pressure to work together to deliver integrated patient care. A common understanding of integration strategies may facilitate the delivery of integrated care across inter‐organizational and inter‐professional boundaries. This paper aims to build a framework for exploring and potentially aligning multiple stakeholder perspectives of systems integration.

The authors draw from the literature on shared mental models, strategic management and change, framing, stakeholder management, and systems theory to develop a new construct, Mental Models of Integrated Care (MMIC), which consists of three types of mental models, i.e. integration‐task, system‐role, and integration‐belief.

The MMIC construct encompasses many of the known barriers and enablers to integrating care while also providing a comprehensive, theory‐based framework of psychological factors that may influence inter‐organizational and inter‐professional relations. While the existing literature on integration focuses on optimizing structures and processes, the MMIC construct emphasizes the convergence and divergence of stakeholders' knowledge and beliefs, and how these underlying cognitions influence interactions (or lack thereof) across the continuum of care.

MMIC may help to: explain what differentiates effective from ineffective integration initiatives; determine system readiness to integrate; diagnose integration problems; and develop interventions for enhancing integrative processes and ultimately the delivery of integrated care.

Global interest and ongoing challenges in integrating care underline the need for research on the mental models that characterize the behaviors of actors within health systems; the proposed framework offers a starting point for applying a cognitive perspective to health systems integration.

Several opinion polls have found that many consumers resist making purchases via the Internet because of their concerns about the privacy of the personal information they provide to Internet merchants. Using the theory of planned behavior as its basis, this study investigated the relationships among beliefs about Internet privacy and trustworthiness, along with beliefs about perceived behavioral control and the expectations of important others, and online purchasing behavior. Data were collected from 193 college students. Analysis of the data indicates that beliefs about trustworthiness positively affect attitudes toward buying online, which in turn positively affect purchasing behavior. Beliefs about self‐efficacy regarding purchasing positively affect perceived behavioral control, which in turn affects online purchasing behavior. In short, respondents who believed in the trustworthiness of the Internet and in their own abilities to buy online were more likely to make Internet purchases than were those without such beliefs.

What happens when change agents intervene to change corporate structures? What is the well‐documented “resistance to change” phenomenon? How are bureaucracies created, maintained and changed? Why do people resist change? The paradigm concept is used to answer these questions and to provide some insights into the nature of future organisational forms.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors affecting anti-consumption behavior of the consumers toward organic food purchase: in particular, how do individual beliefs about trustworthiness of organic foods, normative structure of social pressure and self-efficacy affect individual intentions to make organic food purchases and actual purchasing behavior? To answer this question, a theoretical framework of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as its foundation has been established. Using measurement scales in order to measure different aspects of trustworthiness, normative structure, self-efficacy, attitude, perceived behavioral control (PBC) and subjective norms, a survey instrument has been developed to examine the several associations implied by the model of TPB.

In doing so, data on a structured questionnaire were collected from various parts of a city based on convenience random sampling procedure. The respondents were interviewed face-to-face to collect information on a structured questionnaire. Data (n=337) were analyzed using a research framework formulated based on the TPB through the structural equation modeling procedure.

The findings of the study indicate that among the seven independent variables of trustworthiness, normative structure, self-efficacy, attitude, subjective norm and PBC, only subjective norm has not been statistically significant to influence organic food purchase behavior.

The result implies that various sociopolitical forces and skewed monthly incomes are inhibiting the consumers (anti-consumption) to increasingly buy the organic food products.

In this regard, government, policy planners, academia as well as media have profound roles to play to encourage people to buy more organic food for their health safety and overall consumer well-being.

This research is based on primary data collected from the respondents of a sub-urban areas of a metropolitan city. The findings will help formulate a sound food policy for ensuring social well-being of the consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to deepen the discussion about religious organisations’ (ROs) potential to practise their faith by means of their investments, rather than keeping both issues separate.

The authors adopted a qualitative exploratory approach using seven cases of social shareholder engagement (SSE) by Christian organisations. It focused on creating knowledge from best practices.

Within the three Christian organisations studied, the authors identified three significant features that relate to their religious nature and affect their SSE: having a structured belief system, a grassroots network and a long-term perspective. These features can be instrumental in impacting company behaviour and society at large.

The authors chose three ROs for their relevance and comparative features, but this limited sample size makes it hard to generalise the research findings.

This paper invites ROs to review their potential for actively owning their shares to be consistent with their faith and create change in business and society at large. Besides, ROs, with their unwavering belief system, extensive grassroots networks and long-term approach, are a force in the shareholder engagement field to be reckoned with by business.

The paper presents multi cases of ROs active in using their investments to create change in companies and society at large.