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Industry 4.0 processes brought dramatic changes in skills and competences needed at the firm level. The purpose of this paper is: to identify and quantify key competences required for workers with economics-and-business background; to evaluate development level of those competences among the currently employed workforce; to investigate degree of match between required and currently developed competences; and finally to assess how this (mis)match translates to firm performance.

This research is based on primary data, collected through questionnaires, and secondary data of firms’ financial and structural characteristics. Key competences were estimated using factor analysis and were then used as covariates in explaining differences in firms’ performance in both static and dynamic production function specifications using standard regression model, Heckman selection model and Arellano–Bond estimation.

Results show that mismatches in competences basic algebra; collectedness, conflict resolution and presentation; and motivation and organization are all negatively associated in explaining the variation of firm performance, with motivation and organization having the most significant effect.

This paper focuses on competence mismatch by including both sides of the labor market (employers and employees) in the analysis. This paper offers: a theoretical structure for understanding and investigating existing competence mismatches; a step-by-step industry-driven method for deriving key required competences, including an initial exploratory phase (combination of literature review, exploratory interviews and pilot study) followed by a descriptive and implementation phases (design, implementation and analysis of nationally representative survey); and finally, analysis phase (associating competence mismatches to firm performance).

This article focuses on the Spanish labour market, and its primary objectives are to analyse the factors determining the ICTs usage at workplace, and examine how the workers' e-skills match with the job tasks requiring ICTs. Furthermore, it will explore whether doing ICTs training activities has a positive effect on the probability of carrying out appropriately the ICTs at work.

The methodology applied is an ordered response model analysing how the workers' e-skills match with the knowledge required to the ICTs usage at the job. This econometric specification will control by the selection bias generated because not all employees use ICTs to perform the job tasks. Data are obtained from the Survey on Equipment and Use of ICTs in Households (ICTS-H Survey).

Educational attainment and the type of ICTs training are the most relevant variables to explain the ICTs usage and the quality of the job match.

Data used are cross-sectional, and it excludes the possibility of observing how the workers' careers evolve depending on their ICTs training.

The methodology applied allows the authors to obtain the marginal effects to the variables explaining the probability of using ICTs at job, and how the workers' knowledge match with the e-skill required by the employers.

The results are a source of information to policymakers about how workers face the introduction of ICTs in the labour market.

To the best of author's knowledge, the article's topic and its methodology are unprecedented in the economic literature and, specially, in the Spanish case.

Project work usually has a positive connotation and is considered innovative and modern. However, many project workers suffer from chronic stress, work overload and burnout. This study aims to integrate the determinants of the negative aspects of project work and their implications for individuals involved in projects.

A systematic review was used to analyze 290 papers from various disciplines to identify the most used theories, determinants of the negative aspects of project work and the consequences of these aspects for project participants' work-related and overall well-being.

Based on the findings of the review, this paper develops a multi-level framework that includes determinants at the levels of society, organizations, projects and individuals and discusses opportunities for further research. The findings show that socio-psychological theories and occupational health theories are the dominant theories used in research. The most frequently studied individual outcomes are affective symptoms and work-related outcomes. Detrimental individual outcomes are mostly associated with psychosocial work factors.

The study contributes to the literature by providing a comprehensive review of research on the negative aspects of project work and their implications for project workers. The multi-level framework can serve as a guide for future research and provides important insights for practitioners.

Education-job mismatches, especially overeducation or vertical mismatch, are generally found to lower the worker’s job satisfaction, which may generate the counter-productive behaviors, such as high rates of absenteeism and turnover in developed countries. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of educational mismatches from their both forms and dimensions (match, overeducation, horizontal mismatch and double mismatch) on the job satisfaction among university graduates in Cambodia.

To deal with the sample selection bias owing to the unobserved job satisfaction of unemployed graduates, this paper applies the Heckman probit model on a survey conducted with 19 higher education institutions in Cambodia.

Results indicate that a half of graduates suffer at least one type of educational mismatch and the both forms of mismatches adversely affect the job satisfaction with the strongest impact from the double mismatch case.

The authors take into account the sample selection bias, but are not able to deal with the unobserved heterogeneity, such as individual competences and preferences. With the panel data, it would be possible to isolate those individual fixed effects.

The findings underline the importance of improvement in the quality of higher education in Cambodia that seems to play a main role in this education-job mismatch problem. Creating the occupational counseling for the high school students would be also helpful to orientate students to the majors strongly needed by the labor market.

This paper focuses on all forms and dimensions of mismatches and takes into account the sample selection bias in the context of a low-income country where the increasing rate of enrollment in higher education seems to be accompanied by an increasing rate of education-job mismatches. Previous research works focused mostly on overeducation and in developed countries.

School leadership is found important for school development and student learning. Consequently, the interest in professional leadership education for principals has increased. In Sweden, professional leadership education for novice principals was made mandatory in 2010. Moreover, enhanced focus on leadership for teaching and learning in terms of ‘pedagogical leadership’ is highly topical. This study aims to deepen our knowledge of novice principals’ experiences of pedagogical leadership practices and relate these to their paths toward principalship. The study follows a qualitative and situated design and adopts a practice-based approach. Observations were conducted in the educational and workplace practices of novice principals in Sweden and interviews were conducted with principals and teachers. Using a conceptual framework of Wenger (1998), the analyses show that principals experience challenges concerning pedagogical leadership if their competence and experience are not aligned with practice and context. This mismatch seems to impair their pedagogical leadership practice. In addition, a lack of leadership experience obstructs their learning in the professional leadership education for principals.

The increase in the supply chain complexity demands new professionals who are able to deal with the new challenges faced nowadays. The purpose of this work is to propose an international university–industry collaboration model to develop supply chain management competences in students as a tool for the training of future professionals.

This study proposes an international collaboration model to develop supply chain competences. The model consists of three main phases from the genesis of the collaboration to the assessment of the competence development. This study validates the model collaborating with one of the largest retailer companies in Mexico.

Results identify collaboration good practices and point at possible improvements for the next model iteration. This study identifies four key supply chain competences as part of this model. Three didactic approaches (i.e. guidance methods) and two student’s involvement schemes were tested. The results show that professors acting as an advisor (i.e. acting as a guider without telling student directly what to do or how to do it) plus a voluntary student’s involvement in the project promote better competence development.

The first contribution of this research is the definition of an international collaboration model that promotes competence-based education. Also, this study documents good practices for this type of partnership. The second one refers to a large-scale model validation (i.e. 14-week experiment in nine different regions of Mexico involving a retail company, 20 professor-researchers and more than 100 students). The third contribution includes the assessment of different levels of competences development using diverse students’ participation schemes and professor’s guidance methods.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical examination of factors associated with over-education among PhD graduates in Italy.

The investigation is based on recently released data collected by the Italian National Institute of Statistics by means of interviews with a large sample of PhD recipients, carried out a few years after they obtained their PhD degree. The author measured the mismatch between the current job and previous PhD studies using two direct subjective evaluations of over-education, which distinguish between the usefulness of the PhD title to get the current job position and to perform the current work activities. Even if the incidence of over-education varies according to the measurement applied, the author found that it is highly widespread among PhD recipients. The econometric analyses are aimed at identifying factors associated with over-education and are based on the standard probit model and the bivariate probit model with sample selection which allows to control for self selection into employment.

The results show that over-education is significantly correlated with: first, a number of PhD-related variables, such as the scientific field of study, having attended courses or visiting periods abroad; second, some job-related characteristics, such as working in the academia or being mainly involved in research-related activities; third, the channel of access to the job; and fourth, residential location.

This paper contributes to the literature focusing on job-education mismatch by providing, to the best of the author’s knowledge, the first empirical analysis of over-education among PhD recipients in Italy; moreover, it provides some useful insights to evaluate the professional doctoral graduates in Italy.

Prior research on business analytics has advanced substantially our understanding of how social media analytics affect business performance. However, the specific value of social media analytics to product innovation has not been fully explored and appreciated. To address this important issue, the present study draws on the resource-based view and the knowledge-based view to examine (1) whether the use of social media analytics strengthens radical product innovation to a greater extent than it does incremental product innovation and (2) how knowledge-exploration competence and knowledge-exploitation competence mediate the influence of social media analytics on radical and incremental product innovation.

This study tested the proposed model using data collected from 205 manufacturing firms. Structural equation modeling was applied to test the research hypotheses using LISREL 8.80 software program.

The statistical findings provide compelling evidence that the use of social media analytics is more likely to lead to radical product innovation than to incremental product innovation. In addition, knowledge-exploration competence only partially mediates the relationship between social media analytics and radical product innovation. Knowledge-exploitation competence not only partially mediates such a relationship, but also fully mediates the link between social media analytics and incremental product innovation.

This study contributes to the social media analytics and innovation literature by offering novel theoretical and empirical insights into how firms can leverage the value of social media analytics to create superior product innovation.

Drawing from the compensation effects in social cognition theory, this study aims to investigate the interactive effects of employees’ warmth and competence and service failure types on customer’s service recovery cooperation intention after a service failure and before service recovery is completed.

This study used a scenario-based experiment with a 2 (high vs low) warmth × 2 (high vs low) competence × 2 (outcome failure vs process failure) service failure between-subjects design. Data were collected using an online panel.

This study finds that employees’ low warmth and high competence in outcome failure situations and high warmth and low competence in process failure situations are most effective at increasing customers’ service recovery cooperation intention. The findings further suggest that customers’ cooperation intention is prone to tradeoffs between customers’ perceptions of employees’ warmth and competence as suggested by compensation effects in social cognition theory, such that the effectiveness of employees’ warmth (competence) is curtailed by employees’ competence (warmth).

The findings of this study provide insights to hospitality managers for effective service recovery management. Hospitality companies can enhance customers’ behavioral intentions by training employees to demonstrate appropriate warmth and competence combination that meet customers’ expectations for a specific failure type.

This study argues that customer’s service recovery cooperation intention depends on the combination of warmth and competence displayed by employees after a service failure. The expected combination of warmth and competence varies depending on the service failure context.

The purpose of this paper is to share the findings of investigations into the competences that an effective director should have. It draws upon the findings of surveys of director development undertaken by the author and others and the author's experience of advising over 100 boards on director and board development.

The surveys examined have mainly involved UK directors and unitary boards. The situation might be different in other countries. It would be helpful if more studies were undertaken of director and board development in other contexts and involving different board structures, e.g. two tier or management and supervisory boards.

The findings suggest it is possible to identify, categorize and prioritize the competences that directors require to be more effective in their roles. Trainers and developers interested in addressing directorial competence requirements need to understand the distinction between direction and management, and between deficiencies that require individual and collective action, the boardroom context and concerns directors may themselves have about the assessment of their competences. There are certain questions they need to ask to assess the development requirement.

The competences of individual directors and those of the board as a whole should be periodically reviewed, particularly as the membership of a board changes and it faces new challenges. Trainers and developers can address this requirement by sensitively handling any concerns directors may have about the process used.

The paper highlights the nature of the competences required by a competent director and the challenge of assessing, categorizing, prioritizing and addressing competence deficiencies. The paper should be of value to those who support directors and boards and have an interest in improving the competence of directors and the effectiveness of boards.