Search results

The purpose of this case study is to emphasize the effectiveness of coaching as an instrument to drive transfer of training of behavioral skills disseminated during training programs back at the workplace.

Insights were collected through qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews with learners, followed by a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts.

The findings of this study revealed promising results with the use of coaching as a medium to facilitate workplace training transfer for learners. The learners also informed a positive experience on account of “personalized touch” experienced during the course of coaching sessions for posttraining application of skills and knowledge.

This study offers incisive information in the domain of training transfer through the effective use of workplace coaching in a posttraining environment.

Coaching as a training transfer tool has the ability to provide the necessary impetus to application of behavioral trainings across organizations and institutions, thus encouraging learners to implement what they learn during trainings.

This study is novel on account of its applicability in ensuring successful learning transfer through coaching. The insights from this study have replicability in diverse industries and have the potential to deliver superior results in organizational training transfer.

Women entrepreneurs are often categorized and assessed for various outcomes based on their start-up motivations. It is generally assumed that entrepreneurs with opportunity motivation have better performance when compared to necessity entrepreneurs. This study aims to test these suppositions through the lens of the entrepreneur’s motivation to learn (MTL) and level of female entrepreneurial competencies (FECs), namely, business and management, entrepreneurial, human relations (HR) and personal.

Data collected from 344 respondents through a survey questionnaire was analyzed using the structural equation modelling – partial least squares method using SmartPLS 4.

The findings highlight the need of recognizing the differentials between necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs as they were found to influence performance and learning outcomes. Opportunity entrepreneurship was found to significantly impact both MTL and the FECs. The authors also observed that business and management skills along with HR competencies played a greater role in the firm performance.

The findings demonstrate a case for specialized, tailor-made policy approaches rather than the “one size fits all” approach as evident in many government programs. As necessity entrepreneurs form a vital part of the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem, apart from mentoring, need-based competency development programs may be looked at. Opportunity entrepreneurs may need support and encouragement through advanced skilling and uncomplicated funding options.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, empirical studies related to women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises in India establishing the relationship between start-up motivation and business performance are scarce. Even in the global context, this is one of the initial studies to examine the relationship through the lens of MTL and competencies.

The study aims to facilitate the medical tourists visiting emerging countries for various kinds of ailments by ranking the possible destinations to avail medical treatments.

A Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process (FAHP) with a mixed-method approach is applied to analyze data collected from patients and substantiate it with medical tour operators in India to gain managerial insights on the choice-making patterns of the patients.

India is a preferred emerging market location due to the low cost and high medical staff quality. India offers value for money, whereas Singapore and Thailand are preferred destinations for quality and technology.

The study will facilitate the emerging markets' governments, hospitals and medical tourists to understand the importance of various determinants responsible for availing medical treatment outside their country.

The study recommends that cost and quality care are the patients' prime focus; government policies must provide clear guidelines on what the hospitals and country environment can offer and accordingly align the marketing strategies.

This study is the first attempt to rank various factors affecting medical tourism using the FAHP approach.

The presented research explored artificial intelligence (AI) application in the learning and development (L&D) function. Although a few studies reported AI and the people management processes, a systematic and structured study that evaluates the integration of AI with L&D focusing on scope, adoption and affecting factors is mainly absent. This study aims to explore L&D-related AI innovations, AI’s role in L&D processes, advantages of AI adoption and factors leading to effective AI-based learning following the analyse, design, develop, implement and evaluate approach.

The presented research has adopted a systematic literature review method to critically analyse, synthesise and map the extant research by identifying the broad themes involved. The review approach includes determining a time horizon, database selection, article selection and article classification. Databases from Emerald, Sage, Francis and Taylor, etc. were used, and the 81 research articles published between 1996 and 2022 were identified for analysis.

The result shows that AI innovations such as natural language processing, artificial neural networks, interactive voice response and text to speech, speech to text, technology-enhanced learning and robots can improve L&D process efficiency. One can achieve this by facilitating the articulation of learning module, identifying learners through face recognition and speech recognition systems, completing course work, etc. Further, the result also shows that AI can be adopted in evaluating learning aptitude, testing learners’ memory, tracking learning progress, measuring learning effectiveness, helping learners identify mistakes and suggesting corrections. Finally, L&D professionals can use AI to facilitate a quicker, more accurate and cheaper learning process, suitable for a large learning audience at a time, flexible, efficient, convenient and less expensive for learners.

In the absence of any systematic research on AI in L&D function, the result of this study may provide useful insights to researchers and practitioners.

This study aims to explore the mediating role of employee work engagement in the relationship between training and creativity in the education sector in India.

The sample for this study consisted of 260 faculty members from 11 public universities in the Punjab region. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was utilized to test the hypotheses.

The results of the study revealed that training has a significant direct and indirect effect on employee creativity through employee work engagement. The findings suggest that training can stimulate work engagement, highlighting the importance of fostering employee engagement for enhancing creativity.

While the method used in this study may not facilitate direct generalizations, it offers valuable insights into prevalent discursive strategies found in numerous contemporary public organizations.

The findings offer insights for designing targeted training interventions to enhance work engagement and foster creativity among faculty members in the education sector.

This study contributes to the existing literature by addressing a gap in research on the interaction between training, work engagement and creativity. As there have been limited studies on this topic in the education sector in India, this research provides novel insights and extends the understanding of how these variables are related.

This study examines the mediation effects of leaders' communication competency in the link between leadership styles (i.e. servant and transactional leadership) and employees' work engagement.

Cross-sectional survey data from 392 employees in 33 hotels in Bangladesh were collected. To analyze the data, structural equation modeling was adopted, and partial least squares (PLS) analysis was used.

Results of PLS analysis revealed that servant leaders and leaders' communication competency positively influence employees' work engagement. In boosting employees' work engagement, communication competency is an important tool for servant leadership but not for transactional leadership.

Hoteliers and managers may want to adopt a servant leadership style and develop effective leadership communication skills to increase employees' engagement at work.

This study introduces communication competency as a mediating mechanism between leadership styles and work engagement in the hospitality industry.

This paper explores the way in which industrial pollution has been expressed in the narrative accounts of nature, landscape and industry by William Gilpin in his 18th-century picturesque travel writings. A positive description of pollution is generally outdated and unacceptable in the current society. The authors contrast his “picturesque” view with the contemporary perception of industrial pollution, reflect on these early accounts of industrial impacts as representing the roots of impression management and use the analysis to inform current accounting.

The research uses an interpretive content analysis of the text to draw out themes and features of impression management. Goffman's impression management is the theoretical lens through which Gilpin's travel accounts are interpreted, considering this microhistory through a thematic research approach. The picturesque accounts are explored with reference to the context of impression management.

Gilpin's travel writings and the “Picturesque” aesthetic movement, it appears, constructed a social reality around negative industrial externalities such as air pollution and indeed around humans' impact on nature, through a lens which described pollution as adding aesthetically to the natural landscape. The lens through which the picturesque tourist viewed and expressed negative externalities involved quite literally the tourists' tricks of the trade, Claude glass, called also Gray's glass, a tinted lens to frame the view.

The paper adds to the wealth of literature in accounting and business pertaining to the ways in which companies socially construct reality through their accounts and links closely to the impression management literature in accounting. There is also a body of literature relating to the use of images and photographs in published corporate reports, which again is linked to impression management as well as to a growing literature exploring the potential for the aesthetic influence in accounting and corporate communication. Further, this paper contributes to the growing body of research into the historical roots of environmental reporting.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has long partnered with universities and other nonprofit organizations to perform early-stage, military-related research using research centers established under long-term contracts known as Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). Over the last 25 years, there has been a shift in the type of arrangement used to University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs) that this paper argues is the result of bureaucrats acting as evasive entrepreneurs in response to changing regulations.

Extending the theory of evasive entrepreneurship to bureaucrats, the author shows how regulations increase the cost of bureaucratic action and incentivize the creation of substitute actions to avoid those regulatory costs and capture benefits. Qualitative evidence from DOD documents is used to support the contention that UARCs serve the same function as FFRDCs. Quantitative evidence on the number of FFRDCs and UARCs and their funding illustrates how bureaucrats respond to political restrictions.

Bureaucrats have little to no recourse to respond to budgetary cuts or spending ceilings. In the case of FFRDCs, spending ceilings were introduced starting in the 1960s and led to a decline in the number of DOD FFRDCs. Bureaucrats can however strategically evade new regulations by reorganizing transactions justified by existing federal law that contradicts new regulations. Once FFRDCs were federally regulated in 1990 there were strong incentives to create substitute arrangements leading to the creation of UARCs in 1996 that have ultimately replaced FFRDCs as the research center of choice for the DOD.

The article makes three contributions. First, it applies the concept of evasive entrepreneurship to a political context and then use that framework to understand the creation and establishment of the DOD's UARCS. Second, the organizational features and purpose of UARCs are analyzed. Third, the evidence provided shows how regulations resulted in a shift in the DOD's R&D strategy toward working with universities.

This paper aims to map the antecedents and precursory contexts regarding the four principles of management. Moreover, a description of its codification and coalescence as a unified teaching framework is provided, critically reviewing key theoretical underpinnings of management principles in academic research and management textbooks.

A historiographic approach reviewed seminal works for theory origins of the four principles of management, by analyzing 260 management textbooks from 1935 to 2013 to document their adoption in management education. This study used critical hermeneutics (Prasad, 2002) to explore the framework’s progression by providing the context of cultural, political and economic influences.

This research study tracked and mapped the creation of the four principles of management, as it became the commonly accepted teaching framework in management education. Today, every predominant management principles textbook uses the four principles of management – plan, lead, organize and control – as the basis for teaching students.

There is limited research on the application of the four principles of management in contemporary management, despite its ubiquity in management education. The study’s historical account of its formation provides insights into its adoption and utilization in modern education context. The study’s primary limitation stems from the generalization of the representative sample of textbooks used in the study (1917–2013). However, data saturation was achieved for the scale of textbooks and writings which was reviewed.

Through a critical analysis into the formation of the four principles of management, this research not only provides a historical account of its construction but, as importantly, the influencing factors that led to its development. This research fills a gap in critical literature, as a post mortem exegesis has never been conducted on the four principles of management in the afteryears of its amalgamation.

This study aims to articulate the conceptual foundations of the role of accounting infrastructure (calculative practice and the communicative dimension of accounting) in extractive industries (EIs) towards a sustainable orientation from an actor-network theory (ANT) perspective.

This study is a literature-based analysis of the calculative property and communicative dimension of accounting in EIs, using the concepts of calculability, assemblage and other related concepts from ANT to identify potentialities and limits of the roles of accounting in this sector.

While accounting infrastructure can influence social and environmental outcomes, it has not, as yet, led to ecologically and socially sustainable practices in EIs. Calculative properties and the communicative dimension of accounting infrastructure have capabilities to foster the phenomenon of “sustainability” in EIs by valuing, disclosing (reporting) and governing EIs towards a sustainable orientation. Conceptualizing sustainable EIs as a promissory economy, accounting infrastructure serves as a tool not only to represent past performance but also to enact the future: it helps to shape a sustainable future for the industry by informing and triggering behavioural decisions of EIs firms towards sustainable practices.

This conceptual paper is anticipated to stimulate future sustainability accounting research. The research agenda discussed in this paper can be used to enrich our understanding of the role of accounting in sustainability.

This paper charts a direction for future research by interpreting the role of sustainability accounting within networks of sociotechnical relations, using ANT concepts which attach importance to the dualism of nature and society. Conceptualizing sustainability accounting and reporting as an infrastructure, which draws more attention to the relationality characteristic of accounting, the study goes beyond the traditional interpretation of accounting as a mediation device and draws on a contemporary view of accounting by invoking the dynamic relation between accounting and society, in the context of EIs.