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Online learning and the use of technology-based learning management systems (LMS) are on the rise in higher education. The purpose of this study is to explore how the frequent use of these LMS mediates the relationship between three types of learner interactions and student outcomes.

This was an exploratory study using surveys that collected information on students’ use of LMS, their interactions and student outcomes. The participants of this study consisted of 362 undergraduate students from a South Korean University who were taking online classes as part of their degree.

The findings support existing research that increased learner interactions have positive effects on learning outcomes. However, some of the positive effects were reduced when considering the effect of higher levels of LMS use. In particular, learner-to-learner interactions.

This information will enable educators to identify, measure and evaluate their online courses and consider how to integrate LMS use effectively. Results imply that focus may need to be on how learner to learner interactions can be best supported through the application of LMS.

This information will enable educators to identify, measure and evaluate their online courses and consider how to integrate LMS use effectively.

Learner-to-learner interaction through social networking platforms may be more beneficial in socially constructing knowledge than formalizing interaction through LMS.

This study contributes to the field of online learning by suggesting that the importance of some types of learner interactions may be overestimated in relation to the importance of LMS use.

This study aims to increase language learning (L2) output by incorporating a digital storytelling chatbot system (known as a “storybot”) that focused interactions on a narrative. This study also sought to investigate student perceptions of these storybot interactions and improve on poor perception rates from previous studies.

This one-sample exploratory study was of student-storybot participation rates and student perceptions towards a storybot activity designed to increase L2 output. A combination of storybot participation analytics and survey analysis of student perception was carried out.

The use of storybots in the L2 class resulted in mixed participation rates. Students read nine times more than they wrote, indicating a high degree of reading comprehension necessary for storybot interaction. Survey results revealed that students believed storybots helped them meet their L2 goals, were relevant to their L2 and were easy to navigate.

Interactions were through text messaging so no impact on speech or pronunciation could be observed. Further, the context was within a single university class in South Korea, restricting the generalization of findings to outside regions or with younger learners. Finally, while storybots proved to be valuable reading comprehension activities, the next step in this line of chatbot research should incorporate more writing prompts.

Storybots revealed explicit benefits to reading comprehension, as measured by cohesion between storybot delivered comprehension questions and student responses. Moreover, storybots can be used as examples for students in their own story creation, classroom forms to collect relevant student information regarding learning objectives and platforms for class quizzes.

Storybots scaffold students through conversations, which abide by socio-pragmatic norms, providing models for L2 learners to incorporate in real-world text-based communication. Additionally, a wide range of idiomatic expressions is contextualized in comprehensible interactions that students can learn from the storybot then practice with friends.

This study contributes to the growing research on the use of chatbots for second L2 and offers specific insight into the use of narrative storybots as a means to increase L2 output and potentially benefit L2 reading comprehension.

Ethics of governance deficiencies including weak management of the principal-agent problem by the board of directors and conflict over the strategic intent of the organisation between groups of employees such as the board of directors, top management team, and the middle-line managers working in small teams are age old problems for stock exchange listed companies. These matters continue to cause shareholders of listed companies much concern, creating tense annual general meetings and robust community debate on how to reign in blatant moments of managerial hegemony (or dominance) with agents exploiting principals, at times at great financial cost to long suffering shareholders. The role of the chairperson and the board applying agency theory is to manage these conflicts on behalf of the shareholders; however, in many instances, company directors have failed in their duties and investors have been aggrieved – the result, war in organisations. The challenge for organisations is to avoid this source of tension and war caused by emergence of managerial hegemony over the organisation and to promote sound executive stewardship and effective social exchange among the board, executive team, and middle-line managers. These challenges are discussed and solutions are developed. The importance of strategic intent as a unifying rhetorical message as a key component of an ethics of governance regime that keeps the peace and prevents war in the organisation is explained.

This chapter proposes that organizational strategy formation should be characterized theoretically as a process that is subject to several interacting forces, rather than represented by separate discrete decision-models or theoretic perspectives, as is commonly done in the strategic management literature. Based on an extensive review of relevant theory and empirical work in strategic decision-making, organizational change theory, cognitive and social psychology, and strategy processes, seven kinds of “forces” – rational, imposed, teleological, learning, political, heuristic, and social – are identified as interacting in and having significant influence on the strategy formation process. It is further argued that by applying a holistic “forces-view” of the significant and interacting influences on strategy formation, we can better understand the dynamics and challenges in managing the process of defining and changing organizational strategies.

This paper reports findings on employee participation in decision making from a cross‐section of employees in the public, private and local government sectors in Western Australia. A contextual model of participation relevant to the prevailing industrial climate was developed, then tested using a structural equations modelling approach. Results suggest that participative decision making (PDM) directly contributed to task variety and autonomy, and through autonomy, task identity. Employees perceived that PDM contributed to performance effectiveness and led to greater gains in the workplace. An unexpected result was that these benefits did not contribute to increased job satisfaction or commitment despite PDM having a direct positive influence on job satisfaction, which in turn increases commitment. These findings support arguments that employees believe participation in decision making offers them substantial benefits, but suggests they are more ambivalent about increasing task demands and the gains they receive for this extra effort.

When employees believe in and trust their management it motivates and encourages employees' participation in decision making which improves employees' efforts, benefits their job satisfaction and commitment to work. All of these factors, in turn, contribute to a trustworthy manager‐employee relationship. While the literature supports this premise, there is little empirical evidence that patterns of causal inference in the relationship are clearly understood. This three part empirical case aims to focus on studying the relations between employee trust in management in a Quebec manufacturing company and their job satisfaction, intention to quit, level of employee participation in decision making and their commitment.

This empirical case will test five hypothesis regarding seven variables influencing the level of employee engagement and commitment, employee turnover, employee participation in decision making processes and job satisfaction.

The article finds that employee trust in management is an important determinant of their willingness to participate in decision making. Insufficient employee participation in decision making in turn leads to low level of employee job satisfaction and employee commitment. Lack of employee commitment and engagement affects the employee's intention to quit.

The sample size of the office workers was not sufficient in order to have statistically significant results of the correlations between the variables for the production department employees, and for the office/administrative staff. This could have helped to determine the level of internal communication specifically, but also the level of all of the other variables for the two different groups of employees.

This article offers useful insights for management in relation to strengthening interpersonal trust within an organization and introducing employee empowerment practices.

Owing to lack of trust in management, there will be high employee turnover. This in its turn will have a negative effect on both the performance of management and employees’ welfare, job satisfaction and commitment.

The findings provide empirical evidence to support theoretical models that link employee trust in management, participation in decision making, job satisfaction, commitment, turnover intentions and highlight the impact of these factors on organizational performance.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and job satisfaction, by taking into consideration organizational learning capability (OLC).

Data were collected from eight Spanish ceramic tile manufacturers. The survey was addressed to shop floor workers, and 157 valid questionnaires were obtained, representing a response rate of 61 per cent. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test this theoretical model.

This paper proposes that OLC plays a significant role in determining the effects of EI on job satisfaction.

Owing to certain features of the sample and the use of measurement scales, the final results should be considered with caution. Further research in other contexts using qualitative methods is needed to validate these findings. The most important implication is that job satisfaction is affected by the correlation between individual EI and certain working conditions.

When seeking to improve employee job satisfaction, practitioners should take into account the link between EI and OLC. Under certain conditions (OLC), emotionally intelligent people are more likely to be satisfied.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between EI, OLC and job satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of participation in decision making (PDM) and job satisfaction (JS) in supervisory support and the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) relationship.

Two models with PDM and JS as mediators were tested on the supervisory support-OCB relationship. A sample of 198 Indian business executives was collected exclusively through management development programs (MDPs). To test the hypotheses in this research, correlation and regression analysis were both used. Furthermore, to test the mediation level, Baron and Kenny’s (1986) method was deployed.

All variables in the study were found to be significantly related to each other. Both models were supported by the findings, suggesting that supervisory support promotes both PDM and JS. This, in turn, increases OCB in employees. PDM was found to be the better mediator within the relationship. Implications of these results are also discussed.

Self-reported responses could give biased results; peers should also have been included in the data gathering. Variables in the study cannot be analyzed in isolation. Hence control variables need to be included to arrive at more accurate and informative results.

The findings contribute to better understanding of the supervisory support/OCB relationship, and the ways of improving this through PDM and JS. As an outcome of this research, organizations should aim to support, empower and involve their employees. Satisfying their needs will lead to them becoming more effective citizens within the organization. Businesses can harness the potential of OCB in employees by giving them a “voice” in decision making and by encouraging them to share ideas.

The use of PDM and JS in this relationship is unprecedented. The establishment of PDM as a better mediator of the relationship is also unique. The study draws its strength from a multi-organizational sample and the use of MDPs to provide unbiased responses. Since the study is based on an Indian sample, it also adds to the growing literature of OCB from non-western economies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of literatures and previous studies on the relationship between strategic planning and performance and propose conceptual designs and hypotheses using multidimensional constructs to advance the understanding of this relationship, contribute to existing debates in the extant literature and make recommendations.

A semi-systematic literature and previous studies (studied by various groups of researchers within diverse disciplines) review approach has been used in this paper to contribute to the debate on whether strategic planning affects performance and how. Using more recent knowledge about the strategic planning concept, the semi-systematic review looked at how research within strategic planning has progressed over the past five decades and its relationship with performance.

In the past, the strategic planning performance relationship has been treated as a black box and this paper proposes that the conceptualisation of a number of constructs and the inclusion of strategy implementation will help converting the black box into a white box. To strengthen support for the debate regarding the relationship between strategic planning and performance this paper proposes a further conceptual/operational design, mathematical expressions and hypotheses to be tested empirically in further studies. The proposal provides a conceptualisation of the major constructs (strategy development; strategy implementation; and performance), and the use of strategy implementation as a mediator and/or as a moderator in the planning performance relationship.

This study is limited due to fact that the findings have not been tested empirically, it is not a cross-sectional and/or a longitudinal research and only a limited number of dimensions of strategy development and strategy implementation have been used. In addition, the approach used is a semi-systematic review followed by quantitative thinking, which, in turn, typically assumes the relevance of and a warrant mainly from a positivist epistemology.

The proposed design developed in this paper ensures that core issues in planning performance relationships research are addressed. Furthermore, the inclusion of strategy implementation in planning performance relationship studies means that the whole chain of activities in the strategy process is being considered, drawing a complete and comprehensive conclusion on how strategic planning affects an organisation’s performance. In addition, by separating strategy implementation and by not combining it with formulation/formation activities will theoretically and analytically help to evaluate the importance or role of each stage of the strategy process. Moreover, the conceptualisation and operationalisation of the key concepts as multidimensional constructs contribute to past research gaps. Finally, this paper provides some clarity to many contradictory findings concerning the strategic planning and performance relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between inspirational leadership, participative decision making (PDM) and happiness at work (HAW).

The sampling frame consists of medical specialists in allergy of Spanish public hospitals (n=167). The authors used structural equation modelling to verify if the relationship between inspirational leadership and HAW is mediated by PDM.

Results suggest that PDM fully mediates the relationship between inspirational leadership and HAW. Thus, PDM plays an essential role in explaining how inspirational leader behaviours.

The authors put forward a cross-sectional research, which does not guarantee similar results in the future. Future longitudinal studies may reveal further effects of inspirational motivation and PDM beyond HAW. Also the authors focussed on a specific population of medical specialists working in public allergy units. Future research might consider longitudinal analysis and other populations.

This research provides evidence of the direct and positive effect of inspirational leadership on HAW. However, fostering inspirational leadership is not sufficient on its own to foment HAW, and should be complemented by applying other organisational factors such as PDM.

In recent years, some studies have put forward different conceptual models to explain the gap in the relationship between human resource management and performance, considering the effect of mediating variables. This study proposes a theoretical model that attempts to develop this human resource “black box” by empirically validating a conceptual proposal that links inspirational leadership, PDM and HAW.