Search results

This study is an attempt to contribute to an emerging stream of research, which attempts to explore how work commitment forms affect one another and how together they serve to influence work behaviour and outcomes.Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on five universal forms of work commitment, we tested the relationships between two work commitment models and two forms of employee withdrawal intentions: from their organisation and from their occupation. To this end, we investigated professional employees (social workers) employed in the Israeli healthcare system through a structured questionnaire.Findings – Path analysis results cast doubt on the applicability of both models in their original form, across scenarios. At the same time, with some modifications, both models show a good potential for explaining variance in employee withdrawal intentions from both their organisation and their occupation.Originality/value – This research contributes to work commitment literature by providing empirical findings and theoretical interpretations regarding the role of a particular professional setting in explaining the interrelationships among models of work commitment, and how some constellations of different work commitment foci explain multiple withdrawal intentions.

This era is an era of social media (SM); thus, it is an essential tool for communication among individuals and organizations. The excessive use of SM by employees has raised many questions about their job performance. Therefore, there is a dire need to investigate the effects of SM use on an employee’s job performance mediated by knowledge exchange. Furthermore, the purpose of this paper is to examine how the organization’s SM rules can moderate the relationship between personal and work-related use of SM with information sharing and obtaining information.

Quantitative methodology was used and randomly 1,200 questionnaires data were collected physically from the employees of the public and private sectors in Pakistan. To examine the hypothesized relationships, partial least squares (PLS), rather than covariance-based structural equation modeling, was used to analyze the data. For this reason, multivariate technique, Smart PLS-3.2.1, was used for data analysis.

The findings of this study demonstrated that personal and work-related use of SM could enhance employees’ job performance through knowledge exchange, and SM rules have adverse impacts on the relationships between SM use and knowledge exchange.

This study provides a novel model for the investigation of whether SM use affects employees’ job performance. Furthermore, it will help the policy makers and researchers regarding the management of SM use at work.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) has become so prevalent that a new term, the extended enterprise, has arisen to describe this approach to structuring an organization. The purpose of this paper is to integrate the information systems and the interfirm governance literatures to develop a framework for the role of trust in the governance of extended enterprises.

This paper uses transaction cost economics (TCE) to identify the elements and stages of BPO relationships. This paper then integrates those elements with the types of trust identified in the information systems (IS) literature to develop a framework.

TCE identifies three elements that influence the design and function of interfirm relationships: the transaction, the transaction environment and the parties (the client and the vendors). TCE also recognizes three stages in the transaction: contact, contract, and control. The IS literature identifies three types of trust: trusted systems, trusted institutions, and trusted partners. The paper links the two literatures into a framework identifying the type of trust related to each of the TCE elements; it then uses these linkages to identify the types of trust appropriate for each stage of the BPO relationship.

This paper integrates the IS and interfirm governance literatures concerning trust in interorganizational relationships in an effort to offer a framework for building and sustaining trust between BPO vendors and clients and to identify potential directions for future research.

Free knowledge sharing in the online health community has been widely documented. However, whether free knowledge sharing can help physicians accumulate popularity and further the accumulated popularity can help physicians attract patients remain unclear. To unveil these gaps, this study aims to examine how physicians' popularity are affected by their free knowledge sharing, how the relationship between free knowledge sharing and popularity is moderated by professional capital, and how the popularity finally impacts patients' attraction.

The authors collect a panel dataset from Hepatitis B within an online health community platform with 10,888 observations from April 2020 to August 2020. The authors develop a model that integrates free knowledge sharing, popularity, professional capital, and patients' attraction. The hierarchical regression model is used to for examining the impact of free knowledge sharing on physicians' popularity and further investigating the impact of popularity on patients' attraction.

The authors find that the quantity of articles acted as the heuristic cue and the quality of articles acted as the systematic cue have positive effect on physicians' popularity, and this effect is strengthened by physicians' professional capital. Furthermore, physicians' popularity positively influences their patients' attraction.

This study reveals the aggregation of physicians' popularity and patients' attraction within online health communities and provides practical implications for managers in online health communities.

Transition to a digital economy and the pervasiveness of IT in a firm’s operations together has brought the IT function in corporations to the threshold of a needed transformation: from an orientation that prizes technical excellence to one that achieves continuous innovation by finding new opportunities to provide value to customers.

The author believes that companies need to adopt customer-focused IT, this requires a shift in organizational culture, from considering technical excellence as an end in itself, to respecting customers as the centrally important stakeholder of an organization.

In many companies, rethinking the IT function to focus it on providing value to the customer presents an opportunity to empower frontline employees, to make innovations in the company value chain and to maintain and to enhance competitive advantage.

Changing to a customer focus requires dedicated continuous innovation to enlist the full resources of the IT function – architecture, algorithms, big data and connectivity – to satisfy customer needs, solve customer problems and produce new customer value.

The author argues convincingly that IT organizations will become focused on delivering value that matches evolving customer needs if, and only if, CIOs insist upon concentrating the resources of the organization on this goal Indeed, CIOs should consider themselves chief marketing officers, focusing on the customer and promoting the customer-focus competencies of their organizations.

With gaining popularity, online communities are increasing. It is leading to the data and information overflow. So, there are some challenges like cyber frauds, cyberbullying, etc. while engaging with online communities. Not only this, anonymity of the participants, stress and racism are also big challenges in online communities' interaction. Online harassers' attack tactics have changed over time. In addition, there are challenges like quality of discussion, inequality in participation of the users, etc. may scale online communities towards incitement and activism. Therefore, this study will try to analyse these challenges for overall benefit of the society.

The underlying fuzzy set theory is employed to handle the fuzziness of users' perceptions since the attributes are expressed in linguistic preferences. Through exhaustive literature review, the authors have identified 15 challenges. These challenges are further categorised as cause and effect by using DEMATEL (Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) approach.

Lack of strategic planning and uninspired discussions between users has emerged as a major challenge in cause category. This study further demonstrates how individual challenge can be managed and developed to navigate the online communities to maintain a healthy environment in society.

Results are based on limited dataset. Therefore, findings cannot be generalised for all online communities.

The research findings offer a suitable direction to policymakers to formulate and design policies, laws and regulations to increase user engagement in the online community. The study is beneficial to firms and researchers in understanding the factors influencing effective management of online communities.

The objective of this study is to investigate how country risk, different political actions from the government and bureaucratic behavior influence the activities in industry supply chains (SCs) in emerging markets. The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of these external stakeholders’ elements to the demand-side and supply-side drivers and barriers for improving competitiveness of Ready-Made Garment (RMG) industry in the way of analyzing supply chain. Considering the phenomenon of recent change in the RMG business environment and the competitiveness issues this study uses the principles of stakeholder and resource dependence theory and aims to find out some factors which influence to make an efficient supply chain for improving competitiveness. The RMG industry of Bangladesh is the case application of this study. Following a positivist paradigm, this study adopts a two phase sequential mixed-method research design consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. Qualitative field study is then carried out to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. A survey is carried out with sample of top and middle level executives of different garment companies of Dhaka city in Bangladesh and the collected quantitative data are analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling. The findings support eight hypotheses. From the analysis the external stakeholders’ elements like bureaucratic behavior and country risk have significant influence to the barriers. From the internal stakeholders’ point of view the manufacturers’ and buyers’ drivers have significant influence on the competitiveness. Therefore, stakeholders need to take proper action to reduce the barriers and increase the drivers, as the drivers have positive influence to improve competitiveness.

This study has both theoretical and practical contributions. This study represents an important contribution to the theory by integrating two theoretical perceptions to identify factors of the RMG industry’s SC that affect the competitiveness of the RMG industry. This research study contributes to the understanding of both external and internal stakeholders of national and international perspectives in the RMG (textile and clothing) business. It combines the insights of stakeholder and resource dependence theories along with the concept of the SC in improving effectiveness. In a practical sense, this study certainly contributes to the Bangladeshi RMG industry. In accordance with the desire of the RMG manufacturers, the research has shown that some influential constructs of the RMG industry’s SC affect the competitiveness of the RMG industry. The outcome of the study is useful for various stakeholders of the Bangladeshi RMG industry sector ranging from the government to various private organizations. The applications of this study are extendable through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

The paper aims to investigate how a tablet's design features, namely, its navigation design and visual appearance, influence users' enjoyment, concentration and control, when using tablets for problem-solving, and thereafter how their core flow experiences impact their perceived performance and efficiency with problem-solving.

This study uses a field survey approach to engage 87 participants in a decision sciences class to use eTextbooks and a few other associated educational apps including CourseSmart app for e-notes and highlighting, sketchbook app and a calculator app in tablets to resolve class problems at a large US university.

This study finds that the tablet's interface design features (navigation and visual appearance) make users engrossed in their problem-solving processes with perceived enjoyment, concentration and control. This, in turn, impacts their perceived performance and efficiency. Moreover, visual appearance plays the most significant role in arousing users' affective emotions (i.e. enjoyment), while interface navigation is crucial to engage users' deep concentration (i.e. cognition) and control for problem-solving.

Modern tablets are being used widely in various sectors. More in-depth user flow experience design associated with tablet use for problem-solving contexts should be further advocated in order to provide more engaging and meaningful flow experiences to users.

This study shows that the design of the tablet interface can engage users in problem-solving processes in both affective and cognitive ways. It provides valuable insights on tablet interface design for problem-solving.