Search results

Highly committed, motivated and engaged employees assure organizational success and competitiveness. The study aims to examine the association between human resource development (HRD) practices and employee engagement with organizational commitment as a mediating variable.

Data were collected from 760 employees of 13 star-rated hotels comprising 5 (five-star) and 8 (four-star). The data supported the hypothesized relationships. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the proposed model and hypotheses. Construct validity and reliability were established through confirmatory factor analysis.

The results indicate that HRD practices and affective commitment are significantly associated. HRD practices and continuance commitment were shown to be non-significantly associated. HRD practices and normative commitment were shown to be non-significantly associated. Employee engagement and organizational commitment are significantly associated. The results further show that organizational commitment mediates the association between HRD practices and employee engagement.

The generalizability of the findings will be constrained due to the research's hotel industry focus and cross sectional data.

The study's findings will serve as valuable pointers for stakeholders and policymakers of the hotel industry in the adoption, design and implementation of proactive HRD interventions to keep highly engaged and committed employees for organizational competitiveness and sustainability.

By evidencing empirically that organizational commitment mediates the nexus between HRD practices and employee engagement, the study extends the literature.

This study aimed to identify a specific taxonomy of entry modes for international construction contractors and to develop a decision-making mechanism based on case-based reasoning (CBR) to facilitate the selection of the most suitable entry modes.

According to the experience orientation of the construction industry, a CBR entry mode decision model was established, and based on successful historical cases, a two-step refinement process was carried out to identify similar situations. Then the validity of the model is proved by case analysis.

This study identified an entry mode taxonomy for international construction contractors (ICCs) and explored their decision-making mechanisms. First, a two-dimension model of entry mode for ICCs was constructed from ownership and value chain dimensions; seven common ICC entry modes were identified and ranked according to market commitment. Secondly, this study reveals the impact mechanism of the ICC entry mode from two aspects: the external environment and enterprise characteristics. Accordingly, an entry mode decision model is established.

Firstly, sorting out the categories of entry mode in the construction field, which provide an entry mode list for ICCs to select. Secondly, revealing the impact mechanism of ICC entry mode, which proposes a systematic decision-making system for the selection of ICC entry mode. Thirdly, constructing a CBR entry mode decision-making model from an empirical perspective, which offers tool support and reduces transaction costs in the decision-making process.

The study on entry modes for ICCs is still in the preliminary exploratory stage. The authors investigate the entry mode categories and decision-making mechanisms for ICCs based on Uppsala internationalization process theory. It widens the applied scope of Uppsala and promotes cross-disciplinary integration. In addition, the authors creatively propose a two-stage retrieval mechanism in the CBR model, which considers the order of decision variables. It refines the influence path of the decision variables on ICCs' entry mode.

Based on the theoretical framework, this paper analyzes the sentiment-herding relationship in emerging stock markets (ESMs). First, it aims to examine the effect of investor sentiment on herding. Second, it seeks the direction of causality between sentiment and herding time series.

The present study applies the Exponential Generalized Auto_Regressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) model to capture the volatility clustering of herding on the financial market and to investigate the role of the investor sentiment on herding behaviour. Then the vector autoregression (VAR) estimation uses the Granger causality test to determine the direction of causality between the investor sentiment and herding. This study uses a sample consisting of stocks listed on the Shanghai Composite index (SSE) (348 stocks), the Jakarta composite index (JKSE) (118 stocks), the Mexico IPC index (14 stocks), the Russian Trading System index (RTS) (12 stocks), the Warsaw stock exchange General index (WGI) (106 stocks) and the FTSE/JSE Africa all-share index (76 stocks). The sample includes 5,020 daily observations from February 1, 2002, to March 31, 2021.

The research findings show that the sentiment has a significant negative impact on the herding behaviour pointing out that the higher the investor sentiment, the lower the herding. However, the results of the present study indicate that a higher investor sentiment conducts a higher herding behaviour during market downturns. Then the outcomes suggest that during the crisis period, the direction is one-way, from the investor sentiment to the herding behaviour.

The findings may have implications for universal policies of financial regulators in EMs. We have found evidence that the Emerging investor sentiment contributes to the investor herding behaviour. Therefore, the irrational investor herding behaviour can increase the stock market volatility, and in extreme cases, it may lead to bubbles and crashes. Market regulators could implement mechanisms that can supervise the investor sentiment and predict the investor herding behaviour, so they make policies helping stabilise stock markets.

The originality of this paper lies in investigate the sentiment-herding relationship during the Surprime crisis and the Covid-19 epidemic in the EMs.

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that affect managers’ ethical decision-making in export-oriented readymade garments in Bangladesh.

This is an empirical study based on the quantitative approach undertaking a cross-sectional survey method where a convenience sampling technique was applied. The analysis was done using partial least square structural equation model applying Smart-PLS version 3.0.

This study confirmed that all the components of cognitive appraisal processes, including perceived severity, perceived vulnerability, response efficacy and self-efficacy, have a significant influence on attitude. Attitude, in turn, mediates the relationship between these variables and the behavioural intention of ethical practice, except for perceived vulnerability. Besides, moral obligation is found to mediate the relationship between attitude, self-efficacy and the behavioural intention of ethical decision-making. The study also found that ethical climate and subjective norms have a direct influence on behavioural intention. Furthermore, behavioural intention, ethical climate and self-efficacy are positively related to actual decision-making behaviour. However, this study did not find any direct effect of subjective norms on moral obligation.

The organization should include an emphasis on building ethical culture and setting an ethical code of conduct within the organization to sustain ethical practice within employees. However, the practitioner should work on enhancing self-efficacy to curb unethical practices by individuals.

This research contributes to the management of garments manufacturers by a practical and theoretical understanding of what influences the ethical behavioural decision-making process. Valuable guidelines are provided on the ethical decision-making process in the garments manufacturing companies for future researchers.

This study investigates the key factors that influence customer satisfaction when interacting with augmented reality shopping assistance applications (ARSAPs). ARSAPs grant consumers the capability to experience products in a virtually simulated user environment before product acquisition. With the development of mobile e-commerce due to breakthroughs in smartphone and augmented reality (AR) technologies, there is an increasing potential for these emergent AR mobile services, yet there is a need for further improvement.

This study initially explored the key satisfaction factors for ARSAPs by utilizing topic modeling of a collection of actual user reviews. These factors are subsequently revisited and complemented by existing literature, and finally verified through logistic regression analysis supported by sentiment analysis.

This study identified the key factors that influence customer satisfaction with ARSAPs, including visuality, sense of reality, credibility, format, completeness, understandability, relevance, flexibility, response time, reliability, availability, ease of use and privacy. In particular, two additional factors (i.e. visuality and sense of reality) were newly identified as important in the context of AR, despite their previous omissions in existing literature.

This study is the first to investigate the key factors that influence customer satisfaction with ARSAPs from users' perspectives, utilizing topic modeling of a large amount of real-world data on actual user feedback. By identifying new factors (i.e. visuality and sense of reality) that were not identified in previous literature, this study provides important academic implications for a broader understanding of AR and related technologies that are essential elements of the metaverse. This study also provides valuable insights for developers and companies in the e-commerce industry on how to optimize AR applications and develop more targeted and effective marketing strategies in this field.

This study aims to explore a new restaurant category’s development from birth to maturity, thereby explaining the rationale for category innovation strategies.

The authors conducted a qualitative case study analysis of the New Chinese-style Fusion Restaurant category’s development from birth to maturity. Thematic analysis was conducted on data collected from semi-structured interviews and textual information.

A new restaurant category’s maturation is determined by the formation of society’s shared knowledge about the category’s crucial attributes, which is an outcome of market participants’ category-related social practices. The authors develop a novel, four-stage framework for the socialized construction of this shared knowledge: a knowledge creation (KC), knowledge diffusion (KD), knowledge integration (KI) and knowledge structuralization (KS). This knowledge evolution along this KC–KD–KI–KS sequence can holistically describe the category maturation process. This framework can help understand the rationale for a restaurant category’s maturation by analyzing the interrelationships among market participants’ social practices, knowledge-related activities and market development.

This study explains how market participants’ knowledge-related activities facilitate a new restaurant category’s maturation. This can help restaurant managers cope with increasingly homogeneous competition by applying a category-innovation strategy.

This study extends product categorization research on restaurants by articulating a product category’s maturation process from a knowledge perspective.

This study aims to help develop “business principles for stakeholder capitalism” in two steps. First, the study defines internal logic of three theories of capitalism and two variants within each theory. Second, it examines approaches to integration into modern democratic capitalism. Treating the three theories as substitutes identifies relative strengths and weaknesses; complementarity and partial overlap approaches to integration study the institutional settings within which stakeholder capitalism operates. Empirical outcomes reflect competition between market and stakeholder businesses for participants, with institutional conditions determining the scope of collective action.

The approach aligns three typologies in a unique conceptual arrangement defining the three theories of capitalism: forms of capitalism, potential failures of each form and associated types of goods. The first method examines the internal logic of each theory of capitalism. The second draws on traditional narrative review of references documenting each theory of capitalism and variants together with modern Marxist anti-capitalism.

Three typologies align uniquely with the theories of capitalism, each having two variants. Both variants of stakeholder capitalism are compatible with compassionate capitalism, constitutional government or polycentric governance but not with self-interest capitalism, dictatorship or Marxism. A theory of modern democratic capitalism allocates roles for private, club and social goods with empirically variable mixes occurring across countries. Competition among different types of enterprises provides an empirical test for comparative advantages of stakeholder capitalism. Future research should consider approaches for testing the proposed conceptual scheme in practice concerning capacity to deal with grand challenges, wicked problems and black swan events.

Research approach is limited to logical examination of theories and literature documentation without direct empirical confirmation. The study does not address practical implications for managers and public officials or social implications concerning private incentives, stakeholder cooperation or collective action.

Originality lies in shifting terms of debate about stakeholder capitalism from advocacy of substitute theories to understanding of its relationship to market capitalism and collective action capitalism. Value lies in explaining desirability of theoretical integration of three types of capitalism into a comprehensive framework for modern democratic capitalism.

The consolidation process and morphology evolution in ceramics-based additive manufacturing (AM) are still not well-understood. As a way to better understand the ceramic selective laser sintering (SLS), a dynamic three-dimensional computational model was developed to forecast thermal behavior of hydroxyapatite (HA) bioceramic.

AM has revolutionized automotive, biomedical and aerospace industries, among many others. AM provides design and geometric freedom, rapid product customization and manufacturing flexibility through its layer-by-layer technique. However, a very limited number of materials are printable because of rapid melting and solidification hysteresis. Melting-solidification dynamics in powder bed fusion are usually correlated with welding, often ignoring the intrinsic properties of the laser irradiation; unsurprisingly, the printable materials are mostly the well-known weldable materials.

The consolidation mechanism of HA was identified during its processing in a ceramic SLS device, then the effect of the laser energy density was studied to see how it affects the processing window. Premature sintering and sintering regimes were revealed and elaborated in detail. The full consolidation beyond sintering was also revealed along with its interaction to baseplate.

These findings provide important insight into the consolidation mechanism of HA ceramics, which will be the cornerstone for extending the range of materials in laser powder bed fusion of ceramics.

Given the importance of the growing segmentation of ageing consumers and their increasing interaction with the Internet, digital marketing scholars are becoming more interested in this market. Prior research needs to pay more attention to this market in many contexts of digital marketing. This study aims to provide insights into ageing consumers’ content usage, content typology choices, and online brand advocacy (OBA).

Semi-structured interviews were applied, and 16 consumers from Southern Europe aged 55+ were included. The interviews were transcribed and examined following the principles of content analysis.

According to the research, older consumers display their usage and concerns regarding online content. They have different decision-making processes depending on whether they are purchasing products or services. Likewise, their choices of content typology vary based on the utilitarian or hedonic product category.

This study contributes to the literature by providing insights into this growing segmentation and proposing an OBA framework for older consumers related to content marketing. Finally, the study suggests that older consumers are passive online and active offline brand advocates.

This study aims to examine the effect of motivating language on employee performance and assesses the mediating roles of organisational citizenship behaviour and employee engagement between motivating language and employee performance in the Indian health-care sector, which is a highly demanding work environment, wherein employee burnout is high.

The study was in the context of COVID-19 pandemic set for health-care workers in India. To collect data and test the proposed research model, 328 questionnaires were respondent by multi-level health-care professionals from private and government hospitals in North India.

The findings suggest that leader’s motivating language is crucial for health-care leaders, inducing employee’s performance in context to patientcare, safety and satisfaction. Underpinning theory of leader member exchange substantiates that the role of leader is pivotal in daily interaction with the stakeholders. Self-determination theory of motivation is determined by psychological needs satisfaction inducing employee engagement and organisational citizenship behaviour, amplified through the leader’s motivating language, resulting into improved patientcare and patient safety. The findings state that leader’s motivating language impacts the high culture context like health-care professionals, as observed in the Indian health-care sector during COVID-19. The findings are indicative of developing non-cognitive personality traits for managerial skills.

The study substantiates the pivotal role of the leader’s communication with stakeholders such as patients/attendants and health-care staff. The findings, which are an indicator of patientcare, as an outcome of patient compliance, will be indicative of developing the non-cognitive skills in the personality traits of managerial skills, inducing patients’ trust in their health-care providers, using motivating language. Therefore, the health-care professionals must be trained in the application of motivating language with stakeholders, namely, patients/attendants and staff.

The findings state that leader’s motivating language impacts on employees of high culture context like health-care professionals, as observed in the Indian health-care sector during the recent global medical emergency of COVID-19, whereas the earlier studies posited leader’s motivating language to be effective on employees with low-cultural context. The role of leader is pivotal in daily interaction with the stakeholders, namely, patients/attendants and health-care staff.