Search results

Despite the present focus on improving the resilience of homes to flooding in UK flood risk management policy and strategy, a general measurement framework for determining levels of flood resilience in UK homes does not exist. In light of this, the aim of this study was to develop a means to evaluate the levels of resilience in flood-prone homes from the perspective of homeowners'.

A quantitative research methodology was employed, with empirical data obtained through a postal survey of homeowners who had experienced flooding. The responses received were then analysed using a combination of statistical techniques including agreement/reliability tests and multiple regression to develop a model of flood resilience.

A predictive model was developed that allows the resilience of a property to be quantified and measured as perceived by homeowners. The findings indicate that the main factors found to influence the level of flood resilience were: property type (PT), presence of cellar/basement (C/B), property wall type (PWT), property ground floor type (PGFT), kitchen unit type (KU), flood experience (FE), flood source (FS) and flood risk level (FRL).

The resulting model provides unique insights into resilience levels to the benefit of a range of stakeholders including policy makers (such as Defra/Environment Agency), Local Authority flood teams, property professionals, housing associations and homeowners. As a result, homeowners will be in a better position to determine which interventions should be prioritised to ensure better flood protection.

This is the first study of its kind to have rigorously quantified the level of flood resilience for individual homes. This study has quantified the effectiveness of individual resilience measures to derive the first reliable means to measure the overall levels of resilience at the individual property level. This is regarded as a significant contribution to the study of flood risk management through the quantification of resilience within individual UK homes, enabling the prioritisation of interventions and the overall monitoring of resilience.

Seekers who visit professional virtual communities (PVCs) are usually motivated by knowledge-seeking, which is a complex cognitive process. How do seekers search for knowledge, and how is their search linked to prior knowledge or PVC situation factors? From the cognitive process and interactional psychology perspectives, this study investigated the three-way interactions between seekers’ expertise, task complexity, and perceptions of PVC features (i.e. knowledge quality and system quality) on knowledge-seeking strategies and resultant outcomes.

A field experiment was conducted with 119 seekers in a PVC using a 2 × 2 factorial design of seekers’ expertise (i.e. expert versus novice) and task complexity (i.e. low versus high).

The study reveals three significant insights: (1) For a high-complexity task, experts adopt an ask-directed searching strategy compared to novices, whereas novices adopt a browsing strategy; (2) For a high-complexity task, experts who perceive a high system quality are more likely than novices to adopt an ask-directed searching strategy; and (3) Task completion time and task quality are associated with the adoption of ask-directed searching strategies, whereas knowledge seekers’ satisfaction is more associated with the adoption of browsing strategy.

We draw on the perspectives of cognitive process and interactional psychology to explore potential two- and three-way interactions of seekers’ expertise, task complexity, and PVC features on the adoption of knowledge-seeking strategies in a PVC context. Our findings provide deep insights into seekers’ behavior in a PVC, given the popularity of the search for knowledge in PVCs.

The circular economy (CE) represents an industry-wide transition from linear to circular processes. There has been a proliferation of literature on CE in the last decade. However, the existing studies on the adaption of CE in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are scarce. This study aims to develop a research agenda and the way forward for future researchers focusing on the adoption of CE.

This article analyses the CE concepts through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Coding and content analysis are performed to generate emergent themes with the help of “Atlas.ti” software.

The authors uncovered the contemporary significance of adopting CE and the state-of-the-art literature on CE. The study's findings fall into four broad themes: Technical know-how, resource and process optimization, reverse practices and technology and innovation. Ten thought-provoking questions were identified in the four themes that researchers can explore further in embracing CE to achieve sustainability in SMEs.

The study has highlighted the importance of CE adoption and CE's benefits to stakeholders across all three dimensions, i.e. social, economic and ecological. Practitioners can use the agenda in four themes to strengthen the practitioners' existing practices in SMEs to promote CE.

The study's uniqueness is the supply of current knowledge from diverse literature and practical consequences for SMEs. This study opens new lines of inquiry to adopt CE in SMEs, streamlining the existing literature into four themes to focus future research.

The authors aim to broaden the understanding of incivility through the lens of bystanders who witness incivility toward women. Integrating attributional ambiguity and emotional contagion theories with the literature on workplace mistreatment, the authors propose that witnessing incivility toward women may negatively impact bystanders.

The authors collected multi-wave data from 324 employees to assess the consequences of witnessing incivility toward women at work for bystanders.

Utilizing a serial mediation model, the authors found evidence that witnessing incivility toward women indirectly increased turnover intentions six weeks later, first through elevated negative affect and then through increased cognitive burnout.

Taken together, this study's findings suggest that the negative effects of incivility toward women can spread to bystanders and highlight the importance of considering individuals who are not directly involved, but simply bear witness to incivility at work.

Despite the huge financial resources associated with oil, Nigeria has consistently recorded poor growth performance. Therefore, this study aims to examine how corruption and oil rent influence Nigeria’s economic performance during the 1996–2021 period.

Various estimation techniques were used. These include the bootstrap autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds-testing, dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), the fully modified OLS (FMOLS) and the canonical cointegration regression (CCR) estimators and the Toda–Yamamoto causality.

The bounds testing results provide evidence of a cointegrating relationship between the variables. In addition, the results of the ARDL, DOLS, CCR and FMOLS estimators demonstrate that oil rent and corruption have a significant positive impact on growth. Further, the results indicate that human capital and financial development enhance economic growth, whereas domestic investment and unemployment rates slow down long-term growth. Additionally, the causality test results illustrate the presence of a one-way causality from oil rent to economic growth and a bi-directional causal relationship between corruption and economic growth.

Existing studies focused on the effects of either oil rent or corruption on growth in Nigeria. Little attention has been paid to the exploration of how the rent from oil and the pervasiveness of corruption contribute to the performance of the Nigerian economy. Based on the outcome of this study, strategies and policies geared towards reducing oil dependence and the pervasiveness of corruption, enhancing human capital and financial development and reducing unemployment are recommended.

Prodigious teamwork is the basis for augmenting the level of productivity on construction projects. Globalisation of the construction market has meant that many practitioners work outside of their geographical spectrum; however, the multicultural dissimilarities of construction workforces within the project management team (and how these may impact upon project productivity performance) have been given scant academic attention. To bridge this knowledge gap, this paper aims to analyse the effects of a multicultural workforce on construction productivity.

The epistemological positioning of the research adopted mixed philosophies (consisting of both interpretivism and postpositivism) to undertake a deductive and cross-sectional survey to collate primary quantitative data collected via a closed-ended structured questionnaire. Census sampling and convenience sampling techniques were adopted to target Ghana’s construction workforce and their opinions of the phenomenon under investigation. Out of 96 questionnaires administered, 61 were retrieved. The data obtained were analysed by using mean score ranking, relative important index, one sample t-test and multiple regression. The reliability of the scale was checked by using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient.

From the t-test analysis, 11 variables sourced from extant literature, and the null hypothesis for the study was not rejected and all factors (except high cost of training and improper gender diversity management) were affirmed as negative effects of the multicultural workforce on construction productivity. Using multiple regression analysis, six of the independent variables were shown to impact upon productivity. The goodness of fit was verified by collinearity and residual analysis. The model’s validation revealed a relatively high predictive accuracy (R² = 0. 589), implying that the results could be generalized. In culmination, these findings suggest that the predictors can be used to accurately predict the effects of multicultural workforce on construction productivity performance.

The findings indicate that multicultural workforce/teams have a substantial effect on overall construction productivity in the construction sector; consequently, stakeholders must address this issue to enhance productivity across the sector.

The current study significantly contributes to our understanding of how multicultural workers/teams affect construction productivity in the construction business perspective and how to respond to the negative menace.

Occupational safety issues among employees remains a contemporary and omnipresent concern. In developing countries, safety-related problems are amplified, resulting in higher incidences of serious accidents and occupational diseases. This study aims to evaluate employees’ knowledge and attitudes toward occupational health and safety, and how these influence overall occupational health and safety compliance. Ghana’s oil and gas industry provides the contextual backdrop for this research, given it is characterized by high rates of injury.

A positivist and deductive research strategy was used to quantitatively analyze both primary and secondary data sources. A structured survey was administered to industry employees, and multiple linear regression was used to establish the effects of employee’s knowledge and attitude toward occupational health hazards on overall health and safety compliance.

The findings indicate that most employees had both a high level of knowledge and positive attitude toward mitigating occupational health hazards. Moreover, the study reveals that most employees complied with occupational health safety practices. However, the study also reveals that the effect of employees’ knowledge and attitude toward occupational health hazards does not translate into deployment of comprehensive safety practices. Interestingly, female employees were found to be more knowledgeable and compliant with occupational health and safety practices than their male counterparts.

Premised upon the findings, the study recommends: implementation of relevant education and training programs encompassing the proper usage of machinery and equipment, tailored hazard safety training appropriate to specific employee job requirements, effective dissemination of risk information and governance initiatives that enforce strict adherence to correct safety procedures.

The study uniquely examines the influence of employee’s knowledge of health and safety to overall compliance within the oil and gas industry. Cumulatively, the study’s findings and recommendations contribute to improving the occupational health and safety outcomes within the industry.

The objective of this study is to understand how Arab entrepreneurs in Israel redress the disadvantage of the intersectionality of place and race by setting up their businesses in markets beyond their ethnic enclaves as well as by pursuing opportunity entrepreneurship and the role human values play in this process.

Using the portrait value questionnaire, a survey of Arab entrepreneurs in Israel was conducted. Multiple linear regressions were run to generate the findings.

The authors find that educated and non-conforming Arab men in Israel, driven by stimulation and universalism, successfully neutralise the intersectional disadvantage of place and race through entrepreneurship.

Care is advised in the generalisation of findings of this research to other intersectional communities as they emerge from the unique context of Arab entrepreneurs in Israel.

Education, stimulation and universalism facilitate entrepreneurial success beyond Arab ethnic enclaves whereas conformity suppresses it.

With the right attributes and values, marginalised individuals can emerge from the disadvantage of the intersectionality of place and race.

The study advances the intersectionality discourse from “what it is” and “what it does” to “what can be done about it”. It identifies the attributes and values that help Arab entrepreneurs in Israel to remedy their intersectional disadvantage.

The authors contribute to the literature on leadership by investigating how characteristics of principal investigators (PIs) affect innovation performance, and how collaborative and non-collaborative projects moderate this relationship within the context of inter-organisational research projects.

The authors analysed panel data from the National Science and Technology Information Service on 171 research projects within a biomedical and regenerative medicines programme overseen by the Korea Health Industry Development Institute. The authors used a hierarchical regression model, based on the ordinary least squares method, to examine the relationship between PI characteristics and performance, considering both quantity and quality.

The results show that the characteristics of PIs have diverse effects on the quantity and quality of innovation performance. Gender diversity within PIs negatively affects the quality of innovation performance, while the capacity of PIs positively influences it. Moreover, the degree of PI’s engagement is positively associated with the quantity of innovation performance but does not have a significant relationship with the quality of performance. In terms of moderating effects, collaborative projects with multiple leaders seem less reliant on PI capacity than non-collaborative projects led by a single leader, in terms of innovation performance.

The results contribute significantly to the literature on innovation management by examining the role of leadership in collaborative environments to enhance innovation performance, addressing the need for empirical evidence in this area. Analyses of PI characteristics in government R&D management can lead to improved team performance, more efficient processes and effective resource allocation, ultimately fostering innovation.

This study aims to investigate the effect of the virtual spokesperson type on the consumers' preference for new products. To meet the consumer needs of Generation Z, virtual spokespeople have become new assistants in brand marketing. However, how virtual spokespersons drive consumer preference for new products is minimally understood.

This research conducts three experiments to investigate the influence of virtual spokesperson type on consumers' preference for new products.

The research shows that, for radically new products, competent virtual spokespersons improve consumers' perception of self-efficacy and thus consumers' preference; for incrementally new products, warm virtual spokespersons improve consumers' perception of social connection and thus consumers' willingness to buy.

This study broadens research on brand spokespersons and virtual spokespersons. This research also enriches and expands research on the consideration of new product types in brand spokespersons.