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The purpose of this paper is to explore the experience of intimate relationships of women who have been diagnosed with Autism in adulthood.

Semi-structured interviews were used to interview eight participants. The data were transcribed and analysed using the interpretative phenomenological analysis method.

Four overall themes were identified. These included “Response to the diagnosis and receiving more information about Autism”, “Factors influencing dating behaviour”, “Sex and sexual experiences” and “Experience of intimate relationships as a person with Autism”.

The results of this study have implications for both research and clinical practice as it highlights the areas in which women newly diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) could benefit from support.

The study hopes to add to the limited existing research on adult women with ASD.

To date no similar research has investigated the same phenomenon through a similar method.

Research has established that 38%, 56% and 66% of training is not transferred to work immediately, six months and 12 months after training, respectively. This has led scholars to advocate the continuous examination of factors that enhance training transfer to have a comprehensive understanding of the factors that enhance it. As a result, this study aims to examine transfer opportunity as a pretraining factor and its influence on assimilated training content (in-training factor); the influence of assimilated training content on motivation to transfer (post-training factor) and training transfer; the influence of motivation to transfer on training transfer; and the mediating role of motivation to transfer in the relationship between assimilated training content and training transfer.

A structural equation model is developed to test the five hypotheses formulated in this study using survey data obtained from 195 respondents who attended various training programs across different organizations. Following the assessment of the measurement model, the determination of the significance of the hypothesized paths is assessed based on the bias-corrected and accelerated confidence intervals obtained from the bootstrapping of 10,000 subsamples.

The findings of this study are that: transfer opportunity positively influences assimilated training content; assimilated training content positively influences motivation to transfer and training transfer; motivation to transfer positively influences training transfer; and motivation to transfer plays a complementary mediation role between assimilated training content and training transfer.

The nature of the work environment regarding the opportunity to transfer training influences trainees’ assimilation of the training content when they undergo training. Hence, organizations need to ensure that employees are always afforded the opportunity to transfer training content assimilated from previously attended training programs to assimilate the content of subsequent training programs. Furthermore, for training to culminate in training transfer, organizations and, more specifically, learning and development practitioners ought to pay attention to trainees’ assimilation of the content of training programs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to empirically consider transfer opportunity as a direct antecedent of assimilated training content. More so, it is one of few studies to empirically examine the influence of assimilated training content on training transfer.

This study aims to examine the web of relationships among training value, employee internal states (psychological empowerment, employee engagement and motivation to transfer) and training transfer.

Data is obtained from different categories of employees a few months after attending different training programs organized by their organization. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze the data. Bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) confidence intervals are used to determine the significance of the hypothesized paths.

This study finds that training value relates to motivation to transfer, psychological empowerment and employee engagement. Motivation to transfer also relates to training transfer and employee engagement. Again, psychological empowerment relates to motivation to transfer, employee engagement and training transfer. Concerning the mediated relationship, psychological empowerment and motivation to transfer fully mediate the relationship between training value and training transfer.

Internal states must be the focus of human resource department (HRD) scholars in their quest to discover training transfer improvement mechanisms. HRD practitioners and organizations generally should also prioritize the enhancement of the internal states of employees to aid training transfer.

In this study, training transfer facilitating factors particularly employee internal states are explored by examining the web of relationships comprising training value, motivation to transfer, psychological empowerment, employee engagement and training transfer in a pentagonal model using a homogeneous sample with a common understanding of training transfer due to the similarities in their training as well as job conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the aspects of service quality that citizens view as most important regarding the improvement of their quality of life within the city where they live, by finding out the intangible variables or factors that most influence citizen satisfaction with the local government. The paper uses a measuring instrument to obtain survey data and build a theoretical and empirical model that operates at the level of the local government.

It involves a construction of a causal theoretical model that follows a series of steps that connect the empirical context (data) with the same theoretical representation (model from reality). This model attempts to explain the relations between the latent variables included in the structural equation model from background knowledge inspired in the evolution of social sciences.

The emergent model discriminates three areas pertaining to quality of services, its relationship with the satisfaction of citizens in local government across local leadership image and expectations.

Citizens satisfaction indexes provide not only information about citizen satisfaction and the rate of fidelity and perceived quality but also suggestions about the factors influencing this satisfaction.

This article describes the many and varied possible relationships between the various precedents and consequences that influence the conceptualization of citizen satisfaction with the local government. The paradigm used focuses on perceptions of physical disorder rather than on the hierarchical approach of conceptualizing the perception of service quality.

The purpose is to explore how the process of action research (AR) can support building legitimacy and organizational learning in innovation project management and portfolio practices in merger contexts.

Meta-reflection on method issues in Action Research through an action research case study with an innovation group during an organizational change process. This case demonstrates an example of an action research cycle focused on building practitioner legitimacy rather than problem-solving.

Key findings include (1) demonstrating how AR can be used for building legitimacy through visualizing the innovation process, and embedding those visuals in top management practices of the organization; and (2) demonstrating how AR can work as an organizational learning tool in merger contexts.

This study focuses on an action research cooperation during a two-and-a-half-year period. Thus, findings offer the depth of a medium term case study. The processes of building legitimacy represent this particular case, and can be investigated in other organizational contexts to see the extent to which these issues can be generalized.

For researchers, this paper offers an additional type of AR cycle to consider in their research design which can be seen as demonstrating a form of interplay between practitioner action and organizational level legitimacy. For practitioners, this paper demonstrates a connection between legitimacy and organizational learning in innovation contexts. The discussion of how visuals were co-created and used for building legitimacy for an innovation process that differs from the standard stage gate model demonstrates how engaging in AR research can contribute to developing visuals as resources for building legitimacy and organizational learning based on connections between theory and practice.

This case rethinks AR practice for innovation project management contexts to include legitimacy and organizational learning. This focus on legitimacy building from organizational learning and knowledge conversion contributes to our understanding of the soft side of innovation project management. Legitimacy is demonstrated to be a key concern for innovation project management practices.

The purpose of this paper is to determine differences in customers’ personal disposition to online shopping.

The research model was proposed based on two types of purchases (hedonic vs utilitarian) and on personal traits of individuals against technology throughout the Technology Readiness Index (TRI) 2.0. Generation and gender were considered to evaluate their impact on the type of purchases. Consumers’ data were collected in Chile through 788 face-to-face surveys. The partial least squares approach was used to test the research model.

The findings show that optimism and discomfort influence online shopping. Moreover, generation and gender moderate the relationship between the dimensions of the TRI and online purchases.

The contributions of this study are threefold. The analysis of personal traits and the type of purchases contribute to the existing literature on consumer behavior and e-commerce, and provide some insights for marketers to identify segmentation strategies by analyzing the gender and generation of individuals. Second, this study contributes to examining the stability and invariances of the TRI 2.0 instrument, which has not been fully revised in less developed countries. Third, this study adds to the existing body of research that argues that demographic variables are not sufficient to understand technology adoption by individuals by including psychological variables.

With the emergence of the sharing economy paradigm, the process of innovation is no longer unidirectional, but cyclical. This paradigm shift requires a better understanding of social actors to fully leverage the promise of co-innovation in the sharing economy. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to develop a classification model to profile social actors based on their motivation to participate in different co-innovation activities.

A preliminary case study was first conducted to identify actors’ motivations to continuously participate in co-innovation activities. Next, a survey was administrated to validate the measurement model and then a discriminant analysis was run on a sample of 244 actors to classify actors based on their willingness to participate in three forms of co-innovation activities. Lastly, the resultant classifiers were cross-validated.

The results indicate that financial gains, entrepreneurship and learning are significant predictors of ideation (sharing new ideas). Enjoyment and learning are strong indicators of collaboration (sharing knowledge or experience), whereas networking, enjoyment, and altruism are most strongly related to socialization (sharing network and connections). These findings highlight three classes of social actors – ideators, collaborators and networkers – based on motivational differences.

Co-innovation among individual inventors is an understudied aspect of the sharing economy. This study provides a theoretically parsimonious classification model to profile social actors, predict the sharing activities in co-innovation networks, and highlight the importance of platform design to appeal to different classes of potential contributors in collaborative innovation.

This paper describes the author's lived experiences as a marginalised professional. It offers a nuanced understanding of the author's career development journey to an authentic work identity.

This analytic autoethnography, situated in multicultural, democratic South Africa, describes how historic moments in the country's political evolution influenced the author personally: the author’s sense of belonging and the author’s various roles socially, as well as at work.

The paper tracks selected stories in the author's professional career journey to an authentic work identity, as indexed by the themes: I am a Black South African; I am a gay professional and so, who am I at work? On reflection, the author realised how the bounded nature of authenticity allowed psychological safety while exploring congruency between the author’s multiple work identities.

The autoethnography demonstrates how multiple accounts by the same author may be a valuable way of contributing to the literature on authentic work identity. This autoethnographic work extends the authentic identity literature of marginalised professionals beyond the narrow authenticity–inauthenticity binary of most organisational studies. The paper introduces limited authentic work identity as an ameliorative self-concept in organisations.

Customised capacity building is thought to be essential for organisations. However, empirical studies are lacking with respect to its effect on employee outcomes. This study aims to examine the effect of customised capacity building on employee outcomes including employee empowerment and employee engagement through employee learning in Ghanaian local government institutions.

Valid responses from 281 employees of Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana were collected through a survey. A structural equation model was used to analyse the data and test the hypotheses formulated.

The results showed that customised capacity building has an effect on employee learning, employee empowerment, and employee engagement. Employee learning also had an effect on employee empowerment and employee engagement. In addition, employee learning partially mediated the effect of customised capacity building on both employee empowerment and employee engagement.

This study is of particular relevance to public organisations. As there is a dearth of studies focusing on customised capacity building, this study provides insight into incorporating the phenomenon into public sector organisations to enhance employee learning, empowerment and engagement.

The purpose of this study is to identify, based on social network theory, the relationship between the direction of international migration (immigration/emigration) and the international movement of enterprises and their location.

A traditional gravity model and the Tobit estimation method are applied to three groups of countries from three different regions: Latin America, North America and the European Union. The study considers a period from 2001 to 2012.

The main results suggest that the international migration that goes from the European Union and North America to Latin America is related with the firms’ internationalization and their respective location.

Given that migration can be an important and reliable source of information, trust and knowledge, managers should see it as a “bridge” between the home and host countries, which, in turn, can increase their competitive advantage.

Governments can learn how migration and outward foreign direct investment interact. In addition, they could develop political frameworks to accurately and effectively manage international migration (immigration and emigration) and FDI in the best interests of the stakeholders.

This study extends the social network theory by suggesting that networks are not only related with firms’ expansion abroad but as well with their location. This statement could be generalizable as long as emigration/networks (ethnic ties) are considered the links between the home and the host country.