Search results

This research aims at studying the influence of a classroom’s inner environmental conditions on undergraduate students’ performance using an experimental methodology.

The Uchida-Kraepelin test (U-K test) was applied to measure the performance of a group of 47 students in a selected classroom that was arranged according to the following experimental conditions: air-conditioning on, and doors and windows closed (D1); doors and windows open, and air-conditioning off (D2); air-conditioning off, and doors and windows closed (D3). After completing the tests, questionnaires were distributed to evaluate the students’ assessment of each set of environmental conditions.

On-site measurements of humidity and carbon dioxide levels stress the importance of ensuring good natural ventilation through open doors and windows, independently of whether the air-conditioning system is operated or not. Also, the authors find that the students’ self-assessment regarding the inner environmental conditions for each studied set was entirely accurate, with set D3 being assessed as the worst. The U-K test scores for each environmental set did not show statistically significant differences, which means that, in the studied conditions, the student’s performance in the tests was not affected by the inner environmental conditions.

There is a direct relationship between the building’s indoor conditions and an occupant’s health. Factors such as poor maintenance, bad indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and building age will worsen the building’s condition and negatively impact the occupant’s health. Educational buildings with poor IEQ can reduce the concentration and performance of occupants.

School is an important place to help students grow in their various capabilities. They spend approximately 30% of their daily lives in schools for their educational activities. Since most of their activities are performed indoors, indoor environmental attributes, such as light, heat, air and sound, should be maintained as required. In general, schools are not thermally comfortable. The extreme thermal environment of classrooms affects students’ concentration. Thermal discomfort may also cause irritation. In addition to reduced concentration, such an environment could also cause tiredness, sluggishness and health problem.

Despite the importance of the issue, scientific investigations of the correlations between students’ performance and the quality of scholar buildings’ inner environmental conditions are still relatively recent. In this context, this research further explores the effect of a classroom’s different environmental inner conditions on the performance of undergraduate students at a university in São Paulo/Brazil.

The purpose of this paper is to explore causal complexity in the relationship between environmental proactivity and firm performance. Using data collected from 27 Australian firms and controlling for the organizational life cycle, type of industry and external contingencies, the study empirically examines environmental proactivity in high-performing firms from polluting industries.

The data were analyzed using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.

In general, the results of the analysis imply that environmental proactivity is not always associated with high firm performance, and that environmental proactivity is not as important as the other causal conditions for high-performing firms in highly polluting industries.

The study addresses the relationship between environmental and firm performance more holistically by including a number of the firm’s external and internal factors identified as important in past research. Second, it offers a new perspective on the relationship with its systematic comparative analysis of complex cases. Next, it identifies different combinations of conditions (paths) leading to a high firm performance and, finally, the core complementary model allows an exploration of which factors are essential and which are less important or even irrelevant to high-performing firms.

Based on the findings, firms from highly polluting industries can determine in which circumstances, if any, the adoption of environmental proactivity will result in a positive firm performance.

The study is valuable because it contains a rich set of measures of the firm’s external and internal environment, thus allowing a more holistic examination of the relationship between environmental proactivity and firm performance.

It appears as if a gap exists between objective environmental conditions and the respective managerial perception of those conditions. This situation poses severe problems for executives deriving effective strategies and initiating successful organizational change. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop and provide a deeper understanding of the factors that lead to such a gap.

On the basis of the literature from psychology and strategic management, this paper develops a conceptual framework of the cognitive model with the perception process and potentially moderating factors. Furthermore, more precise mechanisms and relationships within the perception of environmental conditions are proposed.

The perception process consists of three stages, attention, encoding and storage/retrieval, which all may explain variations in how individuals interpret the environment. Moreover, dispositional factors (such as cognitive styles, cognitive structures, intelligence and motivation) as well as situational factors (such as emotion and stress) further cause variations between and within individuals, which ultimately leads to a gap between objective and perceived environmental conditions.

This study not only highlights the existence and the severe consequence of a misperception of environmental conditions, but also offers a variety of factors that could lead to this undesirable effect. Furthermore, while previous research has typically focused on single factors that might influence the perception process, this study assumes a holistic view on the cognitive model and provides more detailed and specific mechanisms on a perceptual gap.

This study aims to examine the contingent fit between business strategies and environmental uncertainty and its effect on corporate tax avoidance.

This study uses a two-stage linear regression method comprising multinomial logistic regression and panel data regression.

This study finds that under highly uncertain conditions, the contingent fit of prospector strategy is higher than the contingent fit of other two strategies, i.e. defender and analyzer strategy. The study fails, however, to demonstrate that under highly uncertain conditions, this study finds that under highly uncertain conditions the contingent fit of a “prospector” strategy is higher than for “defender” and “analyzer” strategies. The study fails, however, to demonstrate that under highly uncertain conditions the contingent fit of a defender strategy is higher than that of an analyzer strategy. The study also finds that the contingent fit between prospector strategy and environmental uncertainty has a positive effect on tax avoidance, and this effect is higher than for the misfit strategies. Moreover, in such environments the fit level of a defender strategy has a negative effect on tax avoidance while environmental uncertainty has a positive effect on tax avoidance.

This study estimated competition uncertainty using the Herfindahl index to measure competitive intensity in an industry. However, only the data from public listed companies was used due to a lack of data availability for non-public companies. Consequently, further study is recommended to include the total number of companies within an industry as a proxy of competitive intensity.

The results implied that managers, not only in Indonesia but also in other countries as well, specifically emerging countries (generally the environmental uncertainty in emerging countries is high) should consider the contingent factors when making business strategy decisions. Managers must be aware of the contingent fit with environmental uncertainty, and therefore, must assess external conditions prudently. Furthermore, the results of this study showed that managers should pay more attention to the effects of their decisions on corporate tax avoidance, while aligning their business strategy decisions with corporate tax planning strategy to obtain an optimal outcome for the company.

The Directorate General of Taxes and Board of Fiscal Policy, as regulators, need to comprehend environmental uncertainty to issue various policies that can ease the burden of the taxpayer to remain in business, particularly during the turbulence environment so that can prevent the companies doing illegal practices and will eventually reduce the number of tax avoidance.

This study developed alternative measure of tax avoidance, which is tax avoidance latent variable score (TAXLVS). The TAXLVS was derived from confirmatory factor analysis of previous existing tax avoidance measurements. This study is also the first that analyzes the effect of business strategy on tax avoidance using contingency approach.

While previous research has identified that environmental innovation is shaped by a variety of drivers, researchers have devoted limited attention to the role of nature-based resources in the country. Building on environmental innovation theory and the natural resource-based view of the firm, this study introduces ecological resource deficits as a novel driver of environmental innovation. The authors explore how ecological resource deficits interact with institutional and regulatory drivers as well as firm-level technology drivers to explain the extent of environmental innovation across different countries.

The authors apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to a multi-source dataset to identify different pathways for environmental innovation across 28 countries.

Findings show that higher environmental innovation is a function of ecological resource deficits complemented by the presence of at least two other conditions. Moreover, the results show that environmental policy stringency and societal expectations are substitute conditions of environmental innovation.

This study reveals the interdependences between different conditions for environmental innovation across countries contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the geography of environmental innovation.

Environmental consequences increasingly influence management strategy and choice. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects on attention and investment of: incorporating environmental data into a balanced scorecard (BSC), called the sustainability balanced score card (SBSC) and the organization of environmental accounting information.

In a between‐participant design, participants (n ≈ 95) chose from among two investments using BSCs. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: no environmental data (control or BSC condition); environmental data embedded within the traditional BSC (four‐perspective SBSC); or environmental data added to a BSC as a standalone fifth perspective (five‐perspective SBSC).

Investment to achieve environmental stewardship objectives was greater with the four‐perspective SBSC than the traditional BSC. In addition, participants were most efficient, i.e. spent the least total time, and least time per data element examined, with the four‐perspective SBSC. Finally, the time spent examining, and decision weight given to, environmental data were unrelated.

Professional managers and accountants may have greater knowledge of environmental metrics than do students, who are the participants in this study; hence, the results may not generalize to higher knowledgeable professionals since their processing of environmental data may differ from the lower knowledge participants of this study.

The form (i.e. organization) of environmental accounting data changed the allocation of participants' attention while the presence of environmental accounting data changed participants' investments; hence, both the presence and form of environmental accounting information influenced decision making.

This study is among the first to show differing influences from both the presence and organization of environmental accounting data on attention and investment.

We argue that a fundamental issue regarding how to search and how to switch between different cognitive modes lies in the decision rules that influence the dynamics of learning and exploration. We examine the search logics underlying these decision rules and propose conceptual prompts that can be applied mentally or computationally to aid managers’ decision-making.

By applying Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) modeling to simulate agents’ interaction with dynamic environments, we compared the patterns and performance of selected MAB algorithms under different configurations of environmental conditions.

We develop three conceptual prompts. First, the simple heuristic-based exploration strategy works well in conditions of low environmental variability and few alternatives. Second, an exploration strategy that combines simple and de-biasing heuristics is suitable for most dynamic and complex decision environments. Third, the uncertainty-based exploration strategy is more applicable in the condition of high environmental unpredictability as it can more effectively recognize deviated patterns.

This study contributes to emerging research on using algorithms to develop novel concepts and combining heuristics and algorithmic intelligence in strategic decision-making.

This study offers insights that there are different possibilities for exploration strategies for managers to apply conceptually and that the adaptability of cognitive-distant search may be underestimated in turbulent environments.

Drawing on insights from machine learning and cognitive psychology research, we demonstrate the fitness of different exploration strategies in different dynamic environmental configurations by comparing the different search logics that underlie the three MAB algorithms.

To reconceptualize the organizational environment in a comprehensive manner, it is important to specify not just the velocity but also other aspects of turbulent environments. Concurrently, the purpose of this paper is to also propose that organizational adaptability and, particularly, the speed of adaptations are critical to moderate the impact of turbulence in the environment on organizational performance.

This paper uses a conceptual methodology to fully specify turbulent environments and commensurate managerial response appropriate for such environments. Based on a perspective borrowed from the field of fluid dynamics used to specify the phenomenon of turbulence, the authors develop a conceptual model with research propositions. Four dimensions that describe turbulence in fluid flow when applied metaphorically offer a comprehensive view of the organizational environment.

An extreme, unanticipated, sudden onslaught resulting in a prolonged disrupted environment such as during the recent coronavirus crisis is best characterized as having caused turbulent environmental conditions. Management theories have addressed disruptions as high-velocity environments in the context of rapid changes in information technology. With a broadened conceptualization of the organizational environment to better capture extreme disruptions, the authors provide a comprehensive model appropriate for turbulent environmental conditions and offer research directions for scholarly pursuit.

This paper provides a new perspective from the physical sciences to better conceptualize organizational environments during extreme disruptions such as in turbulent environmental conditions.

This paper contributes to studies on the relationship between dynamic capabilities (DCs) and performance by showing how domain-specific DCs – international dynamic marketing capabilities (IDMCs) – affect the international performance of exporting firms in the context of extreme environmental dynamism – during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors focus on a sample of 277 exporting manufacturers from the post-transition economy of Poland. The authors use hierarchical multiple regression analysis to test this study's hypotheses.

This study's findings show that deployment of IDMCs by export manufacturers in the context of environmental jolts contributes to better performance, and this relationship is mediated by adaptation to foreign markets and product development capability. Additionally, this study's results reveal that the significant and positive indirect effect of IDMCs on international performance (through mediators) is, however, weakened under conditions of extreme environmental dynamism.

The limitations pertain to the cross-sectional nature of this study and the research sample, characterised by the dominance of export manufacturers of final products, the dominance of manufacturers operating in the business-to-business sector, or in the business-to-business and business-to-customer sectors simultaneously.

The study provides suggestions to managers on how to build resilience in international markets during turbulent times. These activities involve investments in IDMCs that support activities centred around product development and adaptation to foreign markets.

The novel construct of IDMCs is introduced and operationalized. The study empirically tests the direct and indirect relationship between IDMCs and performance contingent upon extreme environmental dynamism. The results demonstrate the boundary conditions for the effectiveness of these domain-specific DCs in such a research setting.