Search results

This study is about the Tanzania Ports Authority (TPA), a central institution in the country that has seen efforts towards improved performance in terms of cargo handled and revenue generated from port operations. This study identifies the actions that were taken by public institutional leaders as a result of political leadership call for performance improvements and implications therefrom for sustainable performance. It attempts to engage with both change and public value theories to make sense of TPA efforts and implications as a result.

The study was conducted at TPA headquarters in Dar-es-Salaam and involved the management and other staff members. The study design was descriptive and exploratory. Data collection involved mostly the use of semi-structured questionnaires and review of documents.

The study reveals that the efforts to improve performance at the TPA indicate success in terms of cargo handled and revenue increases. Factors that support change and factors that impede change efforts were also identified making reference to Lewin's change theories and ADKAR (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement) model. The varied level of improved performance is attributed to the emphasis on change factors and the origin of change that do not give the human element the requisite concern. The quest for performance improvement in the public sector organization is also found wanting on the failure to place the requisite emphasis on public value creation both in processes set in motion and the desired outcomes. A more planned systematic change, championed or internalized within the organization by internal players, specifically TPA's management, is also proposed for a better and more consistent sustainable change in performance at TPA and possible in other public organizations.

The study is about an organization within a change context that is driven by the top leadership of the country. There have been studies on TPA but not as a change process and not yet after 2015 when the country witnessed a very strong leadership. According to Kets de Vries (2016), powerful leadership in Africa has had little to show and a legacy to be lauded. Therefore, there might be some relevance to contribute to the reasons why most African leadership fails, if that is the case.

Performance can be achieved through change efforts that are driven by the country's top leadership when the context is right and support factors are present. What can be elusive is sustainable performance creating public value and that endures despite changes in the country's leadership, particularly when internal leadership of a public organization is not the change champion and is basically toeing a line, and the change process is not holistic. A more systemic approach to efforts to create strong organizations as opposed to strong individuals in leadership may be key to sustainable change in similar institutions in Tanzania and Africa.

The study is based on change management models that have gained long-term interest of both scholars and practitioners. It explores a performance-seeking initiative in a developing country's context that is driven by top country's political leadership. It is thus unique because the institutional leadership had to be in stride with national level changes that was centered on efforts to improve service delivery and to counter corruption and complacency in public institutions. It has also attempted to link change theories and public value creation in the quest for improved public performance.

Groupthink happens in-group decision-making processes whereby members of a group prematurely arrive at a decision that may indicate consensus but for the aim of protecting group harmony. This limits the contributions of the individuals' talents, ideas, competences and experiences to more effective decisions. Although there are a number of studies on predictors (forecasters) of groupthink, they do not consider the influence of the African cultural aspects of collectivism, high power distance and tolerance on groupthink that may characterise the decision-making context in African settings. It is in that context that this case study analyses groupthink in a public sector organization in Tanzania.

This paper unveils the presence of groupthink predictors that can affect the quality of decisions made in groups within the Tanzania context. The study was conducted in one of the public institutions in Tanzania that is under the Ministry of Home affairs. The study population included Directors, Managers, Heads of units, District registration officers and other officials as shown in Table 1. These are the people who participate in decision-making processes in the organization and were drawn from different offices of the organization including the headquarter office, Kibaha Data centre, District Registration offices from different regions including Dares Salaam, Coast region, Arusha, Mtwara, Mwanza, Manyara, Mbeya, Singida, Dodoma, Geita, Lindi and Njombe – these 12 administrative regions are among the 27 regions that make up the Tanzania mainland. Through simple random and purposive sampling methods, a total of 97 participants participated effectively. The criterion for participation being participants must have been involved with at least one decision-making group experience. The choice of the organization was done on the basis that it is a relatively a new institution of importance; it was also possible to get from it the needed data.

The results of the study show that there is the presence of groupthink predictors of high trust, conformity and promotional leadership in decision-making groups in the organization. Furthermore, the diversity of group members alone indicates to be insufficient reason to avoid Groupthink. It is suggested that other important factors might be at play in group decision making including the influence of African cultural characteristics.

This study was limited to only one institution. For a study of this nature to be undertaken access to data could be a very significant problem. Limiting it to one organization we are familiar with made it a bit easy to achieve access.

Group decision making and groupthink are rarely in discourse in Africa. Tanzania is not isolated from the world, and being a country that unity is a cultural tenet that is promoted at every level from the family to national level (Rwegelera, 2003; Tripp, 1999) effects of groupthink is reasonably conspicuous because of the inbuilt national culture that has shaped people to be tolerant and accepting of different perspectives, ethnic groups, religious and races (Tripp, 1999). The same tolerance and acceptance may be transferred to decision-making groups and easily cause the occurrence of groupthink that can affect the quality of decisions made.

The Tanzania government has dedicated itself to putting strict measures to prohibit unethical and erroneous decisions that cost the nation including reducing employees' misconduct. The findings of this study indicate that there are hidden aspects like groupthink that are not reached by those measures yet ironically impacts the decisions made in organizations and in turn costs organizations and the country at large and calls for the government and its institutions together with the private sector to be awakened and alerted if they are dedicated and concerned about the quality of decisions they make.

This is an original research work building on previous research. Some findings on groupthink and implications have Western origins. In Africa, we need to figure out what is making the continent not to make significant steps to change the social-economic environment. This study highlights to both African academics and leaders with no management background to make them understand groupthink as a phenomena that has implications to quality decisions. It will also prompt similar studies and therefore widen understanding on decisions making.

This study aims to investigate the determinants of anti-corruption disclosures by construction firms in Asia-Pacific countries.

The sample comprises construction companies from seven Asia-Pacific countries from 2015 to 2019. The authors hand-collected data on anti-corruption disclosures by using content analysis.

This study provides empirical evidence that government ownership, country-level accounting competence and high-quality auditors increase companies’ anti-corruption disclosures. Meanwhile, this study finds that uncertainty avoidance does not affect companies’ anti-corruption disclosures.

This study has a number of implications. First, government and professional accountant organizations need to improve accountants’ knowledge and competence through education, training and continuous professional development. Second, public accounting firms need to ensure the quality of their auditors, particularly in the technical competence in financial and nonfinancial reporting. Finally, universities must improve and update their curriculum regarding nonfinancial reporting issues.

This study is among the first to examine anti-corruption disclosure practices in the most corrupted settings, i.e. the construction industry in Asia-Pacific countries. It uses the isomorphism perspective to explain the influence of government ownership, country-level accounting competence and high-quality auditors on anti-corruption disclosure transparency. The number of prior studies investigating this association is very limited. Moreover, disclosures of anti-corruption information are complex and sensitive; thus, coercive, normative and mimetic pressures are required to achieve higher transparency and sustainability.

This chapter briefly explores selected English and general education policy documents, curricula, and textbooks within the context of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective and examines how they have changed pre- and post-21st century. First, a policy document related to education in KSA in general (pre-21st century) is analyzed along with an English language teaching (ELT) policy document of the same period. Next, two general policy documents post-21st century are explored, followed by one related to ELT policy. Finally, one post-21st century document related to higher education is discussed. The “network of practices” within which these documents are situated are first detailed, as well as the structural order of the discourse, and some linguistic analysis of the choice of vocabulary and grammatical structures (Meyer, 2001). Issues which might be problematic to the learning and teaching identities of the students and teachers interpreting these documents are also highlighted. Finally, we consider whether the network of practices at this institution and KSA in general “needs” the problems identified in the analysis and critically reflect on the analysis.

Typically, adoption of sustainability in organizations are often done in an unstructured way without the consideration of other partners in the supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a coherent plan to improve sustainability in the supply chains utilizing ISO standards for environment and social responsibility.

This paper draws on literature on ISO14000 and ISO26000 to derive a set of variables applicable to supply chains, which are then prioritized for real organizations utilizing analytic hierarchy process.

The findings highlight that not all the variables of environmental, social and economic responsibility are equally important. Besides, the work reported in this paper justifies the application of multi-criteria decision-making (AHP) to prioritize elements of sustainability in context supply chains. The suggested method is illustrated using inputs from large manufacturing companies in Qatar.

ISO14000 and ISO26000 are well known standards; however, there was no effort to integrate these standards to improve sustainability in supply chains. The suggested methodology provides invaluable help to the managers to implement sustainability in a coherent manner across the supply chain.

The research contributes to the extant literature by proposing a new methodology based on the integration of three-approaches: Analytic Hierarchy Process, ISO14000 and ISO26000 systems.

This study aims to examine the impact of board gender diversity on the level of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure in the Arab Gulf states. Also, this research further aims to explore whether the impact of board gender diversity varies across the Arab Gulf states.

Ordinary least squares regression is used in this study to test the impact of board gender diversity on the level of CSR disclosure. Manual content analysis is used to evaluate the extent of CSR disclosure in annual reports, stand-alone CSR reports, sustainability reports and website sections to examine the relationship between the extent of CSR reporting and board gender diversity. This study uses the global reporting initiative (GRI) fourth version reporting guidelines to design and define the classifications of CSR reporting checklist.

The findings show that there is a statistically significant relationship between the number of female directors and the level of CSR disclosure. The results show that board gender diversity is positively associated with the level of CSR reporting in two countries, namely, Bahrain and Kuwait. Also, the findings reveal that there is a weak positive relationship between the presence of women on the boards and CSR reporting index in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

This study attempts to fill the gap in the literature, in that no similar study covers the Arab Gulf countries as one economic unit. The study is unique in that it focuses on oil-rich countries. This study is, to the best of this researcher’s knowledge, the first to explore the impact of women’s boards on the extent of CSR reporting, as well as investigating the possible variation of board gender diversity impact on the extent of CSR reporting in the Arabian Gulf region.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new approach to investigate complex processes, such as software development processes, using business process modeling.

The paper presents an investigation into the use of role activity diagramming (RAD) to model complex processes in the software industry sector, with reference to the process of TestWarehouse as a case study.

Systematic extension and quantitative analysis to RAD models led to the discovery of process bottlenecks, identification of cross functional boundary problems, and focused discussion about automation of processes.

Further work is required to validate and evaluate the proposed approach using several cases with different application domains and thus generalize the adopted approach.

A new approach has been used successfully to understand and analyze business processes. The tools and techniques that are used to perform the approach are not complicated and do not need much specialist expertise, so the approach is not only oriented toward specialists but also toward organizations' managers and staff.

New techniques have been developed by using process modelling to deepen the understanding and analyzing of complex organizational processes. This research implements a practical investigation which uses a case study to validate the new techniques.

The Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) maintain better control over their transactions than conventional financial institutions (CFIs) through the existence of Shari'a Supervisory Board (SSB) and Shari'a Control Department (SCD). The purpose of this paper is to highlight the superiority of Shari'a supervision over external audit and Shari'a audit over internal audit. The study identifies five independent variables that affect the SSB control: ex‐ante Shari'a audit; ex‐post Shari'a audit; SCD reporting to the SSB; corrective actions of SSB towards the management violations; and the number of SSB members.

The variables are articulated in five hypotheses, which are tested by ordinary least square regression. The data are collected via a questionnaire which was sent to the SSB members of 219 IFIs in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.

The results indicate that ex‐ante Shari'a audit, ex‐post Shari'a audit, and reporting of SCD are significantly related to the SSB control, whereas corrective actions and the number of SSB members have insignificant relation.

The research is focused on internal factors only, without considering other external factors such as stakeholders and regulators. Also, the research covered the GCC region alone.

The research recommends testing the hypotheses in other geographies to generalize the results, and including external factors as well as shareholders and board of directors.

The research provides practical implications for the SCD role and calls for merging the SCD with the traditional internal audit department to reduce the excessive work of controlling.

The paper contributes to the literature gap about the SSB. It is believed to be one of few studies that provide empirical evidence about the SSB control in the IFIs of the GCC region.

This study aims to investigate the content and determinants of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) anti-corruption disclosures (ACDs) of public-listed Indonesian companies using institutional and legitimacy theories.

A content analysis method is used to extract the anti-corruption information in the annual reports. This study uses 40 checklist items developed and used by prior studies to measure the extent of CSR ACD. Univariate and multivariate analyses are applied to examine the determinants of ACD.

The results show that the disclosure level of anti-corruption is considerably satisfactory at 44.9%. The whistle-blowing theme is the most frequently reported. Size of firm and industry type have significant effects on ACD. Surprisingly, the findings show that government ownership has a negative effect on ACD.

The study is limited to one year of observation and is therefore unable to capture changes in the level of disclosure due to policy changes. The results of this study help anti-corruption decision-makers by taking into account the company’s legitimacy and isomorphic factors when formulating ACD policies and efforts that could be made to promote greater disclosure of anti-corruption information.

This study contributes to the discourse of CSR by providing a more comprehensive extent and more determinants of ACD practice in an emerging country from the lens of legitimacy and institutional theories.

The current environment is unhelpful to female entrepreneurs, and they need to overcome numerous barriers when starting their own businesses. In this study, the researchers investigated the significant barriers that Pakistani female entrepreneurs require to overcome in this respect.

In this study, the researchers used a quantitative study and they used a questionnaire to survey the respondents and collect cross-sectional data. The researchers targeted female students who were undertaking bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in different Pakistani public and private sector universities. Accordingly, the researchers based this study’s findings on the usable samples received from 498 Pakistani female students.

The researchers used a structural equation model (SEM) in this study and its findings highlight that aversion to risk (ATR) has an insignificant impact on entrepreneurial inclinations (EI). In addition, fear of failure (FoF), lack of resources (LoR), aversion to hard work and stress (ASH) and the lack of social networking (LSN) have negative and insignificant effects on EI. The ATR factor has an insignificant effect on entrepreneurial success (ES), whereas FoF, LoR, ASH and LSN are negative and insignificant predictors of Pakistani female students’ ES.

This study’s findings may help Pakistani women to overcome the barriers to ES. In this respect, the researchers recommend that the Pakistan Government and policymakers develop significant strategies to provide the conducive business environment and to financially support Pakistani women to start their own businesses. Furthermore, this study’s findings contribute greatly to the vast amount of current literature and help to overcome the entrepreneurial conditions and barriers that potential entrepreneurs from advanced and developing countries experience frequently.

This study’s findings provide empirical evidence of EI and ES in Pakistan.