Search results

This paper presents M-PoP, a method to model large, complex, and dynamic business processes. These processes have sometimes resulted from alliances of organizations (i.e. joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions) and are referred to as Processes-of-Business Processes (PoP). Due to the difficulty of modeling these dynamic processes, alliances of organizations have often lost opportunities, competitiveness, and profitability, so requiring suitable modeling methods.

The authors proposed M-PoP that can model PoP through three views in different abstraction levels and using well-known techniques in industry and academia, mainly those from Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). For this, M-PoP presents three main steps: identification of PoP elements, modeling of PoP, and verification of PoP models. To evaluate M-PoP, we applied it in a real-world business process in the health domain.

The evaluation results point out the capability and viability of M-PoP to deal with dynamic business processes.

M-PoP still needs to be applied in various real-world scenarios to gather evidence of its productivity, efficiency, and scalability.

This novel method could change the way organizations model their business processes and, as a consequence, it could leverage strategic business opportunities.

M-PoP is the first method that makes it possible to model large and complex business processes and, most importantly, dynamic processes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of brand interaction in pop-up shops on consumers’ perceptions of luxury fashion retailers.

Adopting an exploratory, inductive research design, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with female respondents, consistent with the profile of both typical pop-up and “new luxury” customers, who had recently visited a luxury fashion pop-up shop.

Factors influencing consumers’ perceptions of the luxury brands whose pop-up shops were visited are identified relating to three key characteristics of pop-up retailing identified from a review of relevant literature, termed the temporal dimension, the promotional emphasis, and the experiential emphasis.

This study explores the perceptions of pop-up shops qualitatively from a consumer’s perspective, providing new insights into the personal and complex motivations and attitudes of new luxury consumers.

The main purpose of this work is to overcome the difficulty to manage large, dynamic business processes formed from the complicated interplay of business processes of distinct organizations, which take part of strategic alliances of organizations (joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions) and have their software systems as part of complex, large software-intensive systems called Systems of Systems (SoS). Hence, the authors introduce the novel concept of Processes-of-Business Processes (PoP), deepening on their characteristics and related key terms.

Based on the systematically retrieved and analyzed literature and on the authors’ experience from research/industrial projects, the authors defined PoP and have applied them in the Brazilian public health SoS, which involve several organizations and their business processes and their independent software systems as well.

Provided by PoP, a new understanding of the large, dynamic business processes of alliances of organizations is fundamental to advance both the state of the art and the state of the practice on business process management.

The adoption of PoP in other real-world scenarios is still required to get quantitative evidence.

The adoption of PoP can certainly contribute to the success of new businesses and even promoting sustainability and longevity of SoS, which are in fact deeply impacted by business processes.

The concept of PoP can change the mindset of the research community and practitioners about how large, dynamic business processes should be seen and further managed.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether servant leadership (SL) buffers the negative relationship between perceived organizational politics (POP) and employee performance outcomes.

Time-lagged multi source data were collected from 236 supervisor-subordinate dyads in a public sector university in Pakistan. SL, POP and several control variables were measured in subordinates at time 1, and supervisor ratings of organization citizenship behaviors and task performance were measured at time 2. The authors performed moderated multiple regression analysis to test the hypotheses underpinning the study.

Findings revealed that POP was negatively related to employee task performance and two types of organization citizenship behavior (individual and organizational). Findings also revealed that SL attenuated the negative effect of POP on employee task performance and the two types of organization citizenship behavior.

SL is particularly important in organizational cultures characterized by high politics; therefore, managers seeking to enhance task performance and citizenship behavior in employees should adopt this style of leadership if possible.

This is the first study conducted in the South Asian context that has examined whether, and how, SL buffers the negative effects of POP on employee task performance and organization citizenship behavior.

This paper aims to investigate to what extent hybrid differential evolution (DE) algorithms can be successful in solving the optimal camera placement problem.

This problem is stated as a unicost set covering problem (USCP) and 18 problem instances are defined according to practical operational needs. Three methods are selected from the literature to solve these instances: a CPLEX solver, greedy algorithm and row weighting local search (RWLS). Then, it is proposed to hybridize these algorithms with two hybrid DE approaches designed for combinatorial optimization problems. The first one is a set-based approach (DEset) from the literature. The second one is a new similarity-based approach (DEsim) that takes advantage of the geometric characteristics of a camera to find better solutions.

The experimental study highlights that RWLS and DEsim-CPLEX are the best proposed algorithms. Both easily outperform CPLEX, and it turns out that RWLS performs better on one class of problem instances, whereas DEsim-CPLEX performs better on another class, depending on the minimal resolution needed in practice.

Up to now, the efficiency of RWLS and the DEset approach has been investigated only for a few problems. Thus, the first contribution is to apply these methods for the first time in the context of camera placement. Moreover, new hybrid DE algorithms are proposed to solve the optimal camera placement problem when stated as a USCP. The second main contribution is the design of the DEsim approach that uses the distance between camera locations to fully benefit from the DE mutation scheme.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how perceptions of politics (POP) impact individuals’ willingness to engage in organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and how this relationship is impacted by individuals’ conscientiousness and political skills.

Primary data collected from 211 employee working in the consultancy sector in India were analyzed using hierarchical moderated regression technique.

The authors found a significant three-way interaction between POP, conscientiousness and political skill in predicting OCB. Presence of high conscientiousness and high political skill alleviates the negative effect of politics on OCB.

The data were collected from consultancy sector organizations, and thus, generalizability of the results is somewhat limited. Further, self-report surveys are used for data collection. Future studies should use multiple methods to collect data to avoid common method bias.

The results suggest that to alleviate the negative effect of POP on OCB, practitioners should recruit employees with high levels of conscientiousness and impart training to develop political skill.

This study attempts to take a holistic person-centric approach to study the moderating effect of personality variable and political skill when examining the linkage between perceived politics and citizenship behavior.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This study explores the influence of heritage brand extension on consumer purchase intention and analyses the effects of pop culture involvement. The extension of heritage brands is becoming increasingly difficult because such an extension needs to be consistent with the unique characteristics of brands and resonate with consumers. However, few scholars discuss the influence of consumers' level of pop culture involvement on brand extension and purchasing behaviour.

Taking time-honoured brands as an example, this study established a conceptual model based on a comprehensive review of the literature, and then tested the model using a sample of 255 respondents who were familiar with one of the selected Chinese time-honoured brands. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the relationships amongst brand extension fit, pop culture involvement, perceived value and purchase intention.

Time-honoured brand extension fit has a positive impact on consumer purchase intention, and this path is significantly influenced by the mediation mechanisms of perceived value. Situational pop culture involvement can significantly strengthen the relationship between time-honoured brand extension fit and perceived value, whereas enduring pop culture involvement does not.

The results clarify and expand on the different roles of cultural involvement in time-honoured brands and broaden research on the influence of cultural involvement in this regard. This study has significant theoretical value for the inheritance and revival of heritage brands and provides a reference for the practice of time-honoured brands.