Search results

Interrelationships among some common factors of human resource (HR) management and quality management are still unexplored. Changes in work patterns due to the Covid-19 pandemic have aroused interest in some of these factors, such as working-hours, work pressure, work–life balance practices, job satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to explore the interrelationships among such factors. Specifically, the influence of work hours, work pressure, job rotation and work–life balance on job satisfaction is evaluated both directly and under the mediating influence of working conditions.

A questionnaire-based survey was conducted in Indonesia among diversified organisations. A total of 432 responses were gathered, and they were examined using hypothesis testing and partial least square based structural equation modelling.

The study confirms the statistically proven impact of work pressure, job rotations and work–life-balance practices on working conditions. Job rotations, work–life balance practices and working conditions directly influenced job satisfaction. Work pressure did not influence job satisfaction directly, but it significantly influenced working conditions, which eventually affected job satisfaction. Working hours neither affected working conditions nor job satisfaction in a significant manner.

Covid-19 necessitated working from home, which is a peculiar work–life balance situation. The findings are helpful for organisations in planning strategies related to work–life-balance, working hours, multi-skilling, working conditions and other quality of work life factors in both regular working conditions and under Covid-19 conditions.

The proven influence of work pressure and work–life-balance practices may result in the formation of informal organisations, social groups and increased social networking. As working hours are not diagnosed as an influencing factor for job satisfaction, organisations may think about increasing them, affecting the social fabric of the working community.

Previously unexplored interrelationships among various quality of work life factors are established. Under Covid-19 circumstances, factors such as working hours, work–life-balance and work pressure are investigated in a novel manner. The factors and their interrelationships are important to both quality management professionals and HR professionals.

This paper analyses how firm births and deaths are influenced by previous firm births and deaths in related and unrelated sectors. Competition and multiplier effects are used as the theoretical lens for this analysis.

This paper uses 2008–2016 Irish business demography data pertaining to 568 NACE 4-digit sectors within 20 NACE 1-digit industries across 34 Irish county and sub-county regions within 8 NUTS3 regions. A three-stage least squares (3SLS) estimation is used to analyse the impact of past firm deaths (births) on future firm births (deaths). The effect of relatedness on firm interrelationships is explicitly modelled and captured.

Findings indicate that the multiplier effect operates mostly through related sectors, while the competition effect operates mostly through unrelated sectors.

This paper's findings show that firm interrelationships are significantly influenced by the degree of relatedness between firms. The raw data used to calculate firm birth and death rates in this analysis are count data. Each new firm is measured the same as another regardless of differing features like size. Some research has shown that smaller firms have a greater propensity to create entrepreneurs (Parker, 2009). Thus, it is possible that the death of differently sized firms may contribute differently to multiplier effects where births induce further births. Future research could seek to examine this.

These findings have implications for policy initiatives concerned with increasing entrepreneurship. Some express concerns that public investment into entrepreneurship can lead to “crowding out” effects (Cumming and Johan, 2019), meaning that public investment into entrepreneurship could displace or reduce private investment into entrepreneurship (Audretsch and Fiedler, 2023; Zikou et al., 2017). This study’s findings indicate that using public investment to increase firm births could increase future firm births in related and unrelated sectors. However, more negative “crowding out” effects may also occur in unrelated sectors, meaning that public investment which stimulates firm births in a certain sector could induce firm deaths and crowd out entrepreneurship in unrelated sectors.

This paper is the first in the literature to explicitly account for the role of relatedness in firm interrelationships.

The paper is aimed at identifying, analysing and prioritizing the critical constraints affecting efficient management of historic buildings in remote areas of Saudi Arabia.

Thematic content analysis and expert-based evaluation approaches were used to identify and evaluate the constraints. The DEMATEL technique was deployed to define the interrelationship complexities between the constraints and evaluate the impact of these interrelationships to ascertain the influential constraints.

The results identify “lack of clearly defined roles for the multiple government agencies” as the most influential constraint for managing historic sites and buildings in remote areas of Saudi Arabia.

The contextual interrelationship between the constraints is due to the experts' perceptions, which may be biased due to their proficiencies and professional backgrounds. Since the evidence on which the findings of this paper are established is predominantly from experiences related to historic sites and buildings in remote areas of Saudi Arabia, the results of this paper may not be entirely applicable elsewhere.

The paper provides invaluable methodology that can support practitioners and policymakers to establish sustainable strategies that can enhance the management and protection of historic buildings in remote areas of Saudi Arabia.

This study noticeably contributes to knowledge by providing comprehensive understanding of the major impediments to the successful management of historic buildings in remote areas of Saudi Arabia, which can assist in mitigating the potential impacts of these constraints and to advocate for the achievement of efficient management and protection of the historic sites and buildings.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the construction industry, yet still, it is unclear from existing studies about the critical challenges imposed on quality assurance (QA), particularly Cross-border Construction Logistics and Supply Chain (Cb-CLSC). Thus, this study aims to identify and examine the critical challenges of QA of Cb-CLSC during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The aim is achieved via an embedded mixed-method approach pragmatically involving a desk literature review and engaging 150 experts across the globe using expert surveys, and results confirmed by semi-structured interviews. The approach is based on Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) as its foundation.

The study revealed ten critical challenges of QA, with the top four including “the shortage of raw construction material (C7)”, “design changes (C6)”, “collaboration and communication difficulties (C1)” and “changes in work practices (C10)”. However, examining the interrelationships among the critical challenges using ISM confirmed C7 and C10 as the most critical challenges. The study again revealed that the critical challenges are sensitive and capable of affecting themselves due to the nature of their interrelationship based on MICMAC analysis. Hence, being consistent with why all the challenges were considered critical amid the pandemic. Sentiment analysis revealed that the critical challenges have not been entirely negative but also positive by creating three areas of opportunities for improvement: technology adoption, worker management, and work process management. However, four areas of challenges in the QA include cost, raw material, time, and work process, including inspection, testing, auditing, communication, etc.

The finding provides a convenient point of reference to researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and decision-makers on formulating policies to enhance the effectiveness of construction QA during the pandemic through to the post-pandemic era.

The study enriches the extant literature on QA, Cb-CLSC, and the COVID-19 pandemic in the construction industry by identifying the critical challenges and examining the interrelationships among them. This provides a better understanding of how the construction QA has been affected by the pandemic and the opportunities created.

Given the significant role played by valuers and the evidence of a lack of independence in some property valuation industries, particularly in emerging markets, this study analyses the issue of client influence in property valuation by providing a valuer-client perspective and measuring the interrelationships between the clients' influence factors to identify causal factors of prominence, which can assist in developing solutions to address the clients' influence issue.

The study used a mixed-method approach. Firstly, interviews were conducted with ten property valuers and five financial institution staff in Nigeria, and the data were subject to thematic analysis using Nvivo 12 software. A matrix questionnaire survey was administered to the valuers, and the responses were analysed using the fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method.

The results indicate that institutional clients, loan-seeking customers, property valuers and the perception of corruption within the Nigerian environment fuelled the issue of clients' influence. Based on the measurement of the interrelationship between the 14 identified client influence factors, the type of company, perception the public has of the industry, size of the firm, relationship with the client, type of client and regulatory framework were the factors of prominence.

The findings of this study bear huge implications for Nigeria and other similar structured property markets facing the issue of clients' influence in property valuation. With the prominent factors bearing root in a mix of client, valuer and environmental factors such as the valuation structure, process and public perception, there is a need for solutions that level the playing field between institutional clients and valuers, reinforce transparency and establish excellent regulatory standards to address the issue of clients' influence.

This study is the first to measure the interrelationships between the clients' influence factors to identify the prominent causal factors. Accordingly, considering the multi-factors, the research is novel as it focusses on those factors that would likely lead to other factors, thereby providing opportunities to develop solutions that focus on those factors of prominence. Secondly, the study deviates from the narrative on clients' influence in property valuation, which pits it as solely a client or valuer factor, by showing how the interplay of the stakeholders' interests and the environment promotes the issue in a non-transparent property market.

This study aims to identify the enabling factors for Building Information Modeling (BIM) adoption in Vietnamese construction enterprises and uncover their interrelationships. This will help stakeholders focus on controlling and allocating resources (time, personnel, and costs) appropriately to adopt BIM and differentiate themselves from fierce competition in the architectural, engineering, construction and operations (AECO) industry.

This study first identifies and evaluates 32 enabling factors for applying BIM in the Vietnamese construction industry according to the TOE extended framework. Afterwards, a hybrid questionnaire survey using a convenient sampling method is conducted to capture stakeholders' views. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and the partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique are then applied to identify the constructs of the enabling factors and their interrelationships.

The study extracts six constructs that could have a significant impact on the adoption of BIM in construction enterprises, namely: technical feasibility (TF), human resources and management (HRM), company business vision (CBV), political environment (PE), economic viability (EV), and legal aspects (LA). Based on eleven proposed hypotheses, the analysis results confirm nine hypotheses and show that the HRM, TF, and CBV have the strongest effects on managers in evaluating the factors for BIM.

The results of the study fill the gap in knowledge by discovering the interrelationships among the enabling factors for BIM adoption in construction enterprises. The results might support the construction enterprises and their stakeholders in increasing the application of BIM, and digital transformation in construction industry.

Lean management is a contemporary management system that firms adopt to boost their performance. Lean management can be integrated with human resources management to develop a new concept of lean human resources management (LHRM). This entails the implementation of several practices. However, the LHRM–performance paradigm remains underexplored in the literature. Hence, this study aims to examine the interrelationships between LHRM practices and the impacts of those practices on firm performance (FP).

Using two equal-sized samples (n = 250 each) of manufacturing firms in Jordan and Germany, this study proposes two structural equation models (i.e. a Jordanian and a German models) depicting the interrelationships between LHRM practices and the impacts of those practices on FP. After testing these models, a comparison between them is conducted, producing findings with theoretical and practical implications.

The main findings of this study indicate that the average implementation of LHRM practices among German manufacturing firms is at a higher level than the average implementation among Jordanian firms. The findings also support the proposed interrelationships between LHRM practices and the impact of those practices on FP for both the Jordanian and German models.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to highlight the proposed relationships, both in general and in the context of comparing developed and developing countries. Its findings have important implications that can enable manufacturing managers to benefit from the implementation of LHRM practices to enhance FP in different contexts. These findings provide valuable insights for human resource managers and decision-makers and open several avenues for future research.

This paper seeks to revisit the interrelationship among tourists’ perceived value of the destination, tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty in the heritage tourism site of Hoi An. In addition, the moderating role of tourists’ perceived crowding, which has become remarkably common at the site, in such a triangle relationship will also be explored. In other words, this study aims to validate an extended model of perceived value – tourist satisfaction – destination loyalty – perceived crowding.

The study collects data from 403 tourists who visited Hoi An during peak season through an online questionnaire. The data were later analysed using AMOS and Warp partial least squares.

The results validate the significant and positive correlation among perceived value, customer satisfaction and destination loyalty. Also, perceived crowding was confirmed to affect the relationship among these three variables negatively. In terms of academic contributions, this paper empirically proved that low levels of tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty among tourists who highly value their visiting experience at World Heritage Sites (WHS) can be caused by perceived crowding.

So far, current literature has investigated the direct (either positive or negative) relationship between perceived crowding and post-visit behaviours of tourists (Nie et al., 2022; Papadopoulou, Ribeiro, & Prayag, 2023; Stemmer, Gjerald, & Øgaard, 2022). Broadening this area of research, the authors of this paper used the social interference theory and the stimulus-overload theory to explain the low level of tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty among tourists who highly value their visiting experience at WHS.

This study aims to develop cause-and-effect relationships among the critical success factors (CSFs) of fintech adoption and rank these CSFs based on their importance in the model.

To achieve the objectives of the study, the Fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (FDEMATEL) approach was used. The data was collected from 16 experts using a questionnaire.

The findings demonstrated the interrelationships among the CSFs. In total, 16 critical factors were recognized as causal factors, and the remaining eight were considered effect factors. The CSFs were ranked based on their importance in fintech adoption.

This study is novel as it investigates CSFs of fintech adoption using FDEMATEL, and it contributes to understanding the nature of these factors and how they affect fintech adoption. The findings propose a significant basis to deepen fintech adoption and deliver a clue to design a practical framework for fintech adoption.

Due to the high use of mobile devices, the market share of mobile advertisements (Ads) is significantly growing. Although mobile Ads can contact potential customers at any time and in any location depending on their unique demands, one of the biggest problems for advertisers is how to improve customer repurchases with their Ads. The development and empirical support of customer repurchase through mobile Ads context have not been addressed. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to define and identify the key attributes of customer repurchase in a mobile Ads context.

In this research, the set of attributes was derived from a systematic literature review and finalized by applying the Fuzzy Delphi method. To develop a hierarchical model and classify the cause/effect groups among identified key attributes, the Fuzzy mixed approach uses a combination of Fuzzy interpretive structural modeling-decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory.

The findings suggest that language, type of website and social media are classified to as essential attributes for improving customer repurchase through mobile Ads.

The focus of the current research is limited to identify and develop the hierarchical interrelationships between customer repurchase attributes that are unique to the mobile Ads business context. Additional research may be conducted for various media contexts and other products/services categories.

This study illustrated how multicriteria decision-making techniques could be used effectively using Fuzzy theory to explore the research area of customer repurchase in mobile Ads concept.