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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether guests’ tipping motivations (i.e. server quality, social norm and food quality) and demographic characteristics (i.e. gender, age and income) influence loyalty to the server in a restaurant.

Based on a national online survey consumer panel comprised of 468 participants, the authors utilized decision tree using R statistical software. Predictor variables were tipping motivations and demographic characteristics (age, gender and income). Target variable was loyalty to the server.

The findings suggest that social norm, food quality and income influence customers’ loyalty toward the same server on future visits. Social norm turned out to be the strongest predictor. If consumers did not have high social norm on tipping, their loyalty toward a particular server was affected by the combination of determinants such as server quality, social norm, income and food quality.

Future research can identify or develop scales of tipping motivations with stronger reliabilities in the context of restaurants. Future research can also explore other demographic differences (e.g. ethnicity and sexual orientation) in tipping motivations and server loyalty.

Servers are indeed the primary contact point and they are in the most influential position with consumers. Overall, results of this study provide an interesting insight in that restaurant guests’ experience can be ruined by bad quality of food or can be mitigated by server quality. Thus, this research highlights a step-by-step process as to the actions that a server may perform and manage in order to enhance server loyalty.

Loyalty has been examined in the context of products, brands or service providers. This study focuses on loyalty toward a specific server, because the consideration of server–guest relationship provides both a compelling and timely area of study in that restaurants continue to look for unique ways to drive server–guest rapport and customer loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a within-gender analysis and between-gender differences in seeking (personal and interpersonal) and escaping (personal and interpersonal) motivations to attend a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia. Specific objectives were: to conduct a within-gender analysis in motivations to attend a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia; and to examine between-gender differences in motivations to attend a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia.

Based on the data collected from 458 attendees at a non-traditional festival in Saudi Arabia, the authors employed network analysis for within-gender analysis and MANOVA and ANOVA for between-gender comparison. The network analysis served two purposes, in that it examined each item’s predictability for each gender, and analyzed the correlations among motivation items within each gender. In addition, the General Linear Model served to compare the male and female groups’ motivations to attend the non-traditional festival. The authors first performed MANOVA for each dimension and then ANOVA for each dimension’s individual items.

Within-gender analysis reveals that several sets of motivations were associated strongly for both genders. This suggests that Saudi Arabians seem to enjoy entertainment because it projects the festival mood; they want to escape both from home and work and attend the festival to relieve stress by changing their routine pace. However, gender differences were apparent in several other items, especially for the group of women. Between-group comparison analysis shows significant gender differences in several elements of motivation. Overall, personal seeking and escaping were greater for males than females. In contrast, interpersonal seeking was greater for females than males.

Entertainment seems to be a key contributor to the festival mood because entertainment and the festival mood were related closely for both genders. In fact, personal and interpersonal escaping means were greater than personal interpersonal seeking means for both genders. Indeed, opportunities exist to develop non-traditional festivals in the country further. Gender differences were identified in several items of personal seeking and escaping, and interpersonal seeking. With respect to personal seeking, men tend to seek the entertainment, festival mood and the event’s uniqueness more than do women, a finding that their higher means in personal escaping supported. It is clear that men view the festival as a way to enjoy themselves to escape from their jobs and daily stress to a greater degree than do their female counterparts. Women are more likely to seek interpersonal experiences in that they are more likely to enjoy the festival because it offers the opportunity to meet new people and spend quality time with family and friends. This study has several limitations, leading to suggestions for future research. Because seeking and escaping motivations have been used relatively little in the festival setting, future researchers should develop a valid scale of personal and interpersonal seeking and escaping motivations specifically for festivals employing both qualitative and quantitative methods. Second, while the data were collected at a single non-traditional festival, future research can use multiple sites to increase the ability to generalize the findings. Third, although this study was limited to Saudi Arabia, further research can apply seeking and escaping motivations, both at the personal and interpersonal levels, to other cultures to extend the applicability of the framework used in this study.

Non-traditional festival managers need to focus on an atmosphere that provides festivities, as many people in the Saudi Arabian culture appear to be escaping from their everyday lives to enjoy themselves and with family and friends. To appeal to male workers, festival organizers and managers need to advertise and market the events’ mood and liveliness overall with photos of workers leaving the office free of stress and looking forward to attending an event. To appeal to women who desire unique experiences that a variety of forms of entertainment provide, event managers must ensure that the entertainment is innovative and creative, and differs from what other festivals provide to attract more female attendees. Also, festival planners must focus on events that incorporate the family unit and promote the opportunity to meet new people to appeal to women in Saudi Arabia.

This is the first study to examine gender differences in festival motivations in Saudi Arabia. The relaxation of the historically strict and conservative cultural values, coupled with the country’s desire to develop its tourism and event sector, provides an ideal opportunity for future research. The authors hope that this research will stimulate further interest in the country with the goal to develop and market its tourism sector and products on the world’s stage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the profiles of behaviours and adaptive functioning in the UK children and young people with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.

Data of 106 participants registered from 2005 to 2015 were extracted from a clinic database. In total, 99 individuals with confirmed prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE), aged from 5 to 25 years, were analysed using scaled scores of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales-Second Edition (VABS-II), and the Developmental Behaviour Checklist-Primary Carer Version (DBC-P) and Teacher Version (DBC-T). Differences due to age, gender, IQ and family structure (adopted/living with birth parents) were also explored.

The mean composite adaptive behaviour score on the VABS-II was classified as “low” at 68.2 (SD=8.5), with the socialisation domain being the most impaired. Significantly lower VABS-II composite scores were found in individuals with lower IQ’s, older ages and in males. Disruptive behaviours were the most commonly observed on the DBCs, whereas primary carers scored significantly higher than teachers across all subscales. IQ, age and gender were not associated with the total percentile scores of both DBCs. Adoption made no differences compared to living with birth parents.

Future studies would replicate these findings in a larger sample size including individuals without PAE and those living with birth parents.

This study is the first UK report that examines this issue.

The Morgan Library at Colorado State University in Fort Collins suffered catastrophic flooding as the result of a historic rain storm and flood that swept through the town on July 28, 1997. This study examines this single library's organizational disaster response and identifies the phenomena that the library's employees cited as their motivation for innovation.

Purpose – This study provides an example of a library where a pre-disaster and post-disaster organizational environment was supportive of experimentation. This influenced the employees’ capacity and motivation to create a new tool meant to solve a temporary need. Their invention, a service now called RapidILL, advanced the Morgan Library organization beyond disaster recovery and has become an effective and popular consortium of libraries.

Design/methodology/approach – This is an instrumental case study. This design was chosen to examine the issues in organizational learning that the single case of Morgan Library presents. The researcher interviewed employees who survived the 1997 flood and who worked in the library after the disaster. The interview results and a book written by staff members are the most important data that form the basis for this qualitative research.

The interviews were transcribed, and key phrases and information from both the interviews and the published book were isolated into themes for coding. The coding allowed the use of NVivo 7, a text analysis software, to search in employees’ stories for “feeling” words and themes about change, innovation, motivation, and mental models.

Three research questions for the study sought to learn how employees described their lived experience, how the disaster altered their mental models of change, and what factors in the disaster response experience promoted learning and innovation.

Findings – This study investigates how the disruptive forces of disaster can influence and promote organizational learning and foster innovation. Analysis of the data demonstrates how the library employees’ feelings of trust before and following a workplace disaster shifted their mental models of change. They felt empowered to act and assert their own ideas; they did not simply react to change acting upon them.

Emotions motivate adaptive actions, facilitating change. The library employees’ lived experiences and feelings influenced what they learned, how quickly they learned it, and how that learning contributed to their innovations after the disaster. The library's supervisory and administrative leaders encouraged staff members to try out new ideas. This approach invigorated staff members’ feelings of trust and motivated them to contribute their efforts and ideas. Feeling free to experiment, they tapped their creativity and provided adaptations and innovations.

Practical implications – A disaster imposes immediate and often unanticipated change upon people and organizations. A disaster response urgently demands that employees do things differently; it also may require that employees do different things.

Successful organizations must become adept at creating and implementing changes to remain relevant and effective in the environments in which they operate. They need to ensure that employees generate and test as many ideas as possible in order to maximize the opportunity to uncover the best new thinking. This applies to libraries as well as to any other organizations.

If library leaders understand the conditions under which employees are most motivated to let go of fear and alter the mental models they use to interpret their work world, it should be possible and desirable to re-create those conditions and improve the ability of their organizations to tap into employees’ talent, spur innovation, and generate meaningful change.

Social implications – Trust and opportunities for learning can be central to employees’ ability to embrace change as a positive state in which their creativity flourishes and contributes to the success of the organization. When leaders support experimentation, employees utilize and value their affective connections as much as their professional knowledge. Work environments that promote experimentation and trust are ones in which employees at any rank feel secure enough to propose and experiment with innovative services, products, or workflows.

Originality/value – The first of its kind to examine library organizations, this study offers direct evidence to show that organizational learning and progress flourish through a combination of positive affective experiences and experimentation. The study shows how mental models, organizational learning, and innovation may help employees create significantly effective organizational advances while under duress.

An original formula is presented in Fig. 1.

In view of the fact that evaluating library collections is so valuable in learning to what degree they lend support to all phases of curricula, it is surprising that so little attention is paid to evaluation techniques based on library support for individual courses of instruction. Surveying relevant library materials for specific courses is much superior to merely analyzing collection support for academic departments or programs. The first step in the process usually involves assigning call numbers to courses in order to measure the library shelflist and count the number of relevant materials. This is a laborious and sometimes frustrating experience, but not without significant advantages for librarians pursuing such quantitative evaluations.

The purpose of this study is to quantify the vertical shrinkage rates and the mechanical strength of three-dimensional (3D) printed parts for a variety of wood-based materials for liquid deposition modeling.

The overall hypothesis was that a well-chosen combination of binders, fibers and fillers could reduce shrinkage in the Z dimension and increase compressive and flexural strength (DIN 52185, 52186). To test this assumption, eight sub-hypotheses were formulated. Mixtures of the ingredients were chosen in different ratios to measure the performance of prints. For time efficiency, an iterative heuristic approach was used – not testing all variations of all variables in even increments, but cutting off lines of testing when mixtures were clearly performing poorly.

The results showed that some mixtures had high dimensional accuracy and strength, while others had neither, and others had one but not the other. Shrinkage of 3D printed objects was mainly caused by water release during drying. An increase of the wood as well as the cement, sand, salt and gypsum content led to reduced vertical shrinkage, which varied between 0 and 23%. Compressive and flexural strength showed mixed trends. An increase in wood and salt content worsened both strength properties. The addition of fibers improved flexural, and the addition of cement improved compression strength. The highest strength values of 14 MPa for compressive and 8 MPa for flexural strength were obtained in the test series with gypsum.

This paper is an important milestone in the development of environmentally friendly materials for additive manufacturing. The potential of many ingredients to improve physical properties could be demonstrated.