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Universities can do more to deliver against the sustainable development goals (SDGs), working with faculty, staff and students, as well as their wider stakeholder community and alumni body. They play a critical role in helping shape new ways for the world, educating global citizens and delivering knowledge and innovation into society. Universities can be engines of societal transformation. Using a multiple case study approach, this study aims to explore different ways of strategizing sustainability toward delivering the SDGs are explored in a university setting with an example from the UK, Bulgaria (Europe) and USA.

The first case is a public UK university that adopted enterprise and sustainability as its academic mission to secure differentiation in a disrupted and increasingly marketized global higher education sector; this became a source of inspiration for change in regional businesses and the local community. The second case is a business sector-led sustainability-driven transformation working with a private university in Bulgaria to catalyze economic regeneration and social innovation. Finally, a case from the office for sustainability in a major US research university is given to show how its engagement program connected faculty and students in sustainability projects within the institution and with external partners.

Each case is in effect a “living lab,” positioning sustainability as an intentional and aspirational strategy with sustainable development and the SDG framework a means to that end. Leadership at all levels, and by students, was key to success in acting with a shared purpose. Partnerships within and with universities can help accelerate delivery of the SDGs, enabling higher education to make a fuller contribution to sustaining the economic, environmental, cultural and intellectual well-being of our global communities.

The role of universities as the engine of transformational sustainability toward delivering the SDGs has been explored by way of three case studies that highlight different means toward that end. The collegiate nature of the higher education sector, with its shared governance models and different constituencies and performance drivers, means that sustainability at a strategic level must be led with leaders at all levels acting with purpose. The “living lab” model can become a part of transformative institutional change that draws on both top-down and bottom-up strategies in pursuit of sustainable development.

This paper is to explore how cross-functional integration (CFI) of production-marketing can impact the firm's build-to-order (BTO) competitiveness, marketing performance (MP) and financial performance (FP).

Empirical study with the structural equation modeling approach is applied. Six hypotheses are constructed and tested based on survey data collected from Chinese manufacturing firms.

The survey data supports that production-marketing integration (PMI) improves BTO competitiveness (BTOC) and MP and that BTOC also positively affects marketing outcome which, in turn, impacts a firm's FP. The results reveal that CFI of production-marketing is an effective approach for achieving the BTO manufacturing strategy and can improve organizational performance.

The paper uncovers the role of CFI of production-marketing in BTO manufacturing strategy and its impacts on a firm's MP and FP and provides important managerial implications for practitioners to improve organizational time-based competitiveness and performance in today's time-based competition era.

Progress accomplished by the disabled entrepreneurs on the fronts of profits, turnover, return on investment (ROI), employees engaged, capital employed and diversification shall be studied and prevalence of gender differences in such progress shall be assessed.

The proposed research is descriptive in nature, based on primary data, collected by personally administering a well-structured interview schedule to 201 disabled entrepreneurs in Puducherry selected using a snowball sampling technique. Data collected has been analyzed using SPSS 21, using the tools of mean, one-way ANOVA, factorial ANOVA and chi-square (χ²) analysis.

The prevalence rate of entrepreneurship among female disabled is very low. Female disabled entrepreneurs manage higher turnover than their male counterparts and manage insignificantly higher progress in terms of capital employed, while male disabled entrepreneurs have managed insignificantly higher progress in terms of profits, diversification and ROI. Illiterate disabled, both men and women, struggle to manage decent turnover while the better educated manage better turnover.

This paper has highlighted the low prevalence rate of entrepreneurship among women disabled though the fewer women disabled entrepreneurs are performing better than their male counterparts in operating their business.

The findings of this paper may be taken as base for formulation of effective government policies in empowering disabled persons in general and women disabled in particular.

Building on the self-determination theory (SDT), the purpose of this study is to empirically examine the influence of work meaningfulness (WM) on employees' involvement in playful work design (PWD) in the context of software development firms in Pakistan.

For the present study, a two-wave employee survey (online questionnaire) was used for data collection. The data were collected through an adopted questionnaire from employees working in software development firms in Pakistan. structural equation modeling and Hayes Process Macro of SPSS were used to analyze data collected from 305 respondents.

The findings of this study show that work meaningfulness and epistemic curiosity (EC) positively and significantly influence employee playful work design strategies. Moreover, the relationship between work meaningfulness and playful work design was partially mediated by employee epistemic curiosity. This mediating role of epistemic curiosity is strengthened by the presence of the perceived leader's autonomous support (LAS).

Employees improve their personal work experience through playful work design. Theoretically, this study contributes to the body of knowledge on the factors (work meaningfulness, epistemic curiosity and leader's autonomous support) that can influence employees' self-determination to design fun and competition into their work. This study contributes to the theory by introducing the antecedents (work meaningfulness and epistemic curiosity), of employee playful work design and explores the role of epistemic curiosity as a mediator and the leader's autonomous support as a moderator through SDT perspective.

For practitioners, this study pinpoints that software development firms can consider improving employees' perception of work meaningfulness, which can lead them to become epistemically curious to proactively design their work experience for their psychological need fulfillment, well-being and better functioning. Moreover, leader's autonomous support can support involvement in playful work design.

The current study is the first investigation in the Asian context to study the antecedents of playful work design and a critical boundary condition. This study extends the literature on the antecedents of employee playful work design and explores the role of epistemic curiosity as a mediator and the leader's autonomous support as a moderator specifically through a self-determination perspective.

This paper aims to study employee mental health in relation to workplace design and indoor environmental quality (IEQ) when working from home, which has received little attention. The trend toward hybrid working urges for more knowledge.

Through a mixed data collection method, this study analyzed potential relationships (between mental health, workplace design and IEQ) from information obtained through a cross-sectional survey, repeated point-in-time surveys and desk-based IEQ sensors at home. Data were collected in April 2020 during a national COVID-19 lockdown in The Netherlands amongst 36 subjects. They all worked full time from home in this period and together completed 321 point-in-time surveys. The three data sets were combined and analyzed using bivariate and path analysis.

Outcomes indicate that subjective and objective IEQ conditions, workplace suitability and distraction affect employee mental health in the home workplace in a similar way as in the office. Being satisfied with the noise level increases concentration, self-reported well-being and engagement. High sound pressure levels (>58 dB) increased tension or nervous feelings.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to explore employee mental health in relation to simultaneously assessed (perceived and measured) multiple IEQ parameters in the home workplace.

Personality profiling in today’s business world has become an essential organisational development practice targeted at identifying a set of employees' traits, which differentiate an employee from one another. Given the assumption that personality traits form an essential indicator of developing the potential of an individual workforce, possible to establish how employees function in a certain job role and their suitability for the particular tasks in an organisation. This study aims to explore the relationship between personality traits, assessment centres (ACs) quality and management development in Nigeria telecommunication organisation among its managers.

The study employed multi-stage sampling techniques and further stratified the hierarchy of the management and finally used a simple random sampling strategy on each stratum. A combination of 482 managers in Nigerian telecommunication organisations participated in this study. The study investigated 12 hypotheses and 1 mediating postulation. Multiple scales were adapted to measure dimensions of endogenous and exogenous variables along the path of mediating variables of the study. The study employed a cross-sectional survey approach to administering the research instrument across all the departments among the managers of the organisations. A structural equation model of assessment was used to analyse the data collected from managers of the telecoms organisations.

The outcome of the study was significant, 10 of the postulated hypotheses were found to be significant while 3 were not significant. The study revealed that a combination of openness to experience, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness and extraversion personality have no significant relationship with the AC. Also, employees who are high in neuroticism like being emotionally unstable did not find a significant relationship with the AC. In a similar situation, the combined effect of all the big-five personalities was not significant in management development among the managers of the telecommunication industry. The AC is discovered to mediate between personality traits and management development. Individually, the big-five model finds a significant relationship with AC and management development, respectively.

The study is restricted to managers of the Nigerian telecoms industry alone and not all the entire workforce. It adopted cross-sectional analysis to make an inference on all the managers of the organisations. The implication is that the period of the view of a particular point in a sequence of the event may not be representative. Another implication is that the results from the cross-sectional design are for the relationship, and they do not indicate causation.

In practice, this study has shown that personality profiling is important to managing organisational behaviour to highlight a set of traits of employees suitable for peculiar roles. This study implies that personality elements constitute a vital signal of the potential development of the workforce. It helps to illuminate an individual functioning style in a certain task situation, therefore determining both professional and managerial suitability in performing a given role.

The study aims to examine the relationships among personality traits (i.e. the Big Five personality traits and locus of control), self-perceived facial attractiveness, motivations (i.e. intrinsic and extrinsic motivation) and intention toward live stream broadcasting. It also investigates the moderating role of perceived behavioral control in the relationship between motivations and intention.

Data collected from a sample of 637 participants are used to examine the research model and test the hypotheses with the employment of partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The study shows that motivations and perceived behavioral control are significant predictors of intention. Perceived behavioral control has a significant moderating effect between motivations and intention. Intrinsic motivation is positively influenced by self-perceived facial attractiveness, agreeableness, extraversion and internal locus of control, while extrinsic motivation is positively predicted by self-perceived facial attractiveness, conscientiousness and extraversion.

This study enhances our understanding of the determinants of intention toward live stream broadcasting by exploring its relationships with motivations, self-perceived facial attractiveness and personality, as well as the moderating effects of perceived behavioral control.

This study advocates the importance of taking an evolutionary perspective in the strategic configuration of closed-loop supply chains (CLSC) in the transition to a circular economy. Building on the supply chain management and industrial dynamics research domains, an evolutionary analytical framework was developed and applied in the empirical context of the ongoing industrial transition to e-mobility.

This study is designed as an in-depth exploratory case study to capture the multi-layer dynamic complexities and their interplay in CSLC development. The empirical investigation was based on two-year interactions between the authors and various departments in a leading European heavy vehicle manufacturer. The proposed evolutionary analytical framework was used for investigating the dynamics of four CLSC configurations through ten possible trajectories.

The findings demonstrate that the evolution of each CLSC configuration comes with multiple challenges and requirements and point out the necessity for the co-development of technologies, product design and production, and infrastructure through long-term relationships among key supply chain actors. However, this evolutionary journey is associated with multiple dilemmas caused by uncertainties in the market and technology developments. All these factors were properly captured and critically analyzed, along with their interactions, thanks to the constructs included in the proposed evolutionary analytical framework.

The proposed evolutionary framework is applicable for examination of SC transformation in the context of market and technology development, and is particularly relevant for transitioning from linear SC to CLSC. The framework offers a single actor perspective, as it does not directly tackle dynamics and effects of actions taken by SC actors.

The developed framework can support SC managers in identifying, framing, and comparing alternative strategies for CLSC configuration in the transition process.

This study proposes the framework for understanding and guiding the evolutionary process of CLSC development. Its uniqueness lies in the integration of concepts from innovation and evolutionary theories coming from industrial dynamics and SCM literature streams.

Poor indoor air quality in schools is a worldwide challenge that poses health risks to pupils and teachers. A possible response to this problem is to modify ventilation. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to pilot a process of generating alternatives for ventilation redesign, in an early project phase, for a school to be refurbished. Here, severe problems in indoor air quality have been found in the school.

Ventilation redesign is investigated in a case study of a school, in which four alternative ventilation strategies are generated and evaluated. The analysis is mainly based on the data gathered from project meetings, site visits and the documents provided by ventilation and condition assessment consultants.

Four potential strategies to redesign ventilation in the case school are provided for decision-making in refurbishment in the early project phase. Moreover, the research presents several features to be considered when planning the ventilation strategy of an existing school, including the risk of alterations in air pressure through structures; the target number of pupils in classrooms; implementing and operating costs; and the size of the space that ventilation equipment requires.

As this study focusses on the early project phase, it provides viewpoints to assist decision-making, but the final decision requires still more accurate calculations and simulations.

This study demonstrates the decision-making process of ventilation redesign of a school with indoor air problems and provides a set of features to be considered. Hence, it may be beneficial for building owners and municipal authorities who are engaged in planning a refurbishment of an existing building.