Search results

Wheat is the staple food in many parts of the world and bread is one of the most important products of wheat flour. There is a need for innovations in bread making to increase its shelf life and consumer's attraction. Fermentation is mostly done by yeast but it does not produce appreciable amounts of organic acids, which are required to enhance the shelf life of bread. The present study aims to determine the effect of bacterial and yeast culture blends on the quality and shelf life of sourdough bread and to observe the sugar utilization during fermentation.

Three treatments were made using different blends of bacterial cultures (homo‐fermentative and hetero‐fermentative) and baker's yeast compared with a control having only baker's yeast. Chemical analysis, sugar utilization (Sucrose, glucose and fructose) through high performance liquid chromatography, sensory characteristics (both internal and external) and microbial count (Bacterial and fungal count) for each treatment were conducted at different storage intervals.

The hetero‐fermentative bacteria i.e. Lactobacillus plantarum along with baker's yeast exhibited the best results regarding the utilization of sugars during fermentation (after 3 h of fermentation 0.0158 mg/ml sugar remained), objective evaluation of bread and its sensory characteristics. The bread prepared using the blend of hetero‐fermentative bacteria (0.5 per cent) and yeast (0.5 per cent) also showed greater resistance against bacteria (9×10¹ cfu/g after 60 h of storage) and mold (1.1 ×  10² cfu/g after 60 h of storage) growth.

Hetero‐fermentative bacteria along with baker's yeast can be utilized in sour dough to improve major bread characteristics. This study is a step further in improving the shelf life of sourdough.

Presently only baker's yeast is being used by bread industry for fermentation purpose but a blend of bacterial culture along with baker's yeast can give better performance for better quality and shelf life of the bread.

The board structure (BS) is pivotal in modern corporate governance (CG). This study aims to investigate BS variables (BSIZE, BIND and chief executive officer [CEO] duality) and their correlation with risk-taking behavior indicators, enriching the understanding of how CG shapes financial institutions’ (FIs) decision-making in Pakistan.

By scrutinizing data from 67 financial entities listed on the Stock Exchange of Pakistan spanning from 2011 to 2022 through panel data regression techniques, the research emphasizes that BS holds a substantial influence over the risk tendencies exhibited by these firms.

Key findings suggest that board size has a positive influence, aligned with previous CG research. Smaller boards perform better and avoid excessive risk-taking, contrasting some negative relationship claims. More independent directors are recommended to curtail risk and financial disruption. Holding both CEO and chair roles reduces risk exposure, resonating with reputational and employment risk theory. It is essential to recognize that BS’s impact on risk-taking is nuanced and context-dependent.

Policymakers, scholars, practitioners and investors working in the market for financial companies might greatly benefit from the empirical findings of this study. Imposing mandates on FIs to uphold adequate capital reserves functions as a safeguard against unforeseen losses, thereby diminishing the probability of unwarranted risk-taking.

Prior studies in this domain predominantly focus on nonfinancial sectors. In addition, existing research often explores the relationship between BS and firm risk-taking solely within the banking sector, overlooking other FIs. This study contributes by using a comprehensive data set encompassing all types of FIs, thus extending the existing literature.

The shifting and growing tendencies of total quality management (TQM) research are spotlighted in an era of digitization and Industry 5.0. Whether TQM is a fad or a sustainable approach is a topic of continuous discussion among researchers. Thus, the purpose of this study is to comprehensively analyze the body of literature on TQM in the manufacturing industry and advocate areas for further research.

A “systematic literature network analysis” (SLNA) approach is used to accomplish the research goals. It combines bibliometric analyses and a thorough literature review. A corpus of 204 studies from 1987–2022 is finalized from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. To further enrich the findings, the “TCCM (theory, context, characteristics, and methodology)” framework is applied. The Biblioshiny through R-Studio is used to perform the bibliometric analysis.

The bibliometric results show that TQM is not a fading phenomenon in the manufacturing industry. The findings indicate that TQM studies gained considerable attention in developed economies and need more focus in emerging and developing economies.

The review uses evolving theoretical frameworks with a variety of characteristics and advanced analytical techniques, taking into account prior research findings and outlining the agenda for future study in the context of understudies.

This paper argues that teachers’ promotion should also have an impact on turnover intention. The purpose of this paper is to determine the relationship between promotion and turnover intention of advance learning institutions of the Khyber Pakhtoon Khwa Province of Pakistan and the moderating effect of the analytical cognitive style.

A quantitative approach is used predominantly. A questionnaire survey research design is used to collect the data from the entire province and 502 completed questionnaires were collected from the respondents. The questionnaire included the Job Descriptive Index consisting of seven items on job satisfaction, the turnover intention questionnaire consisting of three items and a five-point Likert scale used to determine cognitive style index (CSI); the CSI was used. The fourth section included an open-ended questionnaire and the fifth section included demographic variables. Hierarchical multiple regressions were used to check how much variance promotion occurs upon turnover intention and it also determined how much variance analysis cognitive style occurs upon promotion and turnover intention of advance learning institutions of the KPK province of Pakistan. The correlation results from a bivariate Pearson correlation showed significant results, which were later strengthened by the regression results.

The findings suggested that a negative relationship was found between promotion and turnover intention, whereas a weak correlation was found between promotion and analytical. Moderating results show that analytical cognitive style does act as a moderator between the promotion and turnover intention.

This research was only carried out on advance learning institutions; thus, the findings can only be generalized to higher education institutions in the Khyber Pakhtoon Khwa state.

This extended model of job satisfaction will be useful to lead to changes in job satisfaction and turnover intention of academicians of the Khyber Pakhtoon Khwa province of Pakistan. The findings of this study could be used to guide the management of advance learning institutions and professional academicians to build targeted learning activities around key components of the academician’s promotion, determine where individuals are in their journey, set personalized goals and provide feedback to the management in the process of the development of policies for academicians of advance learning institutions.

The findings of this study will help the higher education commission of Pakistan to make policies that will enable higher education institutions to formulate flexible promotion policies for teachers in order to retain them.

The findings of this study are a valuable extension of the relevant research as this is the first empirical study to examine the effects of cognitive style on promotion policies and turnover intention in advance learning institutions of Pakistan. In the context of an efficient and effective educational policy, a greater understanding of an academician’s promotion could facilitate the development of a more effective policy practice that would increase not only the job satisfaction of the academicians but decrease the turnover intention of the academicians.

The authors investigate the antecedents of psychological ownership from the customers' perspective by applying employee psychological ownership (EPO) to human resource management.

The authors conducted questionnaires on utilitarian benefits, hedonic benefits, perceived risk, customer satisfaction, customer trust and customers' psychological ownership (CPO) on 205 people. They verified their hypotheses using structural equation modeling analysis.

The authors found that customer trust positively influences CPO, but customer satisfaction does not. Instead, customer satisfaction indirectly affects CPO through the mediating effects of customer trust. They also found that utilitarian and hedonic benefits positively influence customer satisfaction and confidence, but perceived risk negatively influences it.

This study contributes to the service marketing literature by empirically confirming that customers have psychological ownership, such as employees, and by incorporating benefits, risk, trust and CPO into a comprehensive framework.

Marketers should formulate service strategies that strengthen customers' perceptions of utilitarian and hedonic benefits and avoid customers' perceived risk, which is expected to exert a significant CPO-enhancing effect.

In the service context, customers are perceived as partial employees. The authors empirically explored the role of perceived benefits and risks in enhancing CPO via customer satisfaction and trust by applying EPO concepts. Strengthening perceived benefits and avoiding perceived risk were verified as critical drivers of CPO in the service context. The results of this study confirm that customer trust is required for customers to feel CPO.

The purpose of this research is to explore the deployment of the total quality management (TQM) paradigm in the TQM Journal in relation to the context of the 21st century. The study builds on the theoretical framework of the four quality paradigms that together compose TQM. The four paradigms differ in their effectiveness based on the context in which they are used. In a complex context, one would expect the reflective and the emergence paradigm to flourish. The TQM Journal is one of the leading scientific journals on TQM. If the assumption that the reflective and emergent paradigm would flourish in a complex environment is correct, one will see that represented in the past five years of scientific research in that magazine.

The TQM Journal articles of the past five years from January 2016 till January 2021 have been chosen as the scope of an exploratory review. The author assessed the title and abstract of all articles based on the characteristics of the four quality paradigms, as described in the theoretical framework. If the title and abstract did not provide enough data to take the decision for the assessment, the whole article has been taken into account. The results have been collated, summarized and reported. Based on the results, the author explores the possible patterns.

In total, 283 articles from 2016 to 2021 (from Volume 28, Issue 1 to Volume 33, Issue 1) were included in this study. In total, 45 were read fully to be able to characterize the article. Most of the studies relate the tertiary (33.3%) and secondary (27.9%) sectors. Healthcare was the sector in 32 of the cases (11.3%). Most studies have been conducted in Europe (n = 82, 28.9%) and Asia (n = 58, 20.5%). Within Europe, Italy was the most prolific country with, respectively, 25 (30.8%) of the articles. The USA and Canada only had five articles in these five years (1.8%). Many articles did not specify the region. More than half of the articles (52.4%) worked with surveys, questionnaires or other methods to involve the customer in the research; 16 articles (5.6%) used experts in the field through expert panels and such to collect data from. In total, 107 articles (37.8%) did involve no other stakeholders than the researchers themselves. Eight studies (2.8%) used action research or co-design methodology to create optimal stakeholder participation. Based on the data, four patterns can be discovered: the context sensitivity of the articles, reflexivity, coping with uncertainty and co-creation.

It is acknowledged that the articles in the study were published in just one scientific journal. One can expect that this will be represented in other journals on TQM. Still, it would be interesting to conduct a follow-up study in other journals on TQM and compare the results. The research is done by one subjective researcher.

Research on TQM should take the complexity of the context into account. For that purpose, researchers should focus more on the emergence paradigm within TQM.

This study is the first to investigate TQM as a holistic paradigm, including the empirical, reflective, reference and emergence paradigm in TQM research.

Foreign and local banks in Malaysia are competing in terms of skilled staff, innovative products and services, rendering quality services and customer satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to examine the overall service quality and customer satisfaction of both foreign and local banks.

The data used to test the hypothesis were collected from 748 foreign and local bank customers in Malaysia. The research model was analysed using a structural equation modelling technique.

Results show that knowledge and staff competencies, as well as convenience of the bank is more significant for local bank customers while bank image and internet banking are important components for foreign bank customers. The results also reveal that foreign bank customers have higher satisfaction as compared to local bank customers.

No analysis is undertaken of any difference in the service quality dimensions between banks of different size. Further research on banking services could usefully test services quality dimensions across banks of different sizes.

The findings serve as a valuable reference for local banks understand service quality challenges they may face from foreign banks in this competitive industry. Findings suggest that, to provide high-quality services, financial institutions need to heighten customer satisfaction differentiation strategies.

The outcomes of this study enhance the knowledge on the performance of both local and foreign banks in Malaysia as well as customer satisfaction, which are invaluable to all bank managers and industry players in improving their services.

This study aims to empirically explore e-banking service quality and its impact on the e-banking loyalty through a mediating impact of e-banking satisfaction. The account holders of three domestic systemically important banks of Pakistan were surveyed during COVID-19 to examine the electronic services provided by these banks.

The data was collected through an adapted questionnaire by using emails and messaging applications. The database of a local marketing company in Pakistan was used, and 976 responses were included in the analysis. The structured equation modeling was used to test the propositions of study.

The findings delineate that reliability and website design proved to increase e-banking loyalty, particularly during COVID-19. The link between e-banking privacy and security and e-banking loyalty was proved as fully mediated by e-banking satisfaction; however, indirect effect of the reliability and website design with e-banking loyalty was partially mediated.

In strategic planning of e-banking mechanisms and the associated consumer behavior, the results of this study can be helpful for policymakers. In case of similar epidemics and natural calamities, consumers may depict similar behavior as shown during the lockdown and social distancing during COVID-19; hence, the study can help regulatory bodies in preparing their safety roadmap.

The mediating effect of e-banking satisfaction between privacy & Security and e-banking loyalty implies that customer give importance to secure e-banking platforms. There can be a variation in their loyalty because of privacy concerns. The application of cognitive–motivational–relational (CMR) theory in a relationship between e-banking service quality and e-banking loyalty with a mediating role of satisfaction is an emotional response to capture the behavioral changes during COVID-19. It enables researchers to understand the CMR theory concerning COVID-19 and e-banking perspective.