Search results

Firms’ strategic responses to environmental shifts under conditions of uncertainty in the wake of institutional changes are far from understood. We utilize data from over 1,200 firms in seven Central Eurasian transition economies to examine the extent to which institutional inefficiency is predictive of the response strategies employed by the firms in their environments. We also examine how firms maneuver in the environment through an innovative effort in developing new products, opening new plants or upgrading product lines and technologies. Our results seem indicative of both an adaptive and an innovative effort by firms in these countries. The results are discussed with respect to empirical limitations and future research avenues in these transition economies.

This paper aims to offer insights regarding antecedents and consequences of relationship conflict in supervisor‐subordinate dyads, regardless of the demographic characteristics of the dyads. The authors explain the causes and outcomes of relationship conflict utilizing an affective approach, and suggest that factors such as moods, values, and situational context play an important role in influencing relationship conflict and its outcomes – intention to quit and trust in supervisor.

The authors surveyed 200 employees of multiple companies in the greater Atlanta, Georgia area. They utilized hierarchical regression, (with the inclusion of two‐ and three‐way interaction terms) to test their hypotheses and interaction effects.

Negative mood and positive mood interacted to impact the level of relationship conflict experienced by subordinates. Subordinates' collectivism values strengthened the impact of the positive mood‐negative mood interaction on relationship conflict. Mentoring and supervisor‐subordinate dyad tenure moderated the relationship conflict to outcomes associations.

The study goes beyond traditional relational demography research in order to offer new insights and perspectives on the causes and outcomes of relationship conflict at different hierarchical levels from an affective approach, specifically, moods theory. Since relationship conflict is an inevitable process, an understanding of antecedents and consequences of the conflict can allow managers to be better equipped to create a healthy work environment.

This conceptual paper develops a theoretical framework to provide insights with respect to enhancing focus on entrepreneurial sustainability initiatives in the context of emerging economies. The unique idiosyncrasies of the institutional environment of emerging economies are identified along the concept of scripts.

Sense-making and social identity theory are utilized to draw propositions along with the dimensions of the three stages of the sense-making process: enactment, selection and retention, in order to identify factors that are likely to motivate the next generation of business leaders in emerging economies to undertake greater levels of sustainability initiatives.

When organizations face competing demands of meeting both social and financial goals, sense-making by next-generation leaders becomes relevant. Leaders with greater entrepreneurial orientation (EO) are more likely to take actions decoupled from local isomorphic pressures, such that they turn opportunities for sustainability into novel sustainable initiatives.

This paper proposes a framework to provide insights and directions for future research with respect to enhancing an organizational focus on sustainability initiatives in the context of emerging economies.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship between service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty among industrial customers of the public electricity utility organisation in Malawi using correlation and regression analyses.

A cross‐sectional survey was used with a sample of 92 respondents drawn from a population of 286 industrial customers of the public electricity utility in the Southern Region of Malawi. Data were collected using a pre‐tested questionnaire based on SERVQUAL and multi‐item scales to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The findings suggest that the service quality is poor irrespective of demographic characteristics of the industrial customers. Furthermore, the findings show that the public electricity utility industrial customers are dissatisfied with the service offered and are disloyal to the public electricity utility. However, the level of loyalty is moderated by level of consumption. Large consumers are less disloyal than small consumers. Finally, the findings suggest that there is a strong relationship between service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty among the public electricity utility's industrial customers and that the relationship between service quality and customer loyalty is partially mediated by customer satisfaction.

The study focused on functional quality offered by the public electricity utility to its industrial customers within Southern Region of Malawi limiting its generalisability. Additionally, it used the original SERVQUAL scale and some items may not be relevant to electricity utility organisation.

The paper has a significant diagnostic value in the sense that it identifies areas where the public electricity utility must direct its resources in order to satisfy its industrial customers.

The paper extends the examination of the relationship between service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty into public sectors of a predominantly associative culture in developing countries. Specifically, it extends the research into electricity utility organisations that operates in a monopolistic market.

This study aims to empirically validate the LibWebSQ measurement scale. In addition, it investigates the relationship between perceived web-based service quality and three other latent constructs, namely, user satisfaction, service value and user loyalty.

A quantitative survey design was used to collect the data. Structural equation modeling was used to determine the influence of web-based service quality on the three latent constructs. The respondents were students, academic staff and non-academic staff from two federal universities in the North-western zone of Nigeria.

The findings of the path analysis indicate that perceived web-based service quality and service value exhibit no statistically significant direct influence on user loyalty. However, user satisfaction has a direct positive influence on user loyalty, and it also mediates the relationship between web-based service quality and user loyalty to the library.

The LibWebSQ is a reliable and valid scale to be used in Nigerian university libraries for web-based service quality measurement. User loyalty in academic libraries can be modelled as a result of service quality and user satisfaction

This study provides a means of assessing web-based library service quality and further improving the policy and practice in university libraries.

This is the first attempt to assess web-based library service quality using the LibWebSQ measurement scale. A satisfactory model fit is obtained, which allows the measurement model to be integrated with service value, user satisfaction and user loyalty. The study contributes to the conceptualization of web-based library service quality.

The purpose of this paper is to explore succession planning in academic libraries, specifically to understand how succession planning is carried out and how the decisions-making styles of library managers influence each stage of the succession planning.

A qualitative approach was used to gather data through a document analysis and interviews with library managers at four Sri Lankan university libraries. Data analysis was done applying the framework analysis (FA) tool.

The study revealed that succession planning has been practiced in Sri Lankan university libraries to develop a bench strength, skilled backup for key positions at all levels, while inculcating leadership competencies in their respective positions. The dominant decision style is the identifiable decision-making style within the succession planning process.

The volume of the data obtained depends largely on the participants’ responses, and the interpretation of the data is subjected to minimum personal biasness of the researcher.

An understanding of how decision-making styles influence practices of succession planning contributes to assist library managers to carry out succession planning within the limitations of their autonomy to do so. The findings of this study benefit library managers in recognizing their own decision-making styles and the level of succession planning they have achieved.

Library managers’ decision-making style can have an influence on how succession planning is carried out successfully at an academic library to ensure continuity of the library’s mission and vision.

This is the first known study to investigate how decision-making style of the manager influences each level of the succession planning at an academic library. The use of a systematic FA method for the qualitative data analysis reveals trustworthy results.

The purpose of this study for eHealth text mining domains, cosine-based visual methods (VM) assess the clusters more accurately than Euclidean; which are recommended for tweet data models for clusters assessment. Such VM determines the clusters concerning a single viewpoint or none, which are less informative. Multi-viewpoints (MVP) were used for addressing the more informative clusters assessment of health-care tweet documents and to demonstrate visual analysis of cluster tendency.

In this paper, the authors proposed MVP-based VM by using traditional topic models with visual techniques to find cluster tendency, partitioning for cluster validity to propose health-care recommendations based on tweets. The authors demonstrated the effectiveness of proposed methods on different real-time Twitter health-care data sets in the experimental study. The authors also did a comparative analysis of proposed models with existing visual assessment tendency (VAT) and cVAT models by using cluster validity indices and computational complexities; the examples suggest that MVP VM were more informative.

In this paper, the authors proposed MVP-based VM by using traditional topic models with visual techniques to find cluster tendency, partitioning for cluster validity to propose health-care recommendations based on tweets.

In this paper, the authors proposed multi-viewpoints distance metric in topic model cluster tendency for the first time and visual representation using VAT images using hybrid topic models to find cluster tendency, partitioning for cluster validity to propose health-care recommendations based on tweets.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and predict the housing prices in Petaling district, Malaysia and its six sub-regions with a set of housing attributes using functional relationship model.

A new multiple unreplicated linear functional relationship model with both the response and explanatory variables are subject to errors is proposed. A total of 41,750 housing transacted records from November 2008 to February 2016 were used in this study. These data were divided into 70% training and 30% testing sets for each of the selected sub-regions. Individual housing price was regressed on nine housing attributes.

The results showed the proposed model has better fitting ability and prediction accuracy as compared to the hedonic model or multiple linear regression. The proposed model achieved at least 20% and 40% of predictions that have less than 5% and 10% deviations from the actual transacted housing prices, respectively. House buyers in these sub-regions showed similar preferences on most of the housing attributes, except for residents in Shah Alam who preferred to stay far away from shopping malls, and leasehold houses in Sri Kembangan are more valuable. From the h-nearest houses indicator, it is concluded that the housing market in Sungai Buloh is the most volatile in Petaling District.

As the data used are the actual housing transaction records in Petaling District, it represents only a segment of Malaysian urban population. The result will not be generalized to the entire Malaysian population.

This study is expected to provide insights to policymakers, property developers and investors to understand the volatility of the housing market and the influence of determinants in different sub-regions. The potential house buyers could also use the model to determine if a house is overpriced.

This study introduces measurement errors into the housing attributes to provide a more reliable analysis tool for the housing market. This study is the first housing research in Malaysia that used a large number of actual housing transaction records. Previous studies relied on small survey samples.

This study aims to identify and analyse the key determinants influencing customer satisfaction towards online shopping in India.

The literature concerning major attributes of website functionality, perceived usability, perceived usefulness and customer satisfaction in online retailing were reviewed. Data were collected from 365 respondents active in online shopping for examining the constructs. The model was empirically tested using structural equation modelling.

The findings of the study reveal that perceived usefulness and website functionality have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, whereas perceived usability had a significant but negative impact on customer satisfaction.

This research will help online retailers to attract and motivate new customers for online shopping and existing customers to extend it in their daily purchase. Online retailers can improve post purchase satisfaction and eventually increase online customers.

This is one of the preliminary study dealing with customer satisfaction towards online retailing in India. The scale has been extended to include items like satisfaction with cash on delivery mode of payment not included in previous scales. The scale of perceived usefulness has also been deepened by adding time performance, product performance and promotional performance.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze if and how country- and sector-related contingency factors affect the implementation of TQM practices and various performance measures within a TQM-performance relationships model framework.

The authors used data from 156 firms in Turkey and 132 firms in North Cyprus (NC) to test the model relationships by utilizing multiple group structural equation modeling (SEM).

The study finds support for both the universal and the contingency argument within the context of country and sector analyses. Although our findings suggest no differences across the two countries, the authors find evidence for differences across sectors in terms of their TQM practices and performance outcomes. In the case of NC firms, the direct effects of TQM on human resource results and customer results constituted the missing linkages in the performance excellence framework.

This study suffers from the same limitations common to all survey research. However, it contributes strongly to the limited TQM contingency research by providing new findings and insights. This study must be replicated in different countries and other types of contextual factors must be used to determine if and how they moderate the model relationships. Other theories are also needed to better explain some of the relationships.

There needs to be a more holistic approach to quality management and increased institutional support for quality initiatives in developing countries. Through proper alignment and integration of their different components, organizations can realize maximum improvement in their business results. Understanding the sector level contingencies before implementing a performance excellence model is also recommended.

The study has several social, economic and policy implications, including the need to improve employees’ work environment to improve their lives and prevent brain drain; to pass legislation to improve lax consumer laws; to found quality institutes to promote the education, training, qualification and professional development of employees working in the various sectors of the economy; and for government and employers to realize the importance of valuing stakeholders and delivering value and results to them to ensure long-term success.

This is one of the few studies in TQM contingency research that tests various relationships among TQM and business results by using country and sector as contingency factors.