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There is compelling evidence that demonstrates that organisations are failing to reap the full benefits of lean initiatives. While much work has been conducted on what factors are critical to the success of lean initiatives, there is a dearth of empirical evidence relating to whether team leaders implement critical success factors (CSFs) in practice. Therefore, this study aims to explore the extent to which functional team leaders implement lean practices focussing on the role of leadership, empowerment and culture.

The research analysed team leaders in a single-site manufacturing organisation. A state-of-the-art analysis was conducted to isolate relevant themes and an instrument was developed to capture data. Empirical data was collected and analysed from 34 team leaders in engineering, quality and manufacturing.

The study found that while many good managerial practices to support lean is implemented, there remain significant challenges relating to cultural issues which must be addressed. The findings illuminate a latent gap in commitment and communication from senior management, as well as an underlying discrepancy in time and resource allocation.

The study’s findings provide new knowledge concerning the extent to which CSFs are implemented by functional team leaders in a real-world environment. The enquiry makes a valuable departure from previous research that focusses on leadership at a senior and middle manager level. It bridges the gap between academia and practice and provides tangible and concise results to management on how CSFs relating to leadership, empowerment and culture impact team leaders to drive lean methodologies.

The purpose of this study is to unearth the factors that influence tourists’ revisit intention. The proposed model of the study is grounded on using the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and extending it with additional variables, i.e. satisfaction, destination image, perceived risk, service quality and perceived value.

This study adopted a cross-sectional approach to collect data. The data were collected by conducting a field survey questionnaire on 330 respondents and were analysed using partial least squares version 3.2.9.

The results show that perceived behavioural control, perceived value, destination image and satisfaction significantly affect visitors’ revisit intention. The influence of perceived value, perceived service quality and destination image on satisfaction is also confirmed. On the other hand, satisfaction is found to be a significant mediator between perceived service quality, destination image and perceived value.

The extended TPB model that includes perceived service quality, perceived value, perceived risk and satisfaction provided a model with a theoretical basis to explain tourist revisit intentions to a tourist destination.

El objetivo principal del estudio es descubrir los factores que influyen en la intención de revisita de los turistas. El modelo propuesto para el estudio se basa en el uso de la teoría del comportamiento planificado y se amplía con variables como la satisfacción, la imagen del destino, el riesgo percibido, la calidad del servicio y el valor percibido.

Este estudio adoptó un enfoque transversal para la recogida de datos. Los datos se recopilaron mediante un cuestionario de campo en el que participaron 330 encuestados. Los datos se analizaron utilizando la versión 3.2.9 de PLS.

Los resultados muestran que el control conductual percibido, el valor percibido, la imagen del destino y la satisfacción afectan significativamente a la intención de revisita. También se confirma la influencia del valor percibido, la calidad de servicio percibida y la imagen del destino sobre la satisfacción. Por otra parte, la satisfacción resulta ser un mediador significativo entre la calidad de servicio percibida, la imagen del destino y el valor percibido.

El modelo TPB ampliado que incluye la calidad de servicio percibida, el valor percibido, el riesgo percibido y la satisfacción proporcionó un modelo con una base teórica para explicar las intenciones de revisita de los turistas a un destino turístico.

本研究的目的是揭示影响游客重访意向的因素。本研究提出的模型以计划行为理论（TPB）为基础, 并以额外的变量（即满意度、目的地形象、感知风险、服务质量和感知价值）进行扩展。

本研究采用了横断面的方法来收集数据。通过对330名受访者进行实地调查问卷来收集数据, 并使用偏最小二乘法3.2.9版进行分析。

结果显示, 感知行为控制、感知价值、目的地形象和满意度对游客的再访意向有显著影响。感知价值、感知服务质量和目的地形象对满意度的影响也被证实。另一方面, 满意度被发现是感知服务质量、目的地形象和感知价值之间的一个重要中介因素。

包括感知服务质量、感知价值、感知风险和满意度在内的扩展TPB模型为解释游客对旅游目的地的再访意向提供了理论基础。

关键词: 满意度; 旅游; 计划行为理论; PLS-SEM; 目的地形象

This study aims to examine the effects of prior small-scale changes to wealth on subsequent risky choices.

The paper opted for a laboratory experiment in which subjects perform two sequences of risky tasks. In between these two sets, the author transfers money for real for a randomly selected half of the subjects. Data on choices before and after the transfer of money are used to estimate risk attitudes and analyze whether the transfer of money affected attitudes to risk.

The author finds that the money gain does not change subjects' risk preferences – neither in a within- nor in a between-subject design. This suggests that individuals' risky choices are consistent with their constant absolute (CARA) risk aversion preferences, a result that supports a key assumption in recent literature on the calibration critique of decision theories and the view that individuals engage in narrow framing.

Because of the relatively small transfer of money, the research results may lack generalizability.

The paper includes implications for the reference-dependent and other theories that explain how prior outcomes affect risk-taking behavior in sequential problems.

The results are relevant to the research community studying risk-taking behavior as the results shed new light on a well-known result put forward by a seminal paper by Thaler.

This paper fills in an identified gap in the literature which is the need to test the house-money effect in a more realistic setting (over repeated risk-elicitation tasks, with money given outside the lotteries and in a within-subject design).

Recently, there has been a shift toward the embodied energy assessment of buildings. However, the impact of material service life on the life-cycle embodied energy has received little attention. We aimed to address this knowledge gap, particularly in the context of the UAE and investigated the embodied energy associated with the use of concrete and other materials commonly used in residential buildings in the hot desert climate of the UAE.

Using input–output based hybrid analysis, we quantified the life-cycle embodied energy of a villa in the UAE with over 50 years of building life using the average, minimum, and maximum material service life values. Mathematical calculations were performed using MS Excel, and a detailed bill of quantities with >170 building materials and components of the villa were used for investigation.

For the base case, the initial embodied energy was 57% (7390.5 GJ), whereas the recurrent embodied energy was 43% (5,690 GJ) of the life-cycle embodied energy based on average material service life values. The proportion of the recurrent embodied energy with minimum material service life values was increased to 68% of the life-cycle embodied energy, while it dropped to 15% with maximum material service life values.

The findings provide new data to guide building construction in the UAE and show that recurrent embodied energy contributes significantly to life-cycle energy demand. Further, the study of material service life variations provides deeper insights into future building material specifications and management considerations for building maintenance.

With the continuous increase of users, resources and tags, social tagging systems gradually present the characteristics of “big data” such as large number, fast growth, complexity and unreliable quality, which greatly increases the complexity of recommendation. The contradiction between the efficiency and effectiveness of recommendation service in social tagging is increasingly becoming prominent. The purpose of this study is to incorporate topic optimization into collaborative filtering to enhance both the effectiveness and the efficiency of personalized recommendations for social tagging.

Combining the idea of optimization before service, this paper presents an approach that incorporates topic optimization into collaborative recommendations for social tagging. In the proposed approach, the recommendation process is divided into two phases of offline topic optimization and online recommendation service to achieve high-quality and efficient personalized recommendation services. In the offline phase, the tags' topic model is constructed and then used to optimize the latent preference of users and the latent affiliation of resources on topics.

Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed approach improves both precision and recall of recommendations, as well as enhances the efficiency of online recommendations compared with the three baseline approaches. The proposed topic optimization–incorporated collaborative recommendation approach can achieve the improvement of both effectiveness and efficiency for the recommendation in social tagging.

With the support of the proposed approach, personalized recommendation in social tagging with high quality and efficiency can be achieved.