Search results

The Yao Yao Social Group was set up three years ago to tackle the social isolation of people from London's Chinese community who have mental health problems. The group provides a safe environment where people can feel comfortable and speak their mother tongue, and participate in a wide range of activities and outings. Jason Chan, Wilson Wong, Man Lee and Dien Luu describe the group and what it means to them.

In this study, the impact of owner-operator and non-owner operator rice mills on productive efficiency is investigated.

Primary data collected from a survey of 111 rice mills in the Mwea region of Kenya are used. A metafrontier approach is employed to measure overall technical efficiency which is decomposed into managerial and organisational efficiency.

The results reveal no significant difference in overall technical and managerial efficiency between owner and non-owner operated mills. However, a significant difference exists in organisational efficiency of mills: non-owner operated mills were found to be performing significantly better than owner-operated.

The authors provide supporting evidence to the study and discuss some of the significant policy implications stemming from the study.

It is recognised that for owners to take the risk of divesting control to a hired manager rather than manage the firm themselves can have major strategic, financial and often emotional consequences. However, there is little empirical evidence on how production efficiency will develop as a result of hiring a manager with the underlying economic theory providing ambiguous guidance. Standard economic theory assumes that firms behave as profit maximisers, which can be achieved by operating efficiently. However, this may not always be the case and as the literature indicates, this may especially be so for small businesses in low- and middle-income countries.

The purpose of this study is to develop and validate scales measuring two consumer moral preferences: Homo moralis and Homo economicus.

This research includes four sequential studies. Before the first study, items were established through a comprehensive literature review and pre-test. Four studies were then conducted to verify the validity and reliability of the scales following the scale validation methodology suggested by Churchill (1979) and Anand and Kaur (2018). Study 1 employed exploratory factor analysis to extract the underlying factor structure of the scale. This led to a two-factor structure with sufficient evidence of internal reliability. Study 2 and Study 3 were conducted to confirm the reliability and the validity of the scale using confirmatory factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha. The final study established the predictive validity of the scale using a structural equation model.

Finally, seven items were developed measuring consumers' moral preferences for Homo moralis and Homo economicus.

This research has some limitations that should be addressed in future research. First, the scale was only tested in a Korean context. Second, this study was not conducted in the context of a specific industry.

This study extends the range of research to an empirical field by practically verifying how these two preferences are independent, can be generalized and can influence human behavior. This study empirically demonstrates that the preferences affect human behavior such as purchase intention. This study extends the current knowledge on Homo moralis and Homo economicus by providing a scale for empirical validation of the concepts.

Resident satisfaction is a catalyst for continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) to enhance their competitiveness in the expanding senior living market. CCRC attributes play an imperative role in resident satisfaction when older adults reside in these communities. The purpose of this study was to identify the attributes that affect CCRC resident satisfaction and quantify their relative levels of importance. In addition, the impact of resident satisfaction on word of mouth (WOM) and satisfaction with life was examined.

The proposed hypotheses were tested by performing structural equation modeling on the data collected from 332 CCRC residents throughout the USA.

The study results revealed that all 10 of the CCRC attributes identified in this study significantly influenced resident satisfaction. Sociopsychological factors had the strongest influence on resident satisfaction, followed by cost and value, medical services, availability of activities, food and beverage services, design, rooms, management and staff, location, and spiritual environment. The study results further indicated that resident satisfaction had a positive impact on WOM and satisfaction with life.

This study provides significant practical implications for CCRC owners and operators to help them better identify the types of CCRC attributes and their relative levels of importance for resident satisfaction.

This study is one of the first comprehensive studies to identify CCRC attributes associated with resident satisfaction and examine the impact of resident satisfaction on satisfaction with life within the senior living field.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of consumers’ moral preferences between moral and economic benefits and consumers’ moral and rational behaviour intentions based on moral decision-making models of previous studies.

Respondents were asked to answer a questionnaire measuring moral and economic benefits, consumers’ moral preferences and moral and rational behaviour intention after reading a stimulus describing imaginary fashion brand A’s unethical activities.

Moral and economic benefits directly and significantly affect moral and rational behaviour intention. Homo economicus evoked by an economic benefit had a negative effect on moral behaviour intention.

This study focused only on a moral benefit and an economic benefit as factors evoking consumers’ moral preferences. This study was also conducted only in a Korean context and considered a specific industry. In future research, the results of this study should be extended to design the “possibility of punishment” to encourage moral behaviour by discouraging the effect of homo economicus. The results have implications for companies such as social enterprises and charities that want to promote consumers’ moral behaviour.

This study provides evidence on why ethical consumers do not always make ethical decisions by confirming that homo economicus has a significant influence on not only rational behaviour intention but also moral behaviour intention.

The purpose of this paper is to provide new insights into the reactions and lessons learned with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of how logistics service providers (LSPs) managed to maintain supply chains resilience and what focus areas have been changed to keep operations functional and uphold financial stability.

Based on data-gathering techniques in interpretive research this study collected primary data via semi-structured interviews, interviewing informants from selected LSPs that operate on a global scale.

The results show that LSPs have built their reactions and actions to the COVID-19 outbreak around five main themes: “create revenue streams,” “enhance operational transport flexibility,” “enforce digitalization and data management,” “optimize logistics infrastructure” and “optimize personnel capacity.” These pillars build the foundation to LSP resilience that enables supply chains to stay resilient during an external shock of high impact and low probability.

The results of this study provide insights into how LSPs have managed the downsides and found innovative ways to overcome operational and financial challenges during the COVID-19 outbreak. As one of the first studies that specially focuses on the role of LSPs during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study categorizes the LSPs’ reactions and provides a “lessons learned” framework from a managerial perspective. From a theoretical perspective, this paper discusses the strategic role of LSPs in supply chain management and thereby extends current supply chain literature with a focus on LSP resilience.

This study reinvestigates the short-run and long-run inflation-hedging attributes of residential property assets in the Nigerian property market, based on variations in property types and location.

Data used for this study comprised the holding period returns of three residential property types, namely bungalow, block of flats and detached house during 1999–2018. These were obtained from property practitioners in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, respectively. The inflation values obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics were split into actual, expected and unexpected components. Fama and Schwert’s (1977) ordered least square (OLS) regression was used to assess the short-term inflation hedging efficacy. Afterwards, the long-run link between residential property and inflation was examined using the Johansen and Juselius cointegration test.

The results showed that despite the variations in hedging behaviour across property types in the three locations, residential property assets significantly provided protection over actual, expected and unexpected inflation in the short run based on the OLS regression analysis. The result of the Johansen and Juselius cointegration test also established a long-term link between the residential property assets and actual inflation. However, mixed results were found on the link between residential property and expected and unexpected inflation, as some of the assets did not effectively hedge these inflation components in the long run.

The study implied that the differences in property types and geographic locations are crucial in establishing the short-run and long-run inflation-hedging attributes of residential property assets and should be factored into consideration.

The paper complements the existing body of knowledge on the inflation-hedging attributes of residential property in emerging markets by determining the effects of variation in house types and geographic differences on the analysis.

Although research on job insecurity (JI) and its relationship with employee performance has increased in recent years, results are mixed and inconclusive. The objectives of this paper are to explore 1) the conceptualizations of JI, 2) the relationship between JI and different performance dimensions, 3) the theoretical perspectives used to explain the JI–performance relationship and 4) the mechanisms and contextual boundaries that affect the JI–performance relationship.

Following the PRISMA guidelines, the authors systematically searched for peer-reviewed empirical studies published before July 2021 in Web of Science and Scopus. The authors analyzed 81 empirical studies published on the conceptualization of job insecurity, its relationship with employee performance, and what mechanisms and contingency factors are studied. The authors used thematic analysis to analyze the articles.

Results of this review show that the quantitative cognitive dimension is dominant in extant JI literature. Furthermore, in-role performance and OCB were most often investigated in relation to the four dimensions of job insecurity, drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives to explain this relationship. Moreover, a variety of mechanisms and contextual factors on individual, individual work-related, individual-level attitudes and job-level characteristics have found to play a role in this relationship.

This study has a number of limitations. The first pertains to the exclusion of articles in languages other than English and non-peer reviewed papers. It is possible that the search strategy used may not have identified other studies that may have met the established criteria in order to be included in our research. However, this method was chosen to guarantee the quality of the included articles in this study and in line with previous meta-analyses and literature reviews (De Witte et al., 2016; Sverke et al., 2019). Second, one selection criteria focused on how performance was assessed in the studies incorporated in this literature review. The authors excluded studies that addressed performance from the perspective of the organization (i.e. studies that measured performance at the organizational level). The authors herewith might have excluded studies that focused on one or multiple job insecurity constructs, but the authors herewith included studies that were comparable in terms of performance indicator outcomes. Future studies could expand the search by investigating, as a next step, the impact on organizational performance. Finally, since the focus of this literature review was on the relationship between job insecurity and performance indicators, including the mechanisms and boundary conditions that affect this relationship, the authors did not include focus on how job insecurity can be influenced (Shoss, 2017), and herewith lack information on the predictors side of job insecurity. However, by narrowing the authors focus to mediators and moderators, the authors were able to come up with an extensive list of factors that impact the job insecurity–performance relationship and herewith provide fruitful areas for future research. Future studies could expand these findings by providing an overview of predictors of different job insecurity constructs, to see whether there are potential different predictors of job insecurity conceptualizations (Jiang and Lavaysse, 2018).

The study review contributes to the systematization of the current empirical evidence on this area of research. This is especially important and enables room to take an additional step toward understanding the consequences of job insecurity on performance. Specifically, it is important for organizations and policymakers to be aware of the different conceptualizations of job insecurity that exist and how they impact employee performance. In addition, an overview of potential mechanisms and boundary conditions that affect this relationship provides insights as to how organizations can intervene to affect reactions to job insecurity.

The study findings are relevant and may be of interest to decision makers in organizations and national authorities that must have information on quality concerning the effects of job insecurity on performance.

Based on these findings the authors show the impact of the different conceptualizations of job insecurity and how they affect job performance. In addition, the authors provide recommendations for future studies how to better handle the integration of different conceptualizations and measures of job insecurity and its different approaches.

This study explores how effectively the Indian government utilized social media to communicate emergency information and promote citizen engagement and awareness during the first wave of COVID-19 crisis.

This research investigates the tweets scraped from the official Twitter handle “CovidnewsbyMIB” of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Government of India; the authors unearthed patterns in the communications between the government and its citizens by adopting various social media analysis techniques. Further, the authors also tried to examine the influence of media richness and dialogic loop on citizen engagement through government social media (CEGSM) using multivariate analysis method.

The results highlighted clusters of words/terms present in the tweets related to COVID-19 combating strategies, guidelines, and updates. The authors also found that media richness has a significant positive relationship with CEGSM, but dialogic loop has an insignificant relationship with CEGSM.

This study provides suggestions to government agencies about ways to improve CEGSM by enhancing media richness and dialogic loop elements such as surveys, polls, and responses in the crisis communication.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2021-0307.

The purpose of this study is to examine the use of formality indicators in chat reference interchanges within the context of politeness theory, with its corollaries of face‐threat and social relationship development.

This discourse analysis identifies the syntactic and content indicators and patterns of formality levels in a purposive sample of 402 chat transcripts (covering 6,572 minutes) from one academic year at a large, US, public university.

Syntactic formality markers include regular use of contractions, slang, sentence fragments, and non‐standard punctuation as well as limited use of acronyms and abbreviations with rare use of emoticons. Content‐based markers included apologies, self‐disclosure, and expressions of extreme need. Use patterns are related to the level of responsibility assumed by the librarian as well as the interview stages.

A limited data source and potential coder bias are the two limitations of this study. The research implications point to the need for chat reference librarians to assume greater control of formality nuances in order to encourage a more effective search for the user.

The fundamentals of politeness theory, particularly in terms of formality indicators, should be incorporated into staff training and behavioral standards for reference librarians. While future research is needed to determine the most effective means of employing this theoretical construct, this study implies that a self‐reflective, culturally sensitive use of the nuances of formality can enhance the user's experience.

This study is the first to systematically examine formality indicators in the context of politeness theory. The use of two coders, a full academic year's worth of data, and a substantial sample provide great depth.