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The success rate of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) in the service industries is dismally poor, and most organisations discontinue LSS initiatives prematurely. This paper aims to identify the LSS barriers (LSSBs) and analyse their interaction via a hierarchical model developed by using interpretive structural modelling (ISM) and Fuzzy Matriced Impacts Croise’s Multiplication Appliqué à un Classement (MICMAC). These allow the LSS execution and implementation to be much more effective and avoid the high cost of implementation.

A structural review of the literature and interviews with experts and professionals from the service industries in the UAE supplied data wherewith to identify LSSBs. Sixteen LSSBs were determined and analysed using ISM and the MICMAC approach to discover the strong drivers and highly dependent barriers. The Fuzzy set was included in the MICMAC analysis to obtain a more precise output and create an effective hierarchical model of the barriers.

The research findings suggest that the top barriers to LSS implementation in service industries are lack of top management commitment, lack of customer focus, resistance to change management and lack of alignment between the LSS and organisational strategy. A deeper analysis using the Fuzzy-MICMAC approach categorises these barriers on the basis of their driving power and dependency.

The relationships between paired LSSBs were obtained through an experts’ interpretations of limited numbers in one country. Conducting a large-scale survey with a more comprehensive demographic or deep focus in one service industry might deepen our understanding of the interactions of LSSBs and models.

The developed ISM that model suggests that the dependencies and relationships among the barriers must be accurately determined so as to remove the collaborative effect of barriers on the implementation process is at the earliest opportunity. This would improve service companies’ competitive advantage and profitability, drive out waste and reduce the cost associated with poor quality. Similarly, academicians may advocate ways in various issues can contribute to improve LSSBs for amended LSS implementation now that business services are booming in the fourth industrial revolution.

The structural model was developed holistically on the basis of the inputs from practitioners and academicians to ensure its practical validity. Though the model has theoretical foundations, its practical applicability is a key factor in its development, so this approach was helpful for practitioner wanted to focus on removing the key dominant barriers and be able to deploy LSS concepts smoothly in service industries. The results support the proposition that top management is a crucial factor for LSS project implementation, whatever the complexity of the research methodology and the nature of the service industries.

The purpose of this research is to examine the validity of the agriculture-induced environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis with evidence from an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach with a structural break including real income and energy consumption in the model for Ghana over the period 1980–2014.

The ARDL approach with a structural break was used to analyze the agriculture-induced EKC model which has not been studied in Ghana. The dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), canonical cointegration regression (CCR) and fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) econometric methods were further used to validate the robustness of the estimates, and the direction of the relationship between the study variables was also clarified using the Toda–Yamamoto Granger causality test.

The ARDL results revealed that GDP, energy consumption and agricultural value added have significant positive effects on CO₂ emissions, while GDP² reduces CO₂ emissions. The Toda-Yamamoto causality test results show a bidirectional causality running from GDP and energy consumption to CO₂ emissions whereas a unidirectional long-term causality runs from GDP² and agriculture value-added to CO₂ emissions.

This finding validated the presence of the agriculture-induced EKC hypothesis in Ghana in both the short run and long run, and the important role of agriculture and energy consumption in economic growth was confirmed by the respective bidirectional and unidirectional causal relationships between the two variables and GDP. Thus, a reduction in unsustainable agricultural practices is recommended through specific policies to strengthen institutional quality in Ghana for a paradigm shift from rudimentary technology to modern sustainable agrarian technologies.

This study is novel in the EKC literature in Ghana, as no study has yet been done on agriculture-induced EKC in Ghana, and the other EKC studies also failed to account for structural breaks which have been done by this study. This study further includes a causality analysis to examine the direction of the relationship which the few EKC studies in Ghana failed to address. Finally, dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), canonical cointegration regression (CCR) and fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) methods are used for robustness check, unlike other studies with single methodologies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the relationship between consumer personality traits and consumer engagement (CE) in the online brand community (OBC) context. This study also examines the effect of CE on consumers’ ensuing purchase intention.

Using a survey incorporating the Big Five model of personality, 390 responses were collected from students who were members of at least one Facebook-based OBC. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

The results reveal that extraversion represents the strongest driver of CE in OBCs, followed by openness to experience, neuroticism and agreeableness. Conscientiousness was found to be negatively related to CE. The findings also indicate a positive association between CE and purchase intention.

This paper highlights the ways in which marketers can capitalize on consumer personality traits and develop corresponding strategies that will not only increase CE in OBCs, but also consumers’ ensuing purchase intent for specific offerings.

This research is among the first to demonstrate and empirically validate insight into the ways in which consumer personality traits drive CE in OBCs. This study, thus, adds to the rapidly developing research stream on CE by exposing and empirically validating an integrated set of influential consumer personality-based antecedents of CE, and examining key ensuing outcomes of CE.

The purpose of this paper is to study how different types of trust develop and change over time in the collaboration between an organization and its board.

This paper is a response to a recent call to apply the concept of trust in understanding the collaboration between a public organization, its board, and other stakeholders. Here, the authors study a single case, and based on a longitudinal in-depth case study method covering the period of 2003–2015, the authors have conducted 27 interviews, including the CEO and all the board members.

The authors introduce and advance the concept of trust in the public sector literature on board work. This paper shows that trust is complex and multidimensional at different units of analysis. The types of trust discussed in this paper are cognitive, affective, contractual, competence, and goodwill. Different types of trust are developed to make the collaboration between a governed organization and its board to work.

Because this paper uses the case study method and only studies one single case, the findings of this paper might be questioned on the issue of generalization.

The authors conceptualize and adopt trust as a multidimensional, dynamic concept, and with different units of analyses, capture the nature of the collaboration between a public organization and its board, and its complexity.

This study aims to investigate the mediation effects of employee voice and employee well-being on the relationship between relational leadership and organizational citizenship behavior.

This study used a Web-based survey method to collect data from 301 respondents in the four public hospitals of the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolis. This study used PLS-SEM (WarpPLS) to test the study’s hypotheses.

The findings show that relational leadership has a positive impact on organizational citizenship behavior, and that this link is mediated in part by both employee voice and employee well-being.

This study demonstrates the importance of leaders, paying close attention to employees’ well-being and opinions when attempting to drive organizational citizenship behavior in the health sector.

Based on the review of the extant literature on the impact of leadership on employee behavior and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is likely that this study will be the first to show how relational leadership, employee voice, employee well-being and organizational citizenship behavior are related in the health sector, thereby advancing the thrusts of the social exchange and relational leadership theories.

Through activism, brands participate in the sociopolitical controversies that shape society today. Based on social identity theory, this study aims to examine the moderating effects of consumer–brand identification (CBI) and political ideology in explaining consumer responses to brand activism. Furthermore, the role of perceived marginalization that can arise in the case of consumer–brand disagreement is explored.

The hypothesized effects were tested in three experiments. Study 1 (n = 262) and Study 2 (n = 322) used a moderation analysis, which was supplemented by a mixed design analysis with repeated measures in Study 1. In Study 3 (n = 383), the mediating effect of perceived marginalization by the brand was tested using a moderated mediation model.

The results show that strong CBI as well as a conservative ideology buffer the negative effects of consumer–brand disagreement on brand attitude and word-of-mouth intentions. In the case of agreement with a brand’s stance, no direct or interactive effects of brand activism on consumer responses occur. Perceived marginalization by a brand mediates the effects of brand activism.

This study extends the “love is blind” versus “love becomes hate” debate to the realm of brand activism and finds evidence for the former effect. It also contributes to the research on political consumption by highlighting the role of political ideology as an important boundary condition for brand activism. Perceived marginalization is identified as a relevant risk for activist brands.

Understanding students’ preferences for teaching and course design is important for educators in higher education when planning courses and teaching activities. The purpose of this study was to explore changes in occupational therapy students’ preferences for teaching and courses across the three-year study program.

A total of 263 students participated in a longitudinal study, where preferences were measured with the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students. The data were analyzed with linear mixed effect models for repeated measures.

The results indicated no significant changes in preferences for courses and teaching over the three-year period. Also, there were no significant differences between the six involved study programs. Preferences for the courses and teaching type “supporting understanding” were associated with higher age and higher study effort. Preferences for the courses and teaching type “transmitting information” were associated with lower age and female gender.

In summary, the findings of this study suggest that preferences for teaching and courses are stable and may be challenging to alter during a three-year undergraduate study program.

This paper aims to use the institutional and information-processing perspectives to explore their association with between internationalization and the Penrose effect phenomenon for business groups (BGs).

The authors use ordinary least squares regression models to test arguments about data pertaining to 101 Taiwanese BGs’ foreign direct investments.

The results indicate that greater levels of depth and scope in the process of internationalization during one period may negatively affect rates of growth in the following period. The results further demonstrate that institutional distance moderates the relationship.

Using the perspective of information-processing demands, the authors provide alternate explanations regarding the relationship between the process of internationalization (depth, scope and rhythm) and the Penrose effect.

Owners and managers should focus on both the depth and the scope of internationalization. BGs are likely to incur high dynamic adjustment costs, which then limit the rate of BGs’ growth. Managers should balance international market uncertainty with current managerial resources when determining how deeply and broadly to expand internationally and where to enter. In addition, as recent major panel studies suggest, management capabilities and practices can improve significantly, which has a positive effect on firm growth and performance. This does require the careful development and acquisition of the managerial resources needed for internationalization.

In 2008, a number of Southern African countries cultivated about 900,000 ha of Jatropha, with a number of biodiesel plants ready for production; however, none of the projects succeeded. In 2014, KiOR advanced biofuel Energy Company in the USA announced bankruptcy due to incompetent technology. Studies disclose that the reasons for biofuel plants failure are not only due to lack of incentives and unclear policies but also due to lack of economic feasibility and low production yields. This paper aims to review the techno-economy assessment of second-generation biofuel technologies. The purpose of this paper is to summarize specific techno-economic indicators such as production cost, technology efficiency and process life cycle analysis for advanced biofuel technology and to narrate and illustrate a clear view of what requires assessment to deploy a feasible advanced biofuel technology. This study also reviews assessment of biomass supply chain, feedstock availability and site selection criteria. The review also elaborates on the use of different processes, forecasting and simulation-modeling tools used in different techno-economic analysis studies. The review provides guidance for conducting a technical and economic feasibility study for the advanced biofuels energy business.

The aim of this review is, therefore, to evaluate the techno-economic feasibility studies for the establishment of viable industrial scale production of second-generation biofuels. It does so by grouping studies based on technology selection, feedstock availability and suitability, process simulation and economies as well as technology environmental impact assessment.

In conclusion, techno-economic analysis tools offer researchers insight in terms of where their research and development should focus, to attain the most significant enhancement for the economics of a technology. The study patterns within the scope of techno-economics of advanced biofuel reveal that there is no generic answer as to which technology would be feasible at a commercial scale. It is therefore important to keep in mind that models can only simplify and give a simulation of reality to a certain extent. Nevertheless, reviewed studies do not reach the same results, but some results are logically similar.

The originality of this article specifically illustrates important technical and economic indicators that should be considered when conducting feasibility studies for advance biofuels.

The article seeks to enrich the body of research on store atmospherics by identifying how storefront window design impacts store entry decisions. An innovative multimodal design approach is presented, considering both visual and verbal constituents.

Study 1 draws on a corpus of high-end storefront windows to create a categorization regarding different levels of verbo-visual complexity. The survey in Study 2 (n = 234) serves two purposes: first, to confirm these levels of complexity and second, to investigate the relation between the complexity of window design and store entry decisions.

Study 2 confirms the order of complexity established in Study 1. The results reveal an inverted-U relationship between window complexity and store entry propensity. Windows of medium level of complexity produce shoppers' relatively highest store entry propensity.

The findings suggest that retailers would benefit from adopting verbo-visual window designs of medium complexity, as this combination optimizes the likeliness of consumers to enter stores.

Research on store atmospherics has until recently primarily focused on in-store cues. Studies on store windows remain vastly underrepresented in extant scholarship. The article not only fills this gap but also incorporates an original interdisciplinary angle on multimodality, which offers new methodological perspectives for research in retail and distribution scholarship.