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This study aims to examine the effect of perceived supervisor support (PSS) and workplace dignity (WPD) on employees' affective commitment to change (ACC). It also investigates PSS as an antecedent of WPD and WPD as a mediator between PSS and ACC.

To examine the proposed relationships, data was collected from employees of an Indian public sector company undergoing many change initiatives at the time of the study. The hypotheses were tested using the structural equation model.

The findings indicate the direct effect of PSS and WPD on employees' ACC, and WPD does mediate between PSS and ACC. The results also suggest PSS works as an antecedent of WPD.

The findings suggest how organizations can enhance employees’ ACC by creating a positive context involving supervisor support and experience of WPD.

The findings contribute to ACC literature by highlighting the role of WPD and PSS. This is one of the few quantitative studies which examines the antecedent and consequences of WPD.

This teaching case aims to encourage reflection on the formulation of the strategic repositioning of an automotive dealership.

Built on the teaching case method, it portrays the situation of the Premium Motors automotive dealership in the face of a strategic repositioning. Management and the board discuss ways to minimize the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on sales figures. The situation presents the possibility of entering a new product segment.

How to make consumers correctly understand the new positioning? The case is structured to enable reflection and teaching of marketing strategies, with each student having the possibility of putting themselves in the role of company managers. The environment and trajectory are also portrayed, broadening the perception of the studied company and providing devices for solving the emerging problems of the case.

The case becomes a tool to promote knowledge, from the implementation to the management of strategic repositioning. Thus, the teaching notes offer directions on how professors can use the teaching case with their undergraduate and graduate students in disciplines related to strategy and marketing.

This study was conducted to fill gaps in the literature based on institution type, career level, and gender identity.

Faculty often struggle with achieving work-life balance. This struggle is exacerbated for faculty parents. Most academic parent research has been conducted on early-career women and at research-intensive universities. Although these groups are important, it is also important to understand experiences of academic parents at different career levels and types of institutions. The authors conducted a qualitative thematic analysis from focus groups with faculty from a mid-sized master's level university about work-life balance expectations and experiences in their roles as academics and parents. These four groups included early-career mothers (n = 5), early-career fathers (n = 4), mid-career mothers (n = 4), and mid-career fathers (n = 7).

Faculty expressed having a high workload based on an intersection of high work expectations, unclear work expectations, and lack of equity. Consequences of the high workload included lower work-life balance, dissatisfaction at not doing more, the loss of flexibility as an advantage, and lower organizational commitment.

Although results are limited in generalizability, it is useful to examine one institution, with all participants sharing the same culture and policies, in-depth. The authors discuss recommendations for educational administrators for assisting academic parents and suggest institutions work to examine informal expectations and formal policies at their institutions. Working together, faculty and staff can help enhance alignment of expectations and perceptions of work-life balance, hopefully leading to happier, more satisfied employees.

Most studies explore the success of mergers and acquisitions through ex ante analyses based on the compatibility of resources and capabilities between the acquirer and target. As more than half of them fail, there seems to be room for enhancing our understanding of when and how acquisitions can actually improve firms' competitiveness. Diverging from these conventional approaches, the authors posit that attention should be at the strategic level. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to explore the existence of compatibility between acquirers’ and targets’ competitive strategies and its effect on post-acquisition business performance.

Through the Thomson Reuters Eikon financial and acquisition databases, the authors built a unique data panel of 174 acquirer–target matched acquisitions in the manufacturing sector from 24 different countries between 2000 and 2020. The authors used a two-step System-GMM approach to address the hypotheses proposed in this paper. This methodology allowed to isolate and easily compare the differential effects of each possible combination of strategic similarity and dissimilarity between the target and acquiring company on the latter’s post-acquisition strategies.

The need to unravel the motives behind successful acquisitions has gained enormous interest in recent years among academics and managers to improve – or maintain – firm competitiveness. Through a panel data of 174 acquisitions among manufacturing firms (2000–2020), this study shows that differentiated firms improve their business performance by acquiring firms with similar strategies; nevertheless, their performance worsens if the acquired firm follows a cost-leadership strategy. Concerning acquirers with a cost-leadership strategy, the lack of clear behavioral patterns suggests that the lower knowledge absorption capacity associated with these firms might be a decisive factor in being able to assimilate and efficiently exploit the acquired firm's knowledge.

Overall, this approach offers a new and valuable perspective for practitioners because it improves understanding of the possible causes of merger failure and opens new attentions to consider in maximizing success and long-term competitiveness. The results of this study bring, thus, an unexpected result to this research: the importance of the acquirer’s strategy beyond the similarity or dissimilarity of the strategies of the acquirer and the acquired company.

The objective of this research is to develop an solution to water management at the scale of buildings, through the technological resources. Automating analysis using 3D models helps increase efficiency in buildings during the operational phase, consequently promotes sustainability.

This study presents a methodology based on Design Science Research to automate water management at building scale integrating BIM-IoT-FM. Data from smart meters (IoT) and the BIM model were integrated to be applied in facilities management (FM) to improve performance of the building. The methodology was implemented in a prototype for the web, called AquaBIM, which captures, manages and analyzes the information.

The application of AquaBIM allowed the theoretical evaluation and practical validation of water management methodology. By BIM–IoT integration, the consumption parameters and ranges for 17 categories of activities were determined to contribute to fulfill the research gap for the commercial buildings. This criterion and other requirements are requirements met in order to obtain the AQUA-HQE environmental sustainability certification.

Traditionally, water management in buildings is based on scarce data. The practical application of digital technologies improves decision-making. Moreover, the creation of consumption indicators for commercial buildings contributes to the discussion in the field of knowledge.

This article emphasizes the investigation of the efficiency of use in commercial buildings using operational data and the use of sustainable consumption indicators to manage water consumption.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of light intensity and sources of carbon and nitrogen on the cultivation of Spirulina maxima.

Cultures were carried out in a modified Zarrouk medium using urea, sodium acetate and glycerol. A Taguchi experimental design was used to evaluate the effect on the production of biocompounds: productivities in biomass, carbohydrates, phycocyanin and biochar were analyzed.

Statistical data analysis revealed that light intensity and sodium acetate concentration were the most important factors, being significant in three of the four response variables studied. The highest productivities in biomass (46.94 mg.L⁻¹.d⁻¹), carbohydrates (6.11 mg.L⁻¹.d⁻¹), phycocyanin (3.62 mg.L⁻¹.d⁻¹) and biochar (22, 48 mg.L⁻¹.d⁻¹) were achieved in experiment 4 of the Taguchi matrix, highlighting as the ideal condition for the production of biomass, carbohydrates and phycocyanin.

Sodium acetate and urea can be considered, respectively, as potential sources of carbon and nitrogen to increase Spirulina maxima productivity. From the results, an optimized cultivation condition for the sustainable production of bioproducts was obtained.

This work focuses on the study of the influence of light intensity and the use of alternative sources of nitrogen and carbon on the growth of Spirulina maxima, as well as on the influence on the productivity of biomass and biocompounds. There are few studies in the literature focused on the phycocyanin production from microalgae, justifying the need to deepen the subject.

This study aims to examine the impact of Lean 4.0 practices on value co-creation in the dairy ecosystem.

Data collection were carried out through a questionary application with 126 professionals linked to the dairy ecosystem, including milk producers, milk cooperatives and milk transporters. The data were analyzed using Cluster Analysis, Mann-Whitney test and Chi-Square test.

A strong relation was found between the use of Lean 4.0 tools and the increase in operational performance, in addition to milk quality. Moreover, it can be noted that the use of digital technologies from Industry 4.0 has a strong relation with dairy production optimization, in other words, it is possible to be more efficient in the dairy process via Lean 4.0 adoption.

The study is limited to analyzing the Brazilian dairy ecosystem. The results presented may not reflect the characteristics of the other countries.

Once the potential empirical impacts of the relation between Lean 4.0 and value co-creation are elucidated, it is possible to direct strategies for decision-making and guide efforts by researchers and professionals to deal with the waste mitigation present in the dairy sector.

Lean 4.0 proves to be a potential solution to improve the operational performance of the dairy production system. Lean 4.0, linked to value co-creation, allows the integration of the production sector with consumers, through smart technologies, so new services and experiences can be provided to the consumer market. Additionally, the consumer experience can be stimulated based on Lean 4.0, once the quality specification is highlighted based on data science and smart management control.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that analyzes the interrelationship between the Lean 4.0 philosophy and the value co-creation in the dairy ecosystem. In this sense, the study reveals the main contributions of this interrelation to the dairy sector via value co-creation, which demonstrates a new perspective on the complementarity of resources, elimination of process losses and new experiences for the user through digital technologies integrated with the Lean Thinking approach.

This study aims to conduct a geographical analysis of the distribution and type of activities developed by social enterprises in rural and urban areas of Ireland.

The study analyses data of more than 4,000 social enterprises against a six-tier rural/urban typology, using descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests to test six hypotheses.

The study shows a geographical rural–urban pattern in the distribution of social enterprises in Ireland, with a positive association between the remoteness of an area and the ratio of social enterprises, and a lack of capital-city effect related to the density of social enterprises. The analysis also shows a statistically significant geographical rural–urban pattern for the types of activities developed by social enterprises. The authors observe a positive association between the remoteness of the areas and the presence of social enterprises operating in the community and local development sector whereas the association is not significant for social enterprises developing welfare services.

The paper shows the potential of using recently developed rural–urban typologies and tools such as geographical information systems for conducting geographical research on social enterprises. The findings also have implications for informing spatially sensitive policymaking on social enterprises.

The merging of a large national data set of social enterprises with geographical tools and data at subregional level contributes to the methodological advancement of the field of social enterprises, providing tools and frameworks for a nuanced and spatially sensitive analysis of these organisations.

This research examines the impact of governance structures within the Brazilian pork supply chain on the necessary controls for exportation. Specifically, the goal is to unravel the intricacies of this supply chain and decode its complexity.

Using transaction cost economics as a theoretical lens, we surveyed the main bodies responsible for the export and quality assurance sectors of Brazilian organizations that trade and export pork. Our sample comprises 53.5% of the country’s pork exporting companies during the period analyzed.

The presence of vertical and horizontal governance structures in the pork export chain stands out. While the vertical structure enables greater control due to command relations, there are trust and cooperation relations in the horizontal structure. This makes it possible to establish mechanisms to control health, quality, safety and traceability in both structures. We also identified each company’s characteristics: formation configuration (if the cooperative, publicly traded company, or other modality), capital stock, location, the average daily slaughter of pigs for export and sows per producer. We conclude that the organizations have concerns related to the food safety programs, as there are programs that seek transparency throughout the process in many supply chain stages.

Studies that relate the level of orientation to the export market with the occurrence or risk of corrupt and opportunistic behavior and the coordination mechanisms adopted may represent an interesting and important opportunity for studies.

This study helps to understand the complexity of the Brazilian pork supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to examine competence management practices in Brazilian industries using ISO 10015 as a framework of analysis, which establishes guidelines for competence management and people development.

A survey was conducted with 22 high-qualified human resources management (HRM) professionals (81.8% of participants hold a PhD) with extensive experience in the Brazilian industrial sector (an average of 20.4 years). The experts assessed 13 practices (P) elaborated based on the ISO 10015:2020, considering two categories: large industries (LI) and small and medium-sized industries (SMI). Data analysis was performed using Hierarchical Cluster Analysis, frequency analysis, Fuzzy TOPSIS and sensitivity analysis.

The practice “individual competences are correctly defined by organizations at all hierarchical levels” was deemed the best practice for LIs, while the practice “clear definition of activities and their specificities when structuring competence management and people development programs” was considered the best practice for SMIs. The practice “organizations map employees' future competence and development needs on a regular basis” received the lowest rating for both LIs and SMIs. When compared to LIs, SMIs have more severe deficiencies in applying competence management practices. The study's findings can be of great value in assisting managers in implementing structured competence management systems and people development initiatives.

The findings of this study can be used by managers of businesses of all sizes and economic sectors to analyze their critical points in order to identify opportunities to improve their competence management systems and people development programs.

This study fills a knowledge gap by analyzing the adoption of competence management practices in Brazil, answering the call for HRM research in developing countries. By using ISO 10015 as a framework of analysis, this study also addresses the literature gap regarding this important and relatively new management tool.