Search results

Management development programs are often regarded as essential for the preparation of managers who are presumed to be responsible for the future success of their organizations. At other times, such programs have been criticized as being irrelevant to the actual practice of management. This paper explores the effectiveness of one management development program from the perspective of its graduates, who reported that the program positively impacted them as well as their organizations. In particular, they perceived that the program had an enormous impact on their career advancement and professional development. Many of the graduates did not believe that the program helped their organizations with management succession planning and achieving gender equity in management. However, the majority perceived that it did increase their organizations’ capacity to remain relevant to their changing environment and to deal with future management challenges, including the management of change.

It is crucial to find a better portfolio optimization strategy, considering the cryptocurrencies' asymmetric volatilities. Hence, this research aimed to present dynamic optimization on minimum variance (MVP), equal risk contribution (ERC) and most diversified portfolio (MDP).

This study applied dynamic covariances from multivariate GARCH(1,1) with Student’s-t-distribution. This research also constructed static optimization from the conventional MVP, ERC and MDP as comparison. Moreover, the optimization involved transaction cost and out-of-sample analysis from the rolling windows method. The sample consisted of ten significant cryptocurrencies.

Dynamic optimization enhanced risk-adjusted return. Moreover, dynamic MDP and ERC could win the naïve strategy (1/N) under various estimation windows, and forecast lengths when the transaction cost ranging from 10 bps to 50 bps. The researcher also used another researcher's sample as a robustness test. Findings showed that dynamic optimization (MDP and ERC) outperformed the benchmark.

Sophisticated investors may use the dynamic ERC and MDP to optimize cryptocurrencies portfolio.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper that studies the dynamic optimization on MVP, ERC and MDP using DCC and ADCC-GARCH with multivariate-t-distribution and rolling windows method.

This study aims to explore the relationships between knowledge management (KM) enablers, employee innovativeness (EI) and market development performance (MDP) in architecture, engineering and construction (A/E/C) firms.

A questionnaire survey is conducted to collect empirical data from A/E/C practitioners in Vietnam. First, factor analysis is used to identify KM enablers in A/E/C firms. Then, a framework which shows the links between KM enablers, EI and MDP is proposed. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to examine the proposed relationships.

This study identifies five constructs which can enable A/E/C firms to achieve effective KM implementation, including mutual trust and collaboration, organizational values and norms, information and communication systems, organizational policies and empowerment. Furthermore, the SEM results show that except for organizational policies, four remaining KM enablers significantly affect EI. It is also found that EI has a significant impact on MDP.

The findings could help A/E/C firms to know which KM enablers are critical to EI and provide a better understanding of the link between EI and MDP. Hence, they could make appropriate investments in KM practices to improve both EI and MDP.

The results of this study fill the gap in knowledge by empirically structuring the relationships between KM enablers, EI and MDP. Such results may provide A/E/C firms with useful information to enhance EI and MDP in today’s intensively competitive construction environments.

The purpose of this paper is to present an example of action learning in marketing – the unique postgraduate programme in marketing called the marketing development programme (MDP). This uniqueness arises in three main ways. First, the MDP is open only to those students with no work experience. Second, it employs action learning as the central pedagogy rather than an add‐on. Finally, it is a rolling programme with overlapping intakes and as such appears to have no beginning and no end. There are two important streams of learning to be harvested from such a programme. First, the MDP has for more than 20 years educated young marketers through affording them the opportunity to learn from marketing action within a supportive learning environment. The second is that there can be no action without learning, that is, the MDP has learned from its experience and created new learning for participants as a result. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the MDP for marketing education, theory and practice.

The UNDP governing council established the Management Development Programme (MDP) in 1988 with a facility of $60 million. The objective of the MDP is to assist developing countries in improving their public sectors by enhancing their governments′ management capabilities. The programme is open to all countries wishing to participate and it is the role of the MDP to help governments to develop comprehensive programmes aimed at strengthening public sector management on a long‐term basis. By the beginning of June 1990, more than 70 countries had requested support from the MDP and the interest continues to be considerable. In the field of public sector management improvement, MDP activities promote the programme approach in development co‐operation recommended by the UN General Assembly in its now famous Resolution 44/211.

The pursuit of knowledge should be the objective of managers in the workplace, both for the purpose of empowerment and to achieve financial objectives. It is important that retail managers have a need to solidify their transformational leadership knowledge, which ultimately could increase their capacity to excel. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A structured management development programme (MDP), consisting of a comprehensive spectrum of retail management and leadership theory and practices, was designed to develop transformational leadership by using transformational teaching and learning strategies. The sample for this study consisted of seven retail managers from a group of 20 managers, employed by Retek, the largest independent retail pharmacy group in South Africa. A focus group interview identified the dominant themes and produced a landscape to understand the retail managers’ environment, their preferred teaching methodology and benefits experienced from attending the MDP.

By transforming themselves, these managers have become more empathetic leaders, armed with self-awareness and a deeper awareness of team issues. The MDP created in a shift in their attitude towards attending training programmes and subsequently, has created a more accommodating philosophy towards workplace learning. The study added to the understanding of how transformational teaching and learning lead to more effective transformational leadership and the integration of theory into practice by retail managers. The conclusion was that by embracing and practising a transformational teaching and learning ideology, the managers would be better equipped with managerial and transformational leadership abilities.

This research provided a landscape for future management development training in terms of selection of managers to attend, relevant curriculum, teaching and learning methodology as well as benefits of this type of professional development. This initiative was the first project in which such a programme has been designed, developed and instructed in this particular organisation and encompassed a unique experience in terms of training, professional development and the change in the willingness to engage in training and acknowledgement of the value of learning.

Can the worst time for an organisation provide the best circumstances for management learning? One UK local authority began a management development programme 18 months before a wholescale reorganisation. This was not regarded as a rational thing to do. Explores the messiness and the politics that had to be worked with by those believing that a programme was necessary. However, training anxious and cynical managers about rational strategic models of change would be wholly inappropriate. Instead, the programme addressed the often hidden struggles, messiness, anxiety, incertainty and politics which influence management learning in a complex and turbulent organisation. The article outline participants’ feelings about the learning processes, and explains how connections were made between personal learning and organisational change. Finally it assesses the programme’s outcomes, concluding that this “bad time” for the organisation resulted in the development of managers’ ability to handle a terrifying amount of change.

This study aims to explore the efficacy of using sport-specific specialist multiple delivery partners (MDPs) contracted by the World Masters Games 2017 Limited (WMG2017) local organising committee (LOC) to deliver their event’s sport programme. Using the experiences and perspectives gained through this novel MDP approach, the objective of this research is to ascertain the benefits and challenges when using MDPs, propose recommendations and develop an MDP model to guide future event organisers who wish to engage MDPs.

This exploratory qualitative case study collected data via 23 semi-structured interviews, which were thematically analysed using NVivo11. Participants were purposively recruited from the 28 MDPs contracted by the LOC to deliver the Games sport programme and from the 7 LOC Executive Team members.

Interviewees highly commend the use of MDPs and provide constructive but minimal advice for future event organisers. Findings indicate that contracting external specialists with the required capability is vital for success, as are open communication, tools and practices to aid consistency and flexibility to allow the MDPs to utilise their expertise.

There is little specific literature on using MDPs by any type or size of event. As this mode of delivery could become more popular, certainly in second-tier events like the WMG, this study provides recommendations for future event organisers through findings on the efficacy, benefits and challenges of employing MDPs to deliver an event.

Emergency departments (ED) are faced with the challenge of capacity planning that caused by the high demand for patients and limited resources. Consequently, inadequate resources lead to increased delays, impacts on the quality of care and increase the health-care costs. Such circumstances necessitate utilizing operational research modules, such as the Markov decision process (MDP) to enable better decision-making. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability and usage of MDP on ED.

The adoption of MDP provides invaluable insights into system operations based on the different system states (e.g. very busy to unoccupied) to ensure optimal assigning of resources and reduced costs. In this paper, a descriptive health system model based on the MDP is presented, and a numerical example is illustrated to elaborate its appropriateness in optimal policy decision determination.

Faced with numerous decisions, hospital managers have to ensure that the appropriate technique is used to minimize any undesired outcomes. MDP has been shown to be a robust approach which provides support to the critical decision-making processes. Additionally, MDP also provides insights on the associated costs which enable the hospital managers to efficiently allocate resources ensuring quality health care and increased throughput while minimizing costs.

Applying MDP in the ED is a unique and good starting. MDP is powerful tool helps in making a decision in the critical situations, and the ED needs such tool.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the existing approaches of coalition formation to how to adapt dynamically the size of the coalition according to the complexity of the task to be accomplished.

A considerable amount of attention has been paid to the coalition formation problem to deal efficiently with tasks needing more than one agent (i.e. robot). However, little attention has been paid to the problem of monitoring a coalition during the execution by modifying it according to the progress of the accomplishment of the task. In this paper, the authors consider a coalition of resource‐bounded autonomous agents with anytime behavior solving a common complex task. There is no central control component. Agents can observe the effect of the other agents' actions. They can decide whether they should continue to contribute in solving the common task or to stop their contribution and to leave the coalition. This decision is made in a distributed way. The objective is to avoid the waste of resources and time by using the same coalition along the task accomplishment while some agents become unnecessary to pursue the accomplishment of the task. The authors formalize this decentralized decision‐making problem as a decentralized Markov decision process (DEC‐MDP).

The paper results in a framework leading to Coal‐DEC‐MDP, which allows each agent to decide whether to stay in the coalition or leave it by estimating the progress on the task accomplishment.

The approach could be extended to deal with more than one coalition.

Decentralized control of a fleet of robots accomplishing a mission.

The paper deals with a new problem of adapting dynamically the coalition to the target task and the use of DEC‐MDPs.