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This paper aims to explore the intermediary roles that public policies play in stimulating government agencies, businesses and civil society to engage in a corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda.

Issues related to decision-making of public policies are increasingly complex. Therefore, analytical hierarchy process has been used to prioritize public policy practices for CSR in the UAE. Data were collected from experts working in businesses and civil society organizations.

Findings suggest that businesses and the civil society confirm the importance of standardization and law enforcement public policy practices in issues related to CSR in developing countries. The endorsing style of public policies was the least important approach to encouraging CSR implementation in the UAE.

Results are derived from a limited amount of empirical data only in one country; therefore, these cannot be generalized. Future research from other countries is needed.

Outcomes from this study will help the government enhance its role as mediator among all agents and help with designing public policies that encourage adoption of CSR by business firms while maintaining competitiveness in the economy.

A framework consisting of five public policy categories – mandating, facilitating, partnering, endorsing and empowering roles – and 29 sub-policy practices is introduced. This study provides an important technique for analyzing the importance of public policies in promoting CSR. It offers insights into a population that shapes a CSR agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to explore certain resources, capabilities and competencies needed to improve the performance of physical asset management (PAM).

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to select and prioritize the most appropriate factors for improving performance. A multi-criteria approach is used to analyze and compare the importance of 6 main criteria and 18 subcriteria identified from a survey of relevant literature.

The study revealed that not all factors are viewed as having equal importance in improving PAM performance, as three of the main factors attained greater importance among the six factors.

This study explored the factors required for managing assets only within the third stage of asset lifecycle, that is, the utilization stage. It is recommended that future studies be conducted in such a way as to determine the importance of similar factors in the other stages of the asset lifecycle, or to identify new factors and add new criteria.

Knowledge of the differential impacts of the factors on the performance of PAM can impact asset managers and decision makers in their allocation of resources and focus their work on the highest-ranked rather than the lowest-ranked factors. Also, AHP used provides an effective mean for asset managers to identify priorities among decision criteria in their organization.

To date, no study has explored the impact of six combined factors on the performance of PAM. Previous studies have found that these factors each had equal importance. However, their relative ranking in practice and when they appear together have remained unrecognized.

This paper aims to identify and prioritize the dimensions that impact employee social sustainability in the airline industry in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The five main criteria (employee well-being, communication, management support, reward and control system and training) and 18 sub-criteria were identified from the literature. The sample comprised four experts covering the HR, finance and training functions from a major UAE airline organization. Applying the analytical-hierarchy-process (AHP) methodology resulted in obtaining priority weights for the factors assigned to employee-social-sustainability implementation.

Management support was found to have the highest priority among the study dimensions impacting employee social sustainability. Surprisingly, reward system was found to be the least important dimension.

The study was carried out on a single airline organization, limiting the generalizability of the findings. Future studies should be extended to cater to different organizational contexts and varying operational conditions.

The findings should be of value to human resource management and policymakers in developing countries, such as the UAE, where employee social sustainability should be sought as a means to develop an efficient and sustainable workforce in different industrial sectors.

This study is among the few pioneering studies that focus on employee social sustainability. The use of AHP to prioritize employee-social-sustainability dimensions is also considered pioneering within the field and is anticipated to support future studies, and a deeper understanding, of employee social sustainability.

Regardless of the diverse research on big data analytics (BDA) across different supply chains, little attention has been paid to exploit this information across service supply chains. The healthcare supply chains, where supply chain operations consume the second highest expenditures, have not completely attained the potential gains from data analytics. So, this paper explores the challenges of BDA at various levels of healthcare supply chains.

Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV), this research explores the various challenges of big data at organizational and operational level of different nodes in healthcare supply chains. To demonstrate the links among supply chain nodes, the authors have used a supplier-input-process-output-customer (SIPOC) chart to list healthcare suppliers, inputs (such as employees) supplied and used by the main healthcare processes, outputs (products and services) of these processes, and customers (patients and community).

Using thematic analysis, the authors were able to identify numerous challenges and commonalities among these challenges for the case of healthcare supply chains across United Arab Emirates (UAE). An applicable exploration on organizational (Socio-technical) and operational challenges to BDA can enable healthcare managers to acclimate efficient and effective strategies.

The identified common socio-technical and operational challenges could be verified, and their impacts on the sustainable performance of various supply chains should be explored using formal research methods.

This research advances the body of literature on BDA in healthcare supply chains in that (1) it presents a structured approach for exploring the challenges from various stakeholders of healthcare chain; (2) it presents the most common challenges of big data across the chain and finally (3) it uses the context of UAE where government is focusing on medical tourism in the coming years.

Originality of this work stems from the fact that most of the previous academic research in this area has focused on technology perspectives, a clear understanding of the managerial and strategic implications and challenges of big data is still missing in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically assess the impact of integrated lean and green practices on the sustainable (environmental, economic and social) performance of a hotel supply chain.

Literature review and previous exploratory studies were used to develop a hypothesized model that characterizes the integrated lean and green (LeGreen) impact on supply chain sustainability. A case study of a large sample of the UAE hotels is used to collect and analyze empirical data, validate the measurement model and test study hypotheses using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results showed that three major lean techniques (Kaizen, quality and productive maintenance) and three green techniques (health and safety, waste disposal and green certifications) have substantial impact on the sustainable performance of hotel supply chains. Further results revealed that LeGreen impacts are complementary. Lean techniques have the highest impact on the economic performance of the hotel supply chain and the least impact on the environmental performance. Green practices, on the other hand, have opposite impacts.

Although the study findings may vary in different contexts, study methodology and measurement model can be adapted to assess the LeGreen impact on the sustainable performance of hotel supply chains, as well as other service industries such as banking and health care.

The proposed assessment model is expected to be of great value toward the effective implementation of LeGreen practices across hotel supply chains in the UAE and globally. The study findings also provide guidelines for practitioners within the hospitality sector to undertake the proposed model and to adapt it for assessing and enhancing sustainable performance in other sectors of the service industry.

There is a growing emphasis by practitioners and academics on measuring the impact of LeGreen on the sustainable performance of service supply chains. However, the assessment of LeGreen impacts within the context of a hotel supply chain remains unexplored with a scarcity of comprehensive assessment frameworks. This study aims to fulfill this gap in literature and provide directions for researchers to expand the proposed model and to further analyze the integrated lean-green impact on the sustainability of supply chains of hotels and the service industry.

This paper is a direct extension of the work by Hussain et al. (2012). They have investigated a long-term relationship between climatic change and economic growth in case of Pakistan. Agricultural sector plays an important role in economic field, whereas industrial sector is the main source of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission. Therefore, this study aims to replace economic growth variable with industrial growth in case of Pakistan.

Investigation is made on the basis of the environmental Kuznets curve by using the time series data during the period 1971-2009. The per capital carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission is used as an environmental indicator and per capita industrial income as the economic indicator. Different econometric tools including augmented Dickey–Fuller, autoregressive distributed lag and Granger-causality test are used to verify this relationship.

The empirical findings will help the policy-makers of Pakistan in developing new standards and monitoring networks for reducing CO₂ emission. It is essential to extend the current research work at provincial and different sectors levels in order to have clear understanding about the impact of current emission rate.

This study replaces economic growth variable with industrial growth in case of Pakistan because the industrial sector is the main source of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission. This study is to investigate a long-term relationship between climatic change and industrial growth in case of Pakistan.

Service levels between public organizations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) differ and fluctuate. Service levels were found to increase with the level of employee creative behavior (ECB), which is currently a focal point in organizational policies by the federal UAE government. While the literature presents an ample array of determinants of ECB, local context typically influences which determinants provide more leverage than others. Therefore, this research aims to present a customized ranking of determinants that enables managers in the UAE public sector to successfully stimulate ECB.

Through a systematic literature review, this study identified 21 determinants at four different levels and subsequently utilized the analytic hierarchical process (AHP) to map their relative importance. Data were attained from 33 experts: managers and senior employees from different organizations.

Findings indicate that, overall, the individual level is seen as the most important leverage point to stimulate ECB, followed by the team level. Comparing the determinants under each level, management support (organizational level) is perceived as the most impactful, followed by coworker support (team level), and enhancing creative self-efficacy (individual level).

This study compares obtained levels from other studies with new levels in building the AHP model. These insights guide managers in the UAE public sector who aim to enhance ECB, which will contribute to increased service quality. The study introduced a comprehensive ECB framework of 21 determinants. Even though many ECB studies applied in different countries and industries, but to researchers' knowledge, this is the first ECB study that applied at the UAE's public sector using the AHP model.

In the context of the debate on ensuring health-care efficiency, this study aims to identify and prioritize factors and subfactors that influence organizational effectiveness (OE) in the health-care supply chain.

For the purpose of this qualitative study, triangulation was applied to identify, explore and systematically analyze the OE-related practices used by diverse stakeholders along the health-care supply chain. Sixty-two OE practices were thus identified. Subsequently, these were grouped in six different nodes before the analytical hierarchical process (AHP) was used to identify the weightings of specific practices (and related factors) and their impact on OE.

The findings suggest that external factors associated with government regulation, including government directives and branding, are the most critical factors that influence OE-related practices, while cost-related factors are the least important.

The originality of this study derives from the introduction of system theory supported by a modified supplier-input-process-output-customer (SIPOC) framework. Two important factors – government regulation and branding – have been introduced to the existing SIPOC chart as a valuable process structure for the health-care chain.

Supply chain quality management (SCQM) has gained less attention in the Arab world, and there is a clear dearth in existing research on this topic, particularly in service organizations. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for investigating the impact of SCQM and associated indicators on organizational performance (OP).

Empirical data have been collected through a survey distributed to a sample of major telecom companies in United Arab Emirates (UAE). To test the conceptual framework, structural equation modeling (SEM) has been used to analyze the data collected from 248 respondents of telecom companies.

The empirical data showed that SCQM practices are significantly correlated with innovation and operations performance. Statistical analysis through SEM also revealed that customer satisfaction has highest direct impact on OP.

External factors (government regulations, policies and culture) also affect the SCQM practices. Hence, future work should incorporate these parameters as well.

This is a contribution to the continuing research into SCQM, giving supply chain managers and designers a practical way for measuring and implementing SCQM practices across service supply chains.

The contribution of this research, through successive stages of data collection, measurement analysis and refinement, is a set of reliable and valid framework that can be subsequently used in conceptualization and measuring quality of service supply chains.

The purpose of this paper is to identify factors affecting sustainable organizational performance, to build a framework for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) public health-care sector to facilitate sustainable organizational performance and to prioritize the factors for sustainable organizational performance.

The method used in this research is the quantitative method called the analytical hierarchal process (AHP) to help the decision makers in the public health-care sector to prioritize the factors that are affecting sustainable organizational performance. The method will also help to deal with the complexity of the sustainable organizational performance issue by interviewing nine experts in the field.

The findings of this research showed 21 sub-factors for sustainable organizational performance in the public health-care sector in UAE. It emphasizes that patient safety and quality of care are the most important factors for sustainable organizational performance.

This study can be repeated by targeting other private hospitals in UAE. The novelty of this research means that it is the first study done in sustainable organizational performance in the health-care sector in UAE.

Health-care management can benefit from this research in many ways: Medical errors have a high impact on the hospital’s reputation and these determine the customer demand. Thus, the hospital’s management should give more attention to minimize the medical errors in order to have a sustainable organizational performance. This can be accomplished through clear protocols and procedures that may affect patients’ lives, the hospital’s reputation and organizational performance. Nevertheless, the policymakers should focus on society engagement; focus on social sustainability should be an integral part of their operational and business strategy. According to Abu Dhabi Health Authority (HAAD), the UAE has a highest rate of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease itself accounted for 36.7% of all 2013 deaths. The health-care sector should focus more on educating the community by conducting workshops, seminars and awareness campaigns across the UAE. In addition, decision makers in the health-care sector should spend more on continued improvement by focusing on lean activities that focus on waste minimization and linking the service quality to the hospital outcomes and patient satisfaction. The fourth highest overall priority weight for both transformational leadership and for the waiting time sub-criteria should also be considered by top management to focus more on hiring, retaining, and developing their transformational leaders, and to keep an eye on the waiting time and improving customer service. This will result in the sustainable organizational performance. Interestingly, all of the HR processes showed the lowest overall weights at 1%, which is a bit strange. HR should play more of a role in sustainable organizational performance, equal to the other sub-factors.

Originality of this research stems from a reliable and valid framework that can be subsequently used for measuring the organizational performance of health care organizations.