Search results

Faced with declining government funding support and rising student loan debt, recently timely graduation in higher education has become a focal point of discussion at many institutions, particularly public universities. Timely graduation requires a student to successfully enroll in and complete a set of required and elective courses, the relationship of which is bound by the courses’ prerequisite requirements. However, due to the fact that class capacity is oftentimes limited and wrongly timed, many students find it challenging to stay on track. A well-structured degree roadmap that takes all factors into consideration and specifies the right courses to take by semester will better guide students’ course selection and thus increase their chance of earning their degrees within the four-year time window. Additionally, it will also allow administrators to do better capacity planning, and hence increase course accessibility to students. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this research, some operational techniques such as line balancing and simulation are applied to restructure and improve degree roadmaps, and assess the resulting outcomes. Some innovative methods are proposed to improve the processes on which students proceed to degree.

The results based on historical data that contains millions of student records spanning over eight-year time window demonstrate that the improved degree roadmaps can substantially increase students’ chance of completing the degree in a four-year time window. The research findings provide university administrators with cost-effective solutions.

This research breaks a new ground in literature due to its unique approach and focus. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of the first attempts to systematically study the impact of degree roadmap on timely graduation. This research focuses on finding solutions that are within the institution’s control, hence the proposed solutions are implementable and will provide university administrators with new tools and perspectives to enhance student success.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the non-linear effects of the presence of women directors on the board on the financial performances of Malaysian companies which undertakes initial public offerings (IPOs). This paper also analyzes the impacts of non-executive directors and independent directors on their company performances.

This paper traces the effects of gender diversity on the board on the financial performance of a sample of 123 Malaysian companies from the list of 230 companies which have made IPOs and are listed during the period 2005-2012. The multiple regressions (with linear and non-linear specification) are used to estimate the effects of women directors on companies’ performance.

The results show that presence of women directors on the board do not purport to have any significant linear or non-linear impact on the financial performance of the companies under reference, except for the companies in the top 80th percentile of return on equity. Similarly, strong evidence is also found when the number of women as board members is more than 15 per cent.

The findings of this paper suggest that presence of women directors provides a beneficial impact on the return on equity of companies in Malaysia. Therefore, it is suggested that there should be greater participation of women as board members in the country.

Prior studies tried to estimate linear relationship between the presence of woman directors on company performance. Present study assessed it from three different angles: the sample consists of companies in Malaysia issuing IPOs; possible non-linear relationship is also assessed; and apart from multiple regression, quantile regression technique was also used.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of native Chinese R&D team directors’ differential leadership on team performance, so as to understand whether and how the directors’ differential leadership impacts team conflict, whether and how team conflict impacts new product development performance of the R&D team and whether team conflict plays full mediation on the relationship between directors’ differential leadership and new product development performance.

A literature review on differential leadership and team conflict provided the model and hypothesis. Two-wave data collected from 103 directors and 344 subordinates from 103 R&D teams of high-tech enterprises from China’s Pearl River Delta Area were used as empirical study samples. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was conducted to test the model and hypothesis.

First, the team director’s differential leadership would cause significant team relationship conflict and team task conflict in the R&D team. Second, team relationship conflict and team task conflict would produce significantly bad new product development performance in the R&D team. Third, team relationship conflict would significantly mediate the relationship between the team director’s differential leadership and the team’s new product development performance.

To yield broader conclusions and to show to that the results can be replicated in other areas or in other types of organizations, further empirical research should expand the sampling by choosing high-tech enterprises from Beijing and Shanghai that have strong innovative abilities. Moreover, to extend the differential leadership theory, few more related variables of consequences, such as team communication, team cooperation and team knowledge share, should be included in future studies.

In general, the native Chinese R&D department director needs to try their best to avoid the use of differential leadership style. In addition, reasonable incentive measures, promotion mechanisms and fair team work culture are needed so as to reduce the negative impact from the director’s differential leadership.

The paper is original in its investigation on how Chinese indigenous organizational factor – differential leadership – influences the R&D team’s conflict and new product development performance, and provides theoretical contribution and managerial implications for the R&D team management.

The purpose of this study is to explore the critical factors that affect users’ acceptance and usage intention toward blockchain-based smart lockers.

The research is designed in two phases. In the first phase, the key stakeholders are interviewed. Participants include managers from technology providers and logistics companies. In the second phase, a questionnaire survey is used to validate the proposed model.

Based on the final results, this study makes the following three suggestions. First, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are the critical factors. In other words, it is important to emphasize the function and convenience of a new service when introducing it to a potential user. Second, safety is not the major concern when using a blockchain-based smart locker. This means that users will trust the service provider for providing a secure service. Users do not worry about the security problem. Finally, the network externality of smart locker is also insignificant.

This study has three major contributions. First, this study identifies the critical factors that will affect user acceptance of blockchain-based smart lockers. Next, this study combines the opinions from service providers and users to understand the gap between different stakeholders. Finally, this study can enrich our understanding on the applications of blockchain from a managerial perspective and not only from a technical perspective, as in most previous studies.

The Euler beam theory is used to study the dynamic stability of a composite material slider‐crank mechanism with an elastic connecting rod. The Ritz finite element procedure is applied to derive the governing equations of motion of the mechanism. Based on the assumption that the slider‐crank mechanism is subjected to a sinusoidal input torque and the operation condition is at a steady dynamic state, the governing equations represent a system of second order differential equations with periodic coefficients of the Mathieu‐Hill type. Making use of the Bolotin method, the boundaries between stable and unstable solutions of the elastic connecting rod are constructed. The advantages of using composite materials in the design of mechanisms are demonstrated.

Building on the conservation of resource theory, the authors posit work-life support as an essential resource for middle managers. This paper aims to explore the positive association between work-life support, positive emotion, job satisfaction and happiness. The paper also assesses the moderating role of work pressure on work-life support and positive emotion relationship on the one hand and flextime on positive emotion and job satisfaction on the other.

Data collected from 512 middle managers of small and medium-sized firms including manufacturing, service and finance sectors in Taiwan were used to test the hypotheses.

The results reveal that work pressure strengthens the effect of work-life support on positive emotions, whereas time flexibility weakens the effect of positive emotion on job satisfaction. Work-life support positively influences happiness through the intervening variables of positive emotion and job satisfaction.

The paper highlights the importance of creating a positive work environment, as empowering middle managers with work-life support can help them handle work pressure and work-life conflict. The negative influence of flextime on positive emotion and job satisfaction highlights the need for effective handling of flextime.

This paper examines the work-life support and happiness of middle managers in the Chinese cultural context which has been under-explored. This paper expands the external validity of previous research results of Western samples by finding the positive influence of work pressure on work-life fit and positive emotion and negative influence of flextime on positive emotion and job satisfaction link.

The dichotomy of views on “arts for arts sake” and “art must meet commerce” elicits the clash about how creative entrepreneurs encounter the dilemma of fulfilling personal satisfaction and chasing entrepreneurial aspiration along the entrepreneurial process. It is argued whether or not creative entrepreneurs can integrate artistic creativity and entrepreneurial alertness to disentangle the conflict and tension between art and commerce in the guanxi embedded culture context. The complex guanxi ties of creative entrepreneurs identified as bonding ties with families, bridging ties with friends and social ties with colleagues are presumed to activate personal and social values.

The research design consists of two stages: face-to-face interviews and empirical survey. A total of four successful local creative entrepreneurs in craft arts were interviewed and asked questions related to their source of creative inspiration, market alertness and value creation. Findings derived from interviews enrich the questionnaire development of the empirical survey. The survey was conducted to realize the social phenomenon of creative entrepreneurs' guanxi, cognitive process and satisfaction with Taiwan's creative industry context. In total, 318 creative entrepreneurs’ responses were collected and analyzed by using structural equation modeling (SEM).

Results suggest that guanxi networks lead to the acquisition of various social resources that are conducive to alertness in entrepreneurial opportunities and stimulate artistic creativity, which in turn gratify creative entrepreneurs' senses of entrepreneurial satisfaction with life, work and social contribution, as well as achieve higher entrepreneurial aspiration, perceived as social recognition and meaning of work.

Results of this study enrich the understanding of creative entrepreneurs and their awareness of balancing opportunity alerting and artistic creativity while starting creative businesses. Diverseness and closeness of guanxi networks can fill the gap between art and market and further pave the way to winning aspiration.

This paper advances the existing literature on creative entrepreneurship by adopting guanxi network theory to explore entrepreneurs' cognitive process in the linkage of artistic creativity and entrepreneurial alertness and their mediating effects on perceived entrepreneurial satisfaction and aspiration.

Traditionally, file transfer protocol (FTP) servers are major archive providers and users apply the Archie server to locate FTP archives. With the extreme popularity of the WWW, Web servers are now important archive providers and users download archives via HTTP. To reduce HTTP traffic, proxy cache servers are deployed on the Internet. However, we find the hit rate of archives in cache servers is quite low. This study proposes a combination of caching and better searching mechanisms to alleviate the problem. We enable a proxy server to automatically collect WWW and FTP archives from its cache, organize them in the form of an FTP directory, and then offer the directory list to the Archie. Accordingly, users can find archives on WWW and FTP servers through the Archie, and they can directly download archives from the proxy server, thus improving the reuse of cached archives. A system was implemented and operated in a real environment to evaluate the approach and results are discussed.

Online reviews are increasingly available for a wide range of products and services in e-commerce. Most consumers rely heavily on online reviews when making purchase decisions, so an important topic is that of understanding what makes some online reviews helpful in the eyes of consumers. Researchers have demonstrated the benefits of the presence of customer reviews to an online retailer, however, few studies have investigated how images in review content and the facial expressions of reviewers’ avatars influence the judgment of online review helpfulness. This study draws on self-construal theory, attribution theory and affect-as-information theory to empirically test a model of the interaction effects of images in review content and the facial expressions of reviewers’ avatars on online review helpfulness. Furthermore, the purpose of this paper is to identify an underlying mechanism of causal attribution toward store performance on the above effects.

This study conducted two online experiments. Study 1 is a 2 (images in review content: one person with a product vs a group of people with a product) ×2 (facial expression of the reviewer’s avatar: happy vs angry) between-subjects design. Study 2 is a 3 (image: product alone vs one person with a product vs a group of people with a product) ×2 (facial expression of the reviewer’s avatar: happy vs angry) ×3 (valence of the review: positive vs negative vs neutral) between-subjects design.

The results indicate that when consumers were exposed to a happy-looking avatar, they were likely to express higher perceptions of online review helpfulness in response to an image showing a group of people in a restaurant than they would for an image of one person in the same situation. In contrast, when consumers were exposed to an angry-looking avatar, their perceptions of online review helpfulness did not differ in response to images of either a group of people or of one person. Furthermore, cause attribution toward store performance mediated the interaction between images in content of reviews and the facial expression of a reviewer’s avatar on the perceptions of online review helpfulness.

The authors provide insights into how to develop guidelines on how online reviews should be written so that readers perceive them to be helpful, and how to design effective reward mechanisms for customer feedback.

Compared with previous studies, this study provides further contributions in three ways. First, it contributes to the literature on review content by showing which images in reviews are deemed to be helpful. Second, it extends previous findings from the literature relating to online peer reviews by demonstrating the importance of facial expressions in reviewers’ avatars (i.e. happy vs angry) when explaining helpfulness, rather than the strength of purchase intent. Third, this study contributes by further highlighting a novel mechanism which shows that a causal attribution toward store performance motivates the perceptions of online review helpfulness.

Climate engineering management (CEM) as an emerging and cross-disciplinary subject gradually draws the attention to researchers. This paper aims to focus on economic and social impacts on the technologies of climate engineering themselves. However, very few research concentrates on the management of climate engineering. Furthermore, scientific knowledge and a unified system of CEM are limited.

In this paper, the concept of CEM and its characteristics are proposed and elaborated. In addition, the framework of CEM is established based on management objectives, management processes and supporting theory and technology of management. Moreover, a multi-agent synergistic theory of CEM is put forward to guide efficient management of climate engineering, which is composed of time synergy, space synergy, and factor synergy. This theory is suitable for solving all problems encountered in the management of various climate engineering rather than a specific climate engineering. Specifically, the proposed CEM system aims to mitigate the impact of climate change via refining and summarizing the interrelationship of each component.

Overall, the six research frontiers and hotspots in the field of CEM are explored based on the current status of research.

In terms of the objectives listed above, this paper seeks to provide a reference for formulating the standards and norms in the management of various climate engineering, as well as contribute to policy implementation and efficient management.