Search results

Many organisations, including professional councils, operate manually to ensure document flow to clients and stakeholders. This results in the loss of valuable documentation such as certificates and the incurring of costs due to the returning of post to the sender. The purpose of this study was to explore digital transformation of document flow at the South African Council for Social Science Professionals.

The methodological approach involved qualitative data collected through interviews, observation and document analysis in response to research questions. The study was a participatory action research project that involved collaboration between researchers and study participants in defining and solving the problem through needs assessment exercise. All three phases of participatory action research were followed, namely, the “look phase”: getting to know stakeholders so that the problem is defined on their terms and the problem definition is reflective of the community context; the “think phase”: interpretation and analysis of what was learned in the “look phase” and the “act phase”: planning, implementing, and evaluating, based on information collected and interpreted in the first two phases.

The study identified various issues relating to poor data quality, high rate of registered postal returns and non-delivery electronic messages that cannot reach all the intended recipients and accumulation of data for decades. In this regard, the study proposes a framework that can be used by SACSSP to update and verify their details on the portal, as well as digital certificates for membership.

Although the proposed framework is tailor-made for the professional council, it is not depended on prescribed technologies due to usage of open standards that can be used by industry and researchers. Therefore, it can be applied in other context where institutions such as universities communicate with many clients via postal or courier services.

The study used participatory action research involving the researchers and the organisation to solve the problem. The study presented a workflow that the council can use to ensure that the documents reach intended recipients. Furthermore, digital transformation of the process will ensure that the registered professionals are able to access their certificates online and can print them when necessary.

This article investigates (in)direct relationships between team-level entrepreneurial orientation and team performance, where team entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is measured as a team-level construct, not as concentration of team members' scores. In this article, the authors present and explore how EO-oriented behaviour within a team affect its performance, taking into account the team's trust in a manager and commitment to team and company goals.

This article focuses on a quantitative analysis of 55 teams operating within a large high-tech manufacturing enterprise, gathered through a traditional survey. The conceptual framework for this research was based on the theories of organisational citizenship, extra-role behaviour and social exchange. The authors explain how contextual factors establish a framework which enables team EO transformation towards higher performance of teams.

The results show that (team) performance benefits from EO-related behaviours. However, individual dimensions of EO are not universally beneficial and need to be combined with a mutual trust and/or commitment to team enterprise's goals to achieve high performance.

The findings provide important insight into which team factors may be targeted at the intervention or support of team members, including managers and immediate superiors who lack an active personality and are not willing to take risks at workplace. The authors adopted EO instruments, mutual trust and commitment from an individual scale to a team one, and also offer new opportunities to analyse such phenomena from a new level and evaluate them from the perspective of team managers.