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This study aims to analyze the outcome features of effective monitoring and evaluation in construction projects delivery.

The study adopted a quantitative research approach. Questionnaire survey was administered to 230 participants who were drawn from metropolitan, municipal, district assemblies and regional coordinating councils in Ghana. Data collected were analyzed to determine the key and underlying monitoring and evaluation outcome features in project delivery. A Cronbach’s α value of 0.953 was achieved based on standardized items, while the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure of sampling adequacy recorded was 0.876. The result of Bartlett’s test of sphericity also revealed a significance level of 0.000 (p < 0.05).

The study discovered that value for money, successful project closure, end-user satisfaction, timely completion of projects and fitness for purpose were the top five monitoring and evaluation outcome features. Similarly, three principal monitoring and evaluation outcome features were identified, namely, performance, satisfaction and value outcome.

The study, thus, seeks to guide project planning and implementation of effective construction project M&E.

The study contributes to the body of knowledge by establishing top and key success outcomes (KSO) in the implementation of monitoring and evaluation.

In order to address the need for greater understanding about the occupational and practice determinants of effective workplace coaching, the purpose of this paper is to examine the associations of two coaching practice factors (coaching format and external vs internal coaching provision), and coachees’ job complexity with perceived outcomes from coaching.

A survey of 161 individuals who had received workplace coaching was conducted. Participants provided data on two outcome criteria (self-reported work well-being and personal effectiveness at work).

Analysis indicated that external coaches and blended format coaching were most strongly associated with work well-being outcomes. The examination of interaction effects showed that coaching provided by external coaches was more strongly associated with outcomes for individuals working in the most complex job roles.

The original contribution of the authors’ findings is in terms of the implications for coaches, managers and HR practitioners by showing how coaching can be implemented differentially and most effectively based on desired outcome criteria and features of coachees’ job situations.

This study seeks to demonstrate that employees' reactions to their supervisors' influence behaviors are governed by meanings inferred from the behaviors. Another aim is to develop a method in which “weights” for predicting employees' reactions are assigned using mean ratings of perceptions of the features and social/organizational implications of the influence behaviors.

Employees of an energy utility completed survey questionnaires concerning the extent of their supervisors' use of specified influence tactics. Employees' organizational commitment, supervisor commitment, turnover intention, and stress also were surveyed. A separate, community sample rated the influence tactics for dimensions of meaning or implications of the tactics. Data from the two samples were combined in a novel arithmetic scoring procedure as one of several analyses looking for evidence of the specified dimensions' effects.

The study finds that employees' work attitudes and other outcomes were predicted to a statistically significant degree by dimensional, perceptual characterizations of the influence tactics used by their supervisors. In culminating multiple regression analyses, respectfulness was associated with supervisor commitment, turnover intention, and emotional distress; directness was associated with organizational commitment. Additional analyses indicated that other dimensions of meaning also were associated with outcomes.

The meanings of supervisors' influence behaviors are somewhat culture‐specific, so the generalizability of findings to other cultures is uncertain. However, the central role of social inferences in reactions to supervisors' influence behaviors may be replicable to other cultures if culture‐specific content or ratings are substituted there. This research also has the usual limitations of cross‐sectional, correlational research.

In their interactions with employees, managers and supervisors should be aware that their influence behaviors, collectively, generate reactions that are significant for employees' motivation and well‐being. Supervisory behaviors and work contexts should be managed so that employees will infer that their supervisors are showing respect and are being honest and direct.

Processes previously assumed to intervene between supervisory influence behavior and employee reactions were operationalized and demonstrated. Novel methods were developed for this research, and these methods may also be applicable to other research domains that involve sets of behaviors that parallel existing schemes for influence behavior.

Business Plan Competitions (BPCs) are readily prescribed and promoted as a valuable entrepreneurial learning activity on university campuses worldwide. There is an acceptance of their value despite the clear lack of empirical attention on the learning experience of nascent entrepreneurs during and post-participation in university-based BPCs. To address this deficit, the purpose of this paper is to explore how participation in a university-based BPC affords entrepreneurial learning outcomes, through the development of competencies, amongst nascent entrepreneurs.

Underpinned by a constructivist paradigm, a longitudinal qualitative methodological approach was adopted. In-depth interviews with nascent entrepreneur participants of a UK university-based BPC were undertaken at the start and end of the competition but also six months after participation. This method enabled access to the participant’s experiences of the competition and appreciation of the meanings they attached to this experience as a source of entrepreneurial learning. Data were analysed according to the wave of data collection and a thematic analytical approach was taken to identify patterns across participant accounts.

At the start of the competition, participation was viewed as a valuable experiential learning opportunity in pursuit of the competencies needed, but not yet held, to progress implementation of the nascent venture. At the end of the competition, participants considered their participation experience had afforded the development of pitching, public speaking, networking and business plan production competencies and also self-confidence. Six months post-competition, participants still recognised that competencies had been developed; however, application of these were deemed as being confined to participation in other competitions rather than the routine day-to-day aspects of venture implementation. Developed competencies and learning remained useful given a prevailing view that further competition participation represented an important activity which would enable value to be leveraged in terms of finance, marketing and networking opportunities for new venture creation.

The findings challenge the common understanding that the BPC represents an effective methodology for highly authentic, relevant and broadly applicable entrepreneurial learning. Moreover the idea that the competencies needed for routine venture implementation and competencies developed through competition are synonymous is challenged. By extension the study suggests competition activities may not be as closely tied to the realities of new venture creation as commonly portrayed or understood and that the learning afforded is situated within a competition context. Competitions could therefore be preventing the opportunities for entrepreneurial learning that they purport they offer. Given the practical importance of competition participation as a resource acquisition activity for nascent entrepreneurs, further critical examination of the competition agenda is necessary as too is additional consideration about the design of such competitions and how such competitions should feature within university policy to support new venture creation.

This study contributes to the limited literature and studies on BPCs by focussing on its effectiveness as a means of providing entrepreneurial learning for participants. The key contribution taking it from an individual nascent entrepreneur participant perspective is that the competencies afforded through competition participation are more limited in scope and application than traditionally promoted and largely orientated towards future BPC participation. Learning is mainly situated for competition sake only and about participants securing further resources and higher levels of visibility. As the nascent entrepreneurs intended learning outcomes from competition participation are subsequently not realised, the study highlights a gap between the intended and actual outcomes of competition participation.

Studies in services management from the different perspectives of marketing, operations, human resources and psychology support the existence of a variety of links between organisations and their customers. The basic premise asserts that organisational characteristics and practices are linked to employee attitudes that are reflected in service quality outcomes, customer satisfaction and loyalty and, consequently, profit. Empirical studies support many of these associations and streams of research link them into linear sequences. However, the evidence is not unequivocal and this review challenges it by highlighting the complexity and non‐linearity of many of the proposed links, and the existence of reciprocity between certain variables. In synthesising the evidence in relation to the proposed links, the paper also identifies conceptual and methodological issues, unanswered questions and potential future research.

This paper aims to examine how gamification components affect training outcomes through intrinsic or extrinsic motivation (IM and EM), drawing on the self-determination motivation theory.

In this study, survey method has been used to analyse the hypotheses and objective of the research. A total of 260 surveys were received through the web-based stage and 260 surveys were legitimate. The data in this study was investigated using SPSS version 20.0 and Smart-PLS version 3.0 software.

The findings represent how IM intervenes in gamification parts of training outcomes. Apart from the indirect effect, this study also shows the immediate effect of experience point and progress bar affecting IM and EM. This study shows that the immediate effect of IM has a positive impact on training outcomes, however there is an adverse consequence in the event of EM on training outcomes as well as there is no intervening or mediating impact.

In this study, the authors offer novel research that might aid businesses in identifying the most important aspects of gamification for the relevant personnel. There is a substantial correlation between gamification and employee engagement that was previously focused on. With particular emphasis on the progress bar and experience point, the authors have demonstrated a connection between IM and EM through the use of gamification elements, paving the way for businesses to place a greater emphasis on intrinsic drive-in gamification systems intended to enhance employee training.

This study aims to propose a data-driven approach, based on open-source tools, that makes it possible to understand customer satisfaction of the accommodation offer of a whole country.

The method starts by extracting information from all hotels of Portugal available at TripAdvisor through Web scraping. Then, a support vector machine is adopted for modeling the TripAdvisor score, which is considered a proxy of customer satisfaction. Finally, knowledge extraction from the model is achieved using sensitivity analysis to unveil the influence of features on the score.

The model of the TripAdvisor score achieved a mean absolute percentage error of around 5 per cent, proving the value of modeling the extracted data. The number of rooms of the unit and the minimum price are the two most relevant features, showing that customers appreciate smaller and more expensive units, whereas the location of the hotel does not hold significant relevance.

National tourist offices can use the proposed approach to understand what drives tourists’ satisfaction, helping to shape a country’s strategy. For example, licensing new hotels may take into account the unit size and other characteristics that make it more attractive to tourists. Furthermore, the procedure can be replicated at any time and in any country, making it a valuable tool for data-driven decision support on a national scale.

The paper aims to present a systematic literature review to analyze interrelated enablers of Industry 4.0 for implementation. Industry 4.0 is an integrated manufacturing strategy embedded with disruptive technologies. Adapting these technologies with the present industrial scenario is dependent on understanding the dynamics of various critical enablers in the existing literature. In this paper, an effort has been taken to validate and reinforce these enablers by experts in the field of Industry 4.0 for implementation.

A mixed-methodology is designed in this paper. A text mining approach with an expert’s linguistic assessment method is planned to discover the enablers from literature 2010 to 2019. The most critical enablers and their dependencies on other enablers are studied by using correlation analysis.

The research explores the power driving enablers in three groups: technology, features and requirements for implementing Industry 4.0 in the existing factory. In each group, a high degree of associated and dependent enablers is fragmented in detail.

This paper will benefit the research communities and practitioners to understand the significance of an integrated ecosystem of Industry 4.0 technologies, features and requirements for implementation.

The text mining approach integrated with expert’s linguistic assessment to explore the pairwise relationship among the enablers using word correlation is a novel approach in this paper. Moreover, to best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first-ever attempt to conduct a structured literature review combined with text analysis and linguistic assessment to identify the enablers of Industry 4.0 for implementation.

Despite rising incomes and reduction of extreme poverty, the feeling of being poor remains widespread. Support programs can improve well-being, but they first require identifying who are the households that judge their income is insufficient to meet their basic needs, and what factors are associated with subjective poverty.

Households report the income level they judge is sufficient to make ends meet. Then, they are classified as being subjectively poor if their own monetary income is inferior to the level they indicated. Second, the study compares the performance of three machine learning algorithms, the random forest, support vector machines and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression, applied to a set of socioeconomic variables to predict subjective poverty status.

The random forest generates 85.29% of correct predictions using a range of income and non-income predictors, closely followed by the other two techniques. For the middle-income group, the LASSO regression outperforms random forest. Subjective poverty is mostly associated with monetary income for low-income households. However, a combination of low income, low endowment (land, consumption assets) and unusual large expenditure (medical, gifts) constitutes the key predictors of feeling poor for the middle-income households.

To reduce the feeling of poverty, policy intervention should continue to focus on increasing incomes. However, improvements in nonincome domains such as health expenditure, education and family demographics can also relieve the feeling of income inadequacy. Methodologically, better performance of either algorithm depends on the data at hand.

For the first time, the authors show that prediction techniques are reliable to identify subjective poverty prevalence, with example from rural China. The analysis offers specific attention to the modest-income households, who may feel poor but not be identified as such by objective poverty lines, and is relevant when policy-makers seek to address the “next step” after ending extreme poverty. Prediction performance and mechanisms for three machine learning algorithms are compared.

Two major trends have shaped the international business field over the past decade: globalization and the quest for responsible leadership. Yet, what are the qualities that predispose business leaders to act responsibly in an increasingly complex, interlinked world, and thus to meet new social, environmental, and political responsibilities? How can organizations develop these qualities in their current and future leaders? In this chapter, we provide tentative answers to both questions by fleshing out some of the qualities global leaders need to succeed in a connected world and by comparing three innovative executive development programs that use international service learning assignments as a way to instill these qualities in their executives. These programs are PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Ulysses Program, Pfizer’s Global Health Fellows Program, and IBM’s Corporate Service Corps.