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In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the degree to which intangible resources explain performance variation among firms.

The method includes a purpose‐designed survey to measure the impact of tangible resources, intangible resources and industry structure on firm performance.

The results suggest that, in the main, intangible resources do explain performance variation, even when measured against other potential performance impacting factors. Research limitations/implications – The results suggest that capabilities, conceptualized as an intangible resource, might not be the firm's most important, contrary to theory. Further, this study suggests that future research might best be served by exploring relationships between resources and the degree to which resource combinations are important to firm performance.

Resource allocation is a constant struggle for management. The results of this study suggest that investment in intangible resources might be a means to drive, and possibly sustain, competitive advantage.

This paper studies intangible resources in conjunction with other potential performance determinants, thus demonstrating a more stringent test of the resource‐based view of the firm than previous studies.

To understand African small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) performance and its antecedents is essential, both from a strategic management and an industrial development perspective. While a substantial literature on African SMEs has emerged in recent years, studies of their performance specifically are few and inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to address this lacuna in the literature by examining variations in performance of 210 East African SMEs.

The paper employs OLS and logistic regression and Classify k-means test to analyze performance variations in a unique data set of 210 food processing enterprises in Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia.

Three generic types of African SMEs are identified based on performance: laggards, followers and gazelles. The gazelles are typically medium-sized, skill-intensive companies selling relatively differentiated products in niche markets. The laggards are typically small, capital-intensive companies involved in grain milling that adopt a cost differentiation strategy. A key driver of variation in performance is found to be the quality of the external business environment (in particular the quality of intermediary markets), and also capability factors such as the strength of management. Strategy factors such as differentiation and political strategies explain performance variations.

Among the policy implications are that African industrial policy should focus on improving the functioning of intermediary markets, e.g. by reducing the transaction costs of inter-firm collaboration. Moreover, rather than focusing industrial policy on SMEs per se, policymakers should focus on those types of enterprises that are capable of generating high performance, e.g. skill-intensive enterprises with strong managerial capabilities, engaged in differentiation strategies.

The paper integrates the extant literature on African SME performance, develops an analytical framework for studying it and presents novel empirical insights based on one of the most detailed surveys of SME performance in the continent to date. The findings have important and tangible implications for literature, as well as for industrial policy.

The world consists of diverse and distinctive economic systems. Due to the unique historical, cultural and location-specific contexts embedded in each economy, a comparison of strategic behaviors across economies is unlikely to provide a causal estimate of the influence of these contextual factors on strategy–performance relationships. In this paper, I outline three approaches to researching multinational firms that address this dilemma. They include the multilevel, historical and variance-centered perspectives, all of which can help international-business (IB) researchers develop stronger theoretical foundations from which to explain why country-specific contexts matter in designing IB action and research.

Construction process is complex and traditionally fragmented; thus, it is almost impossible to have a project completed without changes to the original plan or the construction process. The purpose of this study is to identify and examine the causes of variation orders, ascertain their effects and establish the cost and time performance implication as a result of variation orders.

This study obtained information from 90 construction stakeholders on 30 completed educational building projects to ascertain the causes and effects of variation orders on project delivery using questionnaire survey. In addition to this, a pro forma document was designed to obtain the project characteristics, cost and time data from these 30 completed educational building projects. Factor analysis was used to categorise the causes of variation orders, while severity index was used to examine their effects on project delivery. The hypothesised statement was tested using paired t-statistics to examine whether a statistically significant difference existed between variation orders, cost and time performance of the projects.

The study identified 13 main factors as causes of variation orders and the results revealed that the most frequent effects of variations were increase in construction costs, time, client dissatisfaction, increase construction project rework and demolition and project abandonment. The results also showed that variation orders had significant effects on both cost and scheduled performance of the educational building projects with average cost and time escalation of 33.95 and 29.45 per cent of the original project cost and time, respectively, for the entire projects studied, while average cost implication of variation orders is 23.79 per cent.

The findings in this study will be of assistance to government agencies and management of public works in higher institutions of learning in managing variations in construction projects. The study will also add to the current literature on the impact of variation orders on educational building projects in developing countries. Finally, it will create the much-needed awareness on the severity and implication of change or variation orders on project delivery.

The study identified and examined the causes of variation orders, ascertained their effects and established the cost and time effects of the causes of variation order on project performance. This will assist project initiators, contractors, consultants and other stakeholders to fully appreciate and understand the significant effects of variation orders on project performance.

Considerable research efforts have been made to investigate the relative importance of firm‐specific vs industry structure factors in relation to performance variation among firms in the past. However, the vast majority of the research comes from the USA and very little is known about results outside of this domain. The aim of this study was to investigate industry and firm factors producing performance differences among Turkish firms. In order to explore the contributions of firm‐level factors and structural characteristics of industries, the study decomposes the relative impact of industry and firm effects on overall performance which includes the performance items such as sales turnover, market share and profitability.

A quantitative, positivistic approach was adopted with respect to the methodological choice for this study. In order to measure the relative impact of industry and firm effects on performance, the questionnaire developed by Galbreath and Galvin was sent to the e‐mail addresses of the general managers or the other executives at the top level as a web‐link with a covering letter. Because unit of analysis is at the firm level, a single informant is used in the study and the questionnaire was mailed to only one executive from each firm. Having collected the data, the effects of firm‐level factors (resources and capabilities) and industry structure on performance variation were analyzed by hierarchical regression method.

A total of 259 firms from different industries were analyzed and the findings revealed that firm‐level resources had a greater effect in explaining performance variation than industry structure in the Turkish business context. The results of this study confirm that in the resource‐based view of the firm, the firms in Turkey “demonstrated a quite developed form of organizational learning” just like the other emerging economies (i.e. Taiwan, Brazil, Poland and South Korea). Within this framework, Turkish firms especially in automotive, textile, food, tourism and construction industries became important players in the global arena.

This study contributes to the strategic management literature, particularly, in terms of providing comparable data from an emerging country, which is significant in verifying resource‐based theory and generalizing results in a global context. The findings also suggest that the firms need to focus on their unique resources rather than try to control and manipulate structural forces in their industries since “the economies today might best be viewed as resource‐based economies”. It should be noted that, in this business era, the key challenge for the managers is the optimal deployment of existing strategic resources in order to make their organizations achieve sustainable competitive advantage and superior firm performance.

A product or service usually has multiple measurable characteristics, and its performance on different measures may vary and may change over time. Multi-criterion and multi-period performance benchmarking presents a challenge for management to determine performance gaps among comparable products or services. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new performance benchmarking method to address this challenge.

The author develop this method by formulating two benchmarking functions: a differentiation function based on Shewhart average and standard deviation charts to distinguish the performance of products or services on a single measure, and a categorization function to classify each product’s or service’s overall performance across all measures. By systematically removing the lowest-performing products or services from comparison, the author use these functions iteratively to detect performance gaps.

Using this method, the author find performance gaps in each of three benchmarking applications of airports, hotels, and minivans, although a number of performance gaps are not obvious from the raw data.

This benchmarking study focuses on the quantifiable outcome performance of products and services.

This benchmarking method is generic and applicable to most products and services. It is robust not only for discovering performance gaps, but also for providing useful insights for managers to prioritize improvement efforts on individual performance measures.

The novelty of this benchmarking method lies in that it can not only find the “best overall” products or services for all performance measures, but can also pinpoint the “best-in-class” products or services as well as performance gaps for each performance measure. In addition, this paper presents several original ideas for performance benchmarking, including: using the control limits of Shewhart control charts to categorize performance gaps, systematically removing the lowest-performing products or services from comparison for the purpose of detecting hidden performance gaps, and using symbolic expressions to integrate benchmarking results from all measures and to show all performance gaps intuitively.

There is lack of literature on the evaluation of PPP projects performance based on critical success factors (CSFs). Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate and establish which of the CSFs are good predictor of PPP projects performance in terms of success criteria.

A questionnaire survey was developed based on PPP performance indicators and CSFs identified through a rigorous literature review. It was administrated among experts in PPP from the UK and the UAE. The respondents were selected purely on their work experience in PPP projects. The sites for collecting data were selected based on the similarity of the procurement methods between the two countries. The data were initially analysed using descriptive statics to identify the association between CSFs and PPP performance indicators. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine which of the CSFs were significant predictor of PPP projects performance.

The results demonstrated that “project technical feasibility, social support and local financial market assessment” contribute significantly to time performance. Detailed cost/benefits assessment contributed significantly to the cost, time and quality performance. Appropriate risk allocation and multi-benefit objectives of all stakeholders were found to be significant predictors of the service performance. CSFs “social support and detailed cost/benefits assessment” contribute positively to profit and variation performances. CSFs “profit and transparent procurement” are negatively associated with the variation performance. Cost and quality were the least performance criteria that could be predicted by the factors associated with this study.

The findings are expected to benefit the upper management of local governments and stakeholders to make informed decisions by understanding the link between the CSFs and the generic performance success measures at the onset of the of PPP project.

This study expands the existing literature by using the CSFs to predict the performance success of PPP projects.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution in subsidiary performance and the factors influencing this performance based on a unique database of approximately 800 multi-national company (MNC) subsidiaries in developing countries. Developed-country multi-national companies (MNCs) are increasingly establishing subsidiaries in developing countries. The potential gains are high; however, so are the risks. While the issue of subsidiary performance should be at the heart of any international business (IB) enquiry into MNC activity in developing countries, surprisingly little research has examined this issue.

Based on a comprehensive literature review of the IB performance literature, it is hypothesized that subsidiary performance essentially is shaped by five clusters of factors: location, industry, MNC capabilities, subsidiary role and entry strategy. These factors’ ability to explain variance in subsidiary performance is tested through a multiple regression analysis.

MNC subsidiary performance in developing countries has improved enormously in recent decades. Especially, MNC capability and subsidiary role-related factors appear to explain variance in performance, while location factors appear to have less explanatory power. This suggests that strong MNC capabilities and organization can make MNCs succeed regardless of location.

The key preparatory work for MNCs contemplating entry into developing countries is to carefully scrutinize internal capabilities and organization.

The paper presents a model for explaining variation in subsidiary performance in developing countries specifically. The paper offers unique empirical insights into the state and drivers of subsidiary performance in developing countries.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of icing on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at low Reynolds numbers and to highlight the differences to icing on manned aircraft at high Reynolds numbers. This paper follows existing research on low Reynolds number effects on ice accretion. This study extends the focus to how variations of airspeed and chord length affect the ice accretions, and aerodynamic performance degradation is investigated.

A parametric study with independent variations of airspeed and chord lengths was conducted on a typical UAV airfoil (RG-15) using icing computational fluid dynamic methods. FENSAP-ICE was used to simulate ice shapes and aerodynamic performance penalties. Validation was performed with two experimental ice shapes obtained from a low-speed icing wind tunnel. Three meteorological conditions were chosen to represent the icing typologies of rime, glaze and mixed ice. A parameter study with different chord lengths and airspeeds was then conducted for rime, glaze and mixed icing conditions.

The simulation results showed that the effect of airspeed variation depended on the ice accretion regime. For rime, it led to a minor increase in ice accretion. For mixed and glaze, the impact on ice geometry and penalties was substantially larger. The variation of chord length had a substantial impact on relative ice thicknesses, ice area, ice limits and performance degradation, independent from the icing regime.

The implications of this manuscript are relevant for highlighting the differences between icing on manned and unmanned aircraft. Unmanned aircraft are typically smaller and fly slower than manned aircraft. Although previous research has documented the influence of this on the ice accretions, this paper investigates the effect on aerodynamic performance degradation. The findings in this work show that UAVs are more sensitive to icing conditions compared to larger and faster manned aircraft. By consequence, icing conditions are more severe for UAVs.

Atmospheric in-flight icing is a severe risk for fixed-wing UAVs and significantly limits their operational envelope. As UAVs are typically smaller and operate at lower airspeeds compared to manned aircraft, it is important to understand how the differences in airspeed and size affect ice accretion and aerodynamic performance penalties.

Earlier work has described the effect of Reynolds number variations on the ice accretion characteristics for UAVs. This work is expanding on those findings by investigating the effect of airspeed and chord length on ice accretion shapes separately. In addition, this study also investigates how these parameters affect aerodynamic performance penalties (lift, drag and stall).