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Considering the human factor, the quality of the personnel is vital to ensure especially the value creation in the ports. Therefore, employee quality stands out for withstanding the pressures that stem from global trade on its operational speed felt by ports in recent years. Accordingly, the selection of the qualified personnel at the ports is very critical and a tool based on dynamic capabilities is needed to manage this process well. The aim of this study is to develop a model based on dynamic capabilities for recruitment process of ports.

Port personnel should have dynamic capabilities detected from the literature. These capabilities were approached as criteria. In this study, Buckley's proposed fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method was employed for weighting the whole criteria. After that, weights of the criteria were used to prioritize alternatives with the fuzzy TOPSIS method.

This model reflects port managers' priorities and port customers' evaluations. Thus, the model can also reflect the level of integration of ports' related department managers into the recruitment process. The analyses allow the evaluation of the attitudes of the human resources department in the related port while fulfilling the personnel recruitment function. As a result of analyses, differences between perceptions of port managers and customers served as a feedback to the human resource management department of the ports.

One of the originalities of this study was derived from its customer-oriented perspective. This is a unique study that gathers common personnel capabilities related to the operation, planning and customer relationship departments and evaluates the success of these capabilities from the customer perspective.

In response to environmental uncertainty, organizations rely on independent, empowered teams to increase their responsiveness to change. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how objectives and key results (OKRs) can contribute to creating a shared vision which keeps the different, empowered teams aligned.

Through a qualitative study, this paper develops a conceptual model of how OKRs lead to a shared vision. The authors interview professionals in nine organizations differing in size and industry who recently introduced agile, focusing on the main hurdles encountered and benefits obtained from the methodology.

The findings confirm that OKRs are an effective goal-setting methodology and suggest that their successful implementation builds on the new ways of organizing introduced by the agile methods. Moreover, the findings suggest that OKRs contribute to developing a shared vision and increase the alignment: first, the organizational vision becomes clear and its definition is participatory; second at the team level, individuals align around a shared team vision through participative definition of objectives.

The contribution of the paper is two-fold: this study provide an overview on the methodology, which is diffused from a practice perspective, but has not yet been addressed from a theoretical point of view. And this study connects OKRs to extant theory on goal-setting and vision development. This study shows they act as a coupling mechanism which helps empowered and independent teams together.

Background: The study focuses on the challenges encountered during the distribution of food and face-mask items during the first COVID-19 lock-down by various relief supply chain actors.

Methods: Data were collected from forty (40) relief actors through online (via Zoom and telephones) and face-to-face interviews, between January 2021 to March 2021. Data was coded based on per-determined themes after which it was further processed using Atlas ti. v7.57 to generate patterns.

Results: The study established challenges related to needs identification, procurement, warehousing, transportation, handling, beneficiary verification, and last-mile distribution. Additionally, the media and politics coupled with the emergence of new actors and governance issues were part of the challenges identified.

Conclusions: The identified challenges were internal and external to the relief supply chain; hence actors could have control over some while others were beyond their control. The findings could inform practitioners and policymakers on what challenges are likely to affect their operations, especially during a pandemic, and design appropriate coping mechanisms.

Leaders today are continuously seeking models to navigate through the challenges posed by the pandemic times, so as to help the organizations flourish in the volatile business environment. This paper attempts to explore the alignment of insights drawn from the ancient Indian scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, with today’s leadership requirements, towards the betterment of both the leaders and organizations.

A qualitative approach with thematic analysis is used to identify leadership qualities pertinent in difficult times through interviews with 15 employees at leadership positions. It establishes the alignment of the qualities with the sapient advice from the Holy Scripture, maneuvered by today’s leaders to become more purposeful and impactful.

The discernments from the Bhagavad Gita holistically entwine the emotional, intellectual and spiritual aspects of resilient leaders and provide guidance on the leaders’ attitude towards work, behaviour and self management, to help steer through the challenging environment. With turbulent changes during the COVID-19 pandemic, conventional leadership skills would be outmoded, and hence the leaders need to strengthen the critical shifts in their own established sets of attitudes as well as that of their workforce.

Under the changing work environment, while the new leadership narrative of the world beyond takes shape, this study delves both into ancient Indian wisdom and current opinion to identify a template of workable practices that would differentiate extraordinary leaders from the rest.

The motivation for this study comes from decision making related to strategic marketing orientations in international markets. The authors examine if customer orientation and customer relationship orientation perform as two distinct constructs in driving firm innovativeness, and how together they support business growth among export firms. This study aims to suggest a customer-centric strategy for export firms that drive innovativeness and growth.

An international corporation specialized in company information services provided a list of the contact information of Italian companies. The authors sent an email request to respond to an online survey and received 416 effective responses from firms operating in export markets. The authors propose and empirically test a model in which customer orientation, customer relationship orientation and innovativeness predict business growth. This model controls for the effects of firm size, industry and customer type (B2B vs. B2C).

The study findings suggest that customer orientation and customer relationship orientation are two distinct strategic orientations driving innovativeness. However, they do not directly affect business growth. Instead, they require the innovativeness of an exporter to materialize as business growth.

The results of the study recommend business strategies focusing not only on customer needs and satisfaction but also on retaining current customers and building customer relationships in international markets. Firms can learn from international customers and develop effective customer-centric strategies to spread the acquired information into the internal decision-making as it contributes to firm innovativeness and business growth in international markets.

This study is one of the pioneering studies combining customer orientation and customer relationship orientation, showing their theoretical and empirical divergence. This study is also among the first which tests how the two strategic orientations together with innovativeness promote business growth among export firms. The authors add understanding of the synergistic effects both of using customer information and developing deeper relationships on firm innovativeness and performance among exporters.