Search results

Information is often available to consumers through their social networks. Focusing on dairy consumers in India, this paper aims to present evidence of peer effects in consumers’ attitudes towards various food safety attributes and food safety practices.

Unobserved individual heterogeneities are crucial confounders in the identification of social (endogenous) effects. The identification is based on exploiting within-consumer variation across different aspects of attitude (or practices) related to food safety.

This paper uses a novel identification strategy that allows for average effects across attributes and practices to be estimated. Using the strategy, though this paper cannot estimate endogenous effects in each attribute or practice, this paper is able to identify such effects averaged over attributes or practices.

Cross-sectional study, caste affiliation is not defined at the right level of granularity.

The results suggest that information campaigns aimed at creating awareness about food safety can have social multiplier effects, and this also translates into changes in the practices followed to mitigate food safety risks.

In health-related awareness and practices, there are well-established cases of multiplier effects. The most significant example of this is the Pulse Polio campaign in India, where an awareness drives through social multiplier effects had such a significant impact that in 2012 India was declared polio-free. Perhaps, a similar campaign in matters related to food safety could be very fruitful.

The methodology and the issue are unique. Little exists in assessing social networks in the context of food safety.

The paper aims to establish empirical connections between corporate real estate management (CREM) practices and organisations' sources of sustainable competitive advantage (SSCA). The alignment of CREM practices with modes of achieving competitiveness provides greater competitive advantage from CREM.

The model for sustainable competitive advantage for corporate real estate (CRE) theorising the connections between CREM practices and SSCAs was implemented in a survey of Australian CRE managers. Practices' competitive benefits are reported at the aggregated level of practice categories and illustrated with a selected category of individual practices.

The model was supported by the study's results by providing connections suggested in the model but not previously corroborated in the literature. The cost source of sustainable competitive advantage was a dominant empirical competitive mode for CREM, as it was in the model. Categories of technical CREM practices providing competitive advantage were shown to be practices for “location/site selection”, “workplace styles” and “corporate finance for CRE”.

The research's relatively small sample of organisations meant that not all practices were evident. However, the study does establish the model's usefulness for evaluating CREM's alignment with organisations' modes of competition.

For CRE and its management to fully support a competitive organisation it is essential that CREM practices align with that organisation's competitive positioning. This research evaluated a framework for CRE managers to do this.

CRE, its management, and their connections to competitiveness have seldom been studied but are important as CRE is an organisations' second largest resource. This paper's model is a significant advance in frameworks linking CREM practices to organisational competitiveness for both practitioners and also further theoretical work in the area.

Organizational performance improves through several channels, including changes in efficiency, innovation and technological change. Most of the extant research has focused on overall performance, often measured by partial measures of productivity, with little attention given to the components of performance. The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of HR practices and unionization on one important channel – organization efficiency - as measured by technical and scale efficiency. Using French industry survey data, the paper shows that HR practices do influence efficiency, but this is moderated by the existence of unions. The results show a rather complex set of associations. We find robust results that show that in France, HR practices have a positive effect on scale efficiency but this effect is dampened in the presence of unions. On their own, HR practices have no effect on technical efficiency. However, some of the results suggest that HR practices can exert a positive influence when combined with unions.

This study aims to examine the effect of human resource management (HRM) in mitigating negative effects of Lean management and Six Sigma (LM&SS) on employee well-being in health care. The authors subdivide well-being into three components: happiness, trust and health.

This is a cross-sectional, multisite survey study in internal service units of hospitals. Data analyzed using multivariate regression come from a sample of 1,886 survey respondents (42 units, N = 218 supervisors, N = 1,668 employees) in eight Dutch academic hospitals that have implemented LM&SS.

The present study findings show no or weak effects of LM&SS on the happiness and health component of employee well-being. In addition, the authors found a significant but weak direct positive effect (ß = 0.07) of the LM&SS bundle on the trusting relationships component of well-being. Therefore, moderating effects of HRM practices on the relationship between LM&SS and employee well-being seem less relevant because an existing relationship between LM&SS and employee well-being is a prerequisite for moderation (Hayes, 2009). There were unexpected side effects. Inspired by research that discusses direct effects of HRM on employee well-being, the authors tested this relationship and found that HRM has a direct positive effect on trust and happiness of employees in health care. For the health component of well-being, the present results show a weak negative effect of HRM.

This study results in a cautiously optimistic view about LM&SS in health care, provided that it is applied in a targeted manner (to improve the performance of their processes) and that HRM is strategically aligned with the goals of LM&SS to improve employees’ happiness and trusting relationships.

Unique features of the study are the focus on the consequences for employees’ well-being related to LM&SS in health care, the role of HRM in regard to this relationship and the participation of all eight Dutch academic hospitals in this research.

Quality management (QM) practices have long been suggested as a package to improve the quality performance of a company. Yet, empirical studies offered little support of this perspective as only a small set of QM practices were found to be conductive to quality improvement. By taking a new approach, the purpose of this paper is simultaneously evaluate the individual and synergistic effects of several key quality practices on operations performance.

Survey data were collected and used to test the proposed hypotheses. Hierarchical regression analyses were performed to assess the magnitude of synergistic effects and individual effects.

It is found in this study that the synergistic effects across QM practices are substantial in enhancing all operations performance dimensions whereas individual effect varies for different performance goals.

This study makes theoretical contributes to the field of QM by providing empirical support of the interdependence assumption of QM practices and resolving the inconsistent findings. Practically, the results suggest that in-depth implementation of various QM practices simultaneously can be highly effective to achieve performance improvement on all accounts. In addition, the positive additional individual effects also open up a firm’s strategic choices of where to focus the resource investment in the adoption process as long as the strategic focus can justify its contribution toward the desired performance goals.

This paper investigates organizational performance effects by using performance management (PM) practices (both quality and internal managerial practices) and the moderating effects of the organizational context (cultural aspects and government pressures) on this relationship.

Interrelationships are studied based on data collected by a unique survey administered to Portuguese government agencies. A combination of the economic theory (and the New Public Management [NPM] assumptions) with the institutional theory (inspired by the old institutional economy [OIE] and the new institutional sociology [NIS]) provides a plausibly adequate theoretical framework.

These support the hypothesis about the positive effects of PM practices use (both internal and quality-oriented practices) on organizational performance which validates economic and NPM assumptions. The regression results also show that performance would improve if PM practices were aligned with the organizational culture (at least partially). Looking at the moderating effects, the study finds that agencies more oriented to the use of internal management practices aligned with a citizen-centred approach would have improvements in internal performance, reinforcing OIE assumptions. In addition, findings confirm expectations about the insignificant impact on performance when agencies use PM practices under great government pressures (NIS in the isomorphism perspective).

The limitations appointed in the literature regarding the use of the survey method also apply to this study.

This paper innovates by the research on the interrelationships between the organizational context, the use of PM practices and the organizational performance. The use of different theories in a complementary way (economic and institutional theories) in the explanation of performance consequences provides new insights into the body of performance management in the public sector.

This article examines the direct effect of total quality management (TQM) practices on organizational performance (OP) and innovation (INN), as well as their indirect effect through organizational learning (OL) as a mediating variable. In addition, this survey examines company size as a contextual variable in the relationship between TQM and outcome variables.

A conceptual framework is proposed to test causal links between TQM, OP, INN and OL. To empirically test this framework, 110 questionnaires were collected from large Tunisian quality-certified industries, and 167 questionnaires were collected from small and medium-sized industries (SMIs) in order to examine the effect of company size. In this order, a multigroup analysis (MGA) is performed.

Using the structural equation modeling technique, seven hypotheses are investigated. The results reveal that TQM has a direct and significant positive effect on OP and INN. Data analysis shows that there is a significant positive effect between TQM and OL, while OL positively influences OP and INN. Furthermore, the results illustrate a mediating effect of OL between TQM and OP and INN. The results reveal that large industries and SMIs show significant differences in the relationship, including the conceptual model.

The conceptual framework can be used by practitioners for effective implementation of TQM practices to simultaneously improve operational performance, quality performance and INN. This study also focuses on the role of OL in large-scale industries.

While the relationships between TQM, INN and OP have been examined separately in previous studies, this study examines the relationship between these variables in a unique model in Tunisian industries, including OL as a mediating variable. In addition, it is one of the few studies that considers firm size as a contextual variable and provides an analysis of its effect on the relationships between these variables. This study presents new data and empirical insights into the relationship between these variables.

This paper examines the relationship between human resource practices in 173 hospitals in the United Kingdom and four organizational outcome categories – clinical, financial, employee attitudes and perceptions, and patient attitudes and perceptions. The overarching proposition set forth and examined in this paper is that human resource management (HRM) practices and delivery of care practices have varied effects on each of these outcomes. More specifically, the authors set forth the proposition that specific practices will have positive effects on one outcome category while simultaneously having a negative effect on other performance outcomes, broadly defined.

The paper introduces a broader stakeholder framework for assessing the HR–performance relationship in the healthcare setting. This multi-dimensional framework incorporates the effects of human resource practices on customers (patients), management, and frontline staff and can also be applied to other sectors such as manufacturing. This approach acknowledges the potential for incompatibilities between stakeholder performance objectives. In the healthcare industry specifically, our framework broadens the notion of performance.

Overall, our results provide support for the proposition that different stakeholders will be affected differently by the use of managerial practices. We believe that the findings reported in this paper highlight the importance of examining multiple stakeholder outcomes associated with managerial practices and the need to identify the inherent trade-offs associated with their adoption.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the moderating impact of industry clockspeed (IC) on the relationship between Lean Manufacturing (LM) practices and operational performance. A model for evaluating the impact of LM is developed and the moderating effect of IC is taken into consideration as a fundamental variable that affects the causal relationship between LM practices and operational performance.

A structural equation model was proposed and investigated across two groups based on IC level (Group 1: low IC and Group 2: high IC). A structured survey questionnaire was used to collect empirical data from 600 companies listed by the Confederation of Zimbabwean Industries. A total of 214 usable questionnaires were obtained giving a response rate of 35.6 percent. The data were analyzed using Smart PLS 3 and SPSS version 25.

The results revealed that LM practices directly and positively affected operational performance and IC had a positive moderation effect on the relationship between LM practices and operational performance. The results indicated that the structural equation model remained invariant across the groups. This showed that IC had a moderating effect on the relationship between LM practices and operational performance for both low IC and high IC industries.

The study analyzed the moderating effect of IC in Zimbabwean industries. The study will provide further evidence to managers on the impact of LM practices on operational performance in developing countries.

The consequences of extreme climatic events that threaten food security have created the urgent need to properly adopt climate-smart adaptation techniques to improve productivity. The study examined the sustainability responses to climate-smart adaptation and the implication it has for explaining the food security situations among farm households in the Central Region of Ghana.

We estimated Heckit treatment effect model to analyse cross-sectional data collected from randomly selected farmers in the Central Region.

Analysis of farm sustainability index suggests that farmers' agricultural practices in response to climate change are lowly or moderately sustainable. We further found that while majority of the farm households are severely food insecure or food insecure with hunger, only about one-third are food insecure without hunger and the remaining few being food secure. The sustainability of farm practices is being impacted by the farmers’ choice of climate smart adaptation measures at the farm level. Consequently, the farm households' food security situation is found to be improved when sustainable farming practices are employed in the face of managing climate change effects.

Conclusions drawn from the study findings give rooms for policy implications that suggest responsibilities for policymakers, farmers and other stakeholders to promote CSA practices in food crop production in Ghana. These policy implications will contribute to improve crop productivity, increase incomes and thus enhance food security among farm families. Awareness campaign about benefits of CSA practices and technologies need to be strengthened among farmers in Ghana by government and NGOs that matter in promoting farm resilience to climate change. Given the important impacts of sustainable farm practices on household food security situation, policies that seek to build the adaptive capacity of farmers to climate vulnerability impacts should take into consideration the sustainability dimensions of the adaptation and mitigation measures to be advocated for use at farm levels.

Our paper contributes to literature knowledge on climate-smart adaptation practices effect on food security as evidenced in some recent literature. The paper makes a unique contribution by highlighting the food security implication of the sustainability impact of CSA practices, thereby exploring sustainability as an impact pathway between climate smart adaptations practices and food security in a developing country like Ghana. We approached our study aiming at making new contribution by introducing in the study implementation a quasi-experimental research design which future studies on impacts of climate smart adaptation practices can replicate.