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This research explores perceptions of knowledge management processes held by managers and employees in a service industry. To date, empirical research on knowledge management in the service industry is sparse. This research seeks to examine absorptive capacity and its four capabilities of acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation and their impact on effective knowledge management. All of these capabilities are strategies that enable external knowledge to be recognized, imported and integrated into, and further developed within the organization effectively. The research tests the relationships between absorptive capacity and effective knowledge management through analysis of quantitative data (n = 549) drawn from managers and employees in 35 residential aged care organizations in Western Australia. Responses were analysed using Partial Least Square-based Structural Equation Modelling. Additional analysis was conducted to assess if the job role (of manager or employee) and three industry context variables of profit motive, size of business and length of time the organization has been in business, impacted on the hypothesized relationships.

Structural model analysis examines the relationships between variables as hypothesized in the research framework. Analysis found that absorptive capacity and the four capabilities correlated significantly with effective knowledge management, with absorptive capacity explaining 56% of the total variability for effective knowledge management. Findings from this research also show that absorptive capacity and the four capabilities provide a useful framework for examining knowledge management in the service industry. Additionally, there were no significant differences in the perceptions held between managers and employees, nor between respondents in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Furthermore, the size of the organization and length of time the organization has been in business did not impact on absorptive capacity, the four capabilities and effective knowledge management.

The research considers implications for business in light of these findings. The role of managers in providing leadership across the knowledge management process was confirmed, as well as the importance of guiding routines and knowledge sharing throughout the organization. Further, the results indicate that within the participating organizations there are discernible differences in the way that some organizations manage their knowledge, compared to others. To achieve effective knowledge management, managers need to provide a supportive workplace culture, facilitate strong employee relationships, encourage employees to seek out new knowledge, continually engage in two-way communication with employees and provide up-to-date policies and procedures that guide employees in doing their work. The implementation of knowledge management strategies has also been shown in this research to enhance the delivery and quality of residential aged care.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on how the relational capital of the information technology (IT) department creates value in organizations. In addition, the paper presents a multi-dimensional scale to measure and manage relational capital in the IT department.

In the first, explorative phase of the study, interviews and focus groups were conducted in order to develop a new measurement scale, which was subsequently tested through a survey questionnaire (212 respondents).

This research suggests that the relational capital of the IT department is a very important resource for the creation of strategic value. The statistical analysis conducted for this study confirmed the validity and reliability of the novel scale developed to measure this resource. Finally, thanks to factor analysis, five dimensions for the scale were identified.

Data were collected in northern Italy only. Further studies are advisable to confirm the validity of the constructs and scale.

The questionnaire presented in this study can be used to monitor the effectiveness of the interactions between the IT department and the other key actors involved in IT-enabled innovation. The adoption of this scale and its possible adaptation to specific, evolving business contexts may enhance the practitioner’s understanding of the role of relational capital in the value creation process.

The paper contributes to the “third stage” of intellectual capital research by concentrating on an intra-organizational level of analysis, which has been overlooked in the literature to date.

This study investigates organizational climate under the thriving at work perspective using a network approach. The authors demonstrate how organizational climate functions as a complex system and what relationships between variables from different dimensions are the most important to characterize the construct.

By surveying 119,266 workers from 284 companies based in Brazil, the authors estimated a Gaussian graphical model with LASSO regularization for the complete dataset and for two subsets of cases randomly drawn from the whole dataset. The walktrap algorithm was applied for community detection, and a strong model for measurement invariance was fit to test whether the organizational climate is perceived similarly across groups.

Results show that the networks estimated for both groups are quite consistent, with similar number of communities and items detected. The same pattern was found for the expected influence of each item. Measurement invariance was confirmed, showing that organizational climate is perceived similarly in both groups. The most important community detected and whose items have higher levels of centrality was organizational commitment, followed by a community centered around macro-organizational aspects covering cultural integrity, organizational agility and responsible leadership.

Studies in the field have attested to the possibility of investigating the phenomenon from four (Campbell et al., 1970) to over 80 dimensions (Koys and DeCottis, 1991). As a result, since several dimensions have been produced to investigate organizational climate, there is no consensus on the quality and number of dimensions that should be considered to measure such a vast and multifaceted construct. Built on thriving at work perspective, eight dimensions were devised to cover a wide range of characteristics that distinguish organizational climate, including those related to Industry 4.0 (Coetzee, 2019). However, one may argue that a few dimensions, namely social responsibility, diversity and inclusion, or even more items describing work-life balance could expand the depth and breadth of the instrument and potentially trigger new associations that might eventually impose a new logic to the comprehension of climate as a system. Future studies combining the dimensions investigated in this study with other dimensions are therefore highly recommended for an even more comprehensive investigation.

The results of this investigation show how to apply psychological networks to gain insights into different variables and dimensions of organizational climate. These findings can be used for the development of organizational policies focused on the most relevant aspects of organizational climate. This information would allow organizations to go beyond simply describing the individual frequencies for each item and could even be used to create a weighted scoring model that could prioritize variables with higher levels of centrality.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that investigates organizational climate using psychological networks; it provides a better understanding of the relationships established between items from different dimensions as opposed to the common cause framework whose focus is on the investigation of dimensions separately.

This study aims to assess volatility spillovers and directional connectedness between electricity (EPs) and natural gas prices (GPs) in the Canadian electricity market, based on a hydrothermal power generation market strongly dependent on exogenous variables such as fossil fuel prices and climatology factors.

The methodology is divided into two stages. First, a quantile vector autoregression model is used to evaluate the direction and magnitude of the influence between natural gas and electricity prices through different quantiles of their distributions. Second, a cross-quantilogram is estimated to measure the directional predictability between these prices. The data set consists of daily electricity and natural gas prices between January 2015 and December 2023.

The main finding shows that electricity prices are pure shock receivers of volatility from natural gas prices for the different quantiles. In this way, natural gas price fluctuations explain 0.20%, 0.98% and 22.72% of electricity price volatility for the 10th, 50th and 90th quantiles, respectively. On the other hand, a significant and positive correlation is observed in the high quantiles of the electricity prices for any natural gas price value.

The study described the risk to the electricity market caused by nonrenewable source price fluctuations and provided evidence for designing regulatory policies to reduce its exposure in Alberta, Canada. It also allows us to understand the importance of natural gas in the energy transition process and define it as the fundamental determinant of the electricity market dynamic.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the food safety management system (HACCP – type system) implemented in Greek food businesses, examine the techno-managerial factors influencing its application according to enterprises' opinion and correlate these answers to the HACCP evaluation results.

The study involved 33 slaughterhouses located throughout Greece. Two types of questionnaires were used (IF questionnaire – for the influencing factors and HE questionnaire – for HACCP evaluation). Reliability or item analysis and principal component analysis were applied to the data obtained from the survey.

The results showed that the companies identifying the benefits of HACCP implementation as very important have fully understood possible problems and had the best results as regards HACCP evaluation. Companies not identifying the benefits as important had poor score in HACCP evaluation. Businesses with HACCP certification for longer periods and especially those that were certified according to more than one standard had better performance in HACCP evaluation. In addition, slaughterhouses involved in rearing of animals as well, especially those slaughtering only one animal species, and which do not provide services for others, seem to have better performance as regards HACCP evaluation.

The findings of this study correlate the results of the HACCP evaluation with the factors that affect the implementation of a food safety management system using the hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and canonical correlation analysis (CCA) statistical technique.

The purpose of this paper is to examine analysts’ evaluations of usefulness of KPIs disclosed by UK corporates. The disclosure of KPIs, both financial and non-financial is driven by legislation in the form of the Companies Act 2006. The paper considers two of the key concerns raised with KPI disclosure: a lack of standardisation (leading to inconsistency of calculation) and a lack of external assurance.

A questionnaire was prepared which was used as the basis for semi-structured interviews with senior professional equity analysts. Questions were designed to cover aspects of usefulness and desirability of standardisation to improve consistency and comparability as well as the incremental value of audit firms providing assurance of KPIs.

KPIs are indeed a useful supplement to the financial statements in developing a corporate narrative. Analysts highlighted that a significant amount of this information is released to the market in advance of the Annual Report which performs a confirmatory role. Whilst analysts highlight inconsistencies in calculation methods of KPIs they did not feel that a standard calculation should be prescribed. Further they did not feel that assurance over the calculation would be valuable as they perceived that this would remove the flexibility of companies to select the most appropriate measures.

The paper contributes to the body of research on disclosure by focussing on how the KPI disclosure is used by the intended audience and whether and how the disclosure mechanism may be strengthened.

The findings provide an interface between theory and practice adding to the body of knowledge on disclosure theory and in particular KPI disclosure and how it is used. This will in turn help the standard setters in ensuring that disclosures enhance usefulness.

Insight into the actual usefulness of these measures is important to inform this debate on presentation of the corporate “narrative”. This goes some way to addressing the unanswered questions in Healy and Palepu (2001) and the calls for further qualitative research in the area (Watson et al., 2002).

The purpose of this paper is to study the efficiency of different oil and gas markets. Most previous studies examined the issue using low frequency date sampled at monthly, weekly, or daily frequencies. In this study, 30-minute intraday data are used to explore efficiency in energy markets.

Sophisticated statistical analysis techniques such as Granger-causality regressions, augmented Dickey-Fuller tests, cointegration tests, vector autoregressions are used to explore the transmission of information between oil and gas energy markets.

This study provides evidence for efficiency in energy markets. The new information that arrives either to futures markets or spot markets is digested correctly, completely, and in a fast manner, and is propagated to the other market. The evidence indicates high efficiency.

This study is one of the first papers that uses 30-minute interval intraday data to investigate efficiency in oil and gas commodity markets.

Humane entrepreneurship (HumEnt) has been theoretically proposed as a new model of entrepreneurship supporting the idea of an enlarged entrepreneurial strategic posture. The aim of paper is to frame humane entrepreneurial orientation’s (HEO) characteristics by showing how firms apply the HumEnt approach, and to offer suggestions to build an HEO measurement scale.

The study adopts a case study approach, focusing on five Italian small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The study (1) identifies which are the characteristics of HEO strategic posture in the enterprises under examination; (2) shows that entrepreneurs' personal values and credos are fundamental to having an HEO strategic posture adopted; (3) provides indications on the development of a measurement scale through a discussion of emerging HEO themes.

The value of the study is that emerging themes of HEO strategic posture was derived from the analysis of five Italian SMEs. Entrepreneur's personal values have been proven to be relevant in the implementation of HEO. Based on the emerging HEO themes, the study contributes to the literature opening the way toward the building of an all-encompassing HEO measurement scale.