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This study aims to investigate the relationship between project management competency, job motivation and performance in people engaged in electronic commerce (e-commerce). A questionnaire was developed for e-commerce workers in various professional aspects including business strategy planning, content management and design, sales services, marketing business sales, host settings, analysis and management. A total of 299 valid questionnaires were retrieved. Multiple regression analysis was applied to the testing and analysis on important competences for project management and the factors influencing job performance.

In this study, the related indexes are measured mainly through appropriate questionnaire design and the questionnaires were mainly distributed among employees and managers of the e-commerce enterprises. Tables 5–1 provide the personal profiles of the e-commerce personnel. A total of 350 questionnaires were distributed and 320 questionnaires were returned. After the 320 questionnaires were sorted and categorized, 21 incompletely-filled and invalid questionnaires were excluded, for a total of 299 valid questionnaires that were returned. Based on the quantitative data obtained from the returned valid questionnaires, files were created and statistical analyzes were conducted by the computerized statistical software statistical product and service solutions 21. According to the research question and nature of this study, the present study mainly adopted statistical methods, including descriptive statistical analysis, reliability analysis, Pearson’s correlation analysis and regression analysis.

The results suggested that the project management competency of those engaged in e-commerce had a positive influence on their work performance. The capabilities in the management of integration, scope and procurement were significantly important factors identified in this study. In addition, the internal and external motivations of those engaged in e-commerce had a positive influence on work performance, and thus, facilitated their influence on the project management competency. The results and statistical analysis could be a reference in e-commerce-related business management and serve as the basis for evaluation of the training of project management competencies for those engaged in e-commerce and further improvements of human capitals and corporate competitive advantages.

This study used literature on project management competence and job performance as a foundation; previous studies argue that project management competence has a positive correlation with job performance. Empirical results reveal that among the e-commerce personnel, most dimensions of project management competence are significantly correlated with job performance. This study reveals that stakeholder management competence, the newly introduced 10th dimension of project management competence, is also significantly correlated with job performance. Therefore, study results reveal that project management competence has a significant positive correlation with job performance. In this study, the two constructs of internal motivation and external motivation in job motivation are introduced for use as disturbing factors. Empirical results reveal that internal motivation and external motivation have a significant positive disturbing effect with respect to the influence of cost management competence and human resource management competence on job performance. Hackman and Oldham (1975) contend that the jobs calling for a variety of skills can boost the job motivation of employees. Study results reveal that job motivation is of great importance to the influence of project management competence on job performance and can be used as the basis for improving job performance.

The objective of this study is to investigate how country risk, different political actions from the government and bureaucratic behavior influence the activities in industry supply chains (SCs) in emerging markets. The main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of these external stakeholders’ elements to the demand-side and supply-side drivers and barriers for improving competitiveness of Ready-Made Garment (RMG) industry in the way of analyzing supply chain. Considering the phenomenon of recent change in the RMG business environment and the competitiveness issues this study uses the principles of stakeholder and resource dependence theory and aims to find out some factors which influence to make an efficient supply chain for improving competitiveness. The RMG industry of Bangladesh is the case application of this study. Following a positivist paradigm, this study adopts a two phase sequential mixed-method research design consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. Qualitative field study is then carried out to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. A survey is carried out with sample of top and middle level executives of different garment companies of Dhaka city in Bangladesh and the collected quantitative data are analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling. The findings support eight hypotheses. From the analysis the external stakeholders’ elements like bureaucratic behavior and country risk have significant influence to the barriers. From the internal stakeholders’ point of view the manufacturers’ and buyers’ drivers have significant influence on the competitiveness. Therefore, stakeholders need to take proper action to reduce the barriers and increase the drivers, as the drivers have positive influence to improve competitiveness.

This study has both theoretical and practical contributions. This study represents an important contribution to the theory by integrating two theoretical perceptions to identify factors of the RMG industry’s SC that affect the competitiveness of the RMG industry. This research study contributes to the understanding of both external and internal stakeholders of national and international perspectives in the RMG (textile and clothing) business. It combines the insights of stakeholder and resource dependence theories along with the concept of the SC in improving effectiveness. In a practical sense, this study certainly contributes to the Bangladeshi RMG industry. In accordance with the desire of the RMG manufacturers, the research has shown that some influential constructs of the RMG industry’s SC affect the competitiveness of the RMG industry. The outcome of the study is useful for various stakeholders of the Bangladeshi RMG industry sector ranging from the government to various private organizations. The applications of this study are extendable through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

This paper aims to measure the extent to which students possess the necessary competences of an employable graduate, the authors explored the development and validation of a questionnaire that measures employability competences of students in higher education through combining insights from higher education and workplace learning literature.

The paper aims to develop and validate the questionnaire a systematic literature review and factor analyses were conducted. The authors applied the questionnaire to two different groups of students. First, to undergraduate students in an applied sciences program in Belgium (N = 935). The dataset was randomly divided into two subsets to conduct an exploratory and a confirmatory factor analysis. Next, another confirmatory factor analysis was done to cross-validate the factor structure found. For this, the questionnaire was offered to a group of undergraduate and graduate students at a university in The Netherlands (N = 995).

The results support a model of employability based on combined insights from higher education and workplace learning literature. The model consists of the following seven factors: social competences, e-literacy, efficacy beliefs, flexibility, healthy work–life balance, lifelong learning and oral and written communication.

The questionnaire can be utilized to screen students' employability profiles and examine the relationship between teaching practices and students’ employability competences.

With the development of the internet, huge numbers of reviews are generated, disseminated, and shared on e-commerce and social media websites by internet users. These reviews usually indicate users’ opinions about products or services directly, and are thus valuable for efficient marketing. The purpose of this paper is to mine online users’ attitudes from a huge pool of reviews via automatic question answering.

The authors make use of online reviews to complete an online investigation via automatic question answering (AQA). In the process of AQA, question generation and extraction of corresponding answers are conducted via sentiment computing. In order to verify the performance of AQA for online investigation, online reviews from a well-known travel website, namely Tuniu.com, are used as the experimental data set. Finally, the experimental results from AQA vs a traditional questionnaire are compared.

The experimental results show that results between the AQA-based automatic questionnaire and the traditional questionnaire are consistent. Hence, the AQA method is reliable in identifying users’ attitudes. Although this paper takes Chinese tourism reviews as the experimental data, the method is domain and language independent.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to use the AQA method to mine users’ attitudes towards tourism services. Using online reviews may overcome problems with using traditional questionnaires, such as high costs and long cycle for questionnaire design and answering.

Teachers, students, librarians, scholars and domain experts often spend a lot of time and effort to select good and suitable textbooks. This study aims to propose and construct a computer-aided bibliometric system to rate textbooks. Through the software system designed here, the quality of every textbook can be easily and quickly known. This system will benefit both scholars and librarians.

Four methods were used to evaluate textbooks in this study, including: questionnaire recommendation analysis, dissertation citation analysis, library circulation analysis and bibliography analysis. The system architecture includes three subsystems: the textbook indexing and searching subsystem, the statistics added-value analysis subsystem and the citation report inquiry subsystem. An example demonstrates the usability and validity of the proposed method and system. The example uses surveying textbooks. The following percentages were used in the correlation calculation: textbook citation percentage (TCP), textbook library circulation percentage (TLP) and textbook recommend percentage (TRP).

There are three textbook assessment methods applied in this study, including: dissertation citation, library circulation and questionnaire recommendation. Dissertation citations for textbooks have a high correlation value with library circulation. The frequency correlation calculation was 0.7, while the TCP, TLP and TRP correlation calculation was 0.84. Therefore, the dissertation citation method can be accepted to evaluate textbooks effectively.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work related to evaluating surveying textbooks using a computer-aided bibliometrics system that can deal with large amounts of data and generate results quickly. This can be applied to other fields as well.

Unnatural working postures usually cause musculoskeletal problems for workers in work field, especially in traditional industry. Many analysis and survey methodologies have been developed to identify unnatural postures and disorder risks in workplaces. The Ovako Working Posture Analyzing System (OWAS) and Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire (NMQ) are the representative methods and applied widely. This study applied the both tools to investigate the work field of a manufacturing factory of the water heater’s case. We divided the manufacturing process into nine workshops, took the pictures of working motions by DV camera and analyzed the postures on OWAS. From the OWAS results, we could identify the risks level of musculoskeletal symptoms as four Action Categories (AC). And from the comparison of OWAS and NMQ results, we could provide the suggestions to improve the working methods and environment. From the results of OWAS, we found that the operators) head/neck and back were above AC3 in some workshops. If the situation continued in long period, the operators might have the risk to get musculoskeletal symptoms. From the investigation of NMQ, we also found that the percentage of aches on neck, shoulders and lower back were higher than other parts of body. The correlation between aches and jobs was more than 75 per cent. So we provided some suggestions to improve: work rotation and adjustment of work surface/height to fit in with Ergonomics. Then the risks of musculoskeletal symptoms would be reduced.

This research aims to use the Oriental Institute of Technology Library (the OIT Library) in Taiwan as a case to introduce some of the mobile web services which can be provided by a library, as well as to investigate and discuss the first two mobile web services offered by the OIT Library, the due‐day reminder and renewal‐request services, at length. Furthermore, the performance evaluation of the two services is conducted.

This research employs system logs and patron questionnaires to understand the effectiveness of, and patron satisfaction toward, the two services.

Results of system log analysis show that the usage of the two services improves the average number of overdue occurrences, average amount of overdue fines, average amount of overdue fines per transaction, and average overdue rate; furthermore, the use of the services also indirectly increases the number of items borrowed by patrons, which corresponds with the questionnaire analysis as well. Results of questionnaire analysis show that 71.3 per cent and 87.5 per cent of the respondents are strongly satisfied with the due‐day reminder and renewal‐request services, respectively.

As a case study, this research provides a direction on designing mobile web services for a library. In addition, it points out how to evaluate the performance and patron satisfaction of mobile web services through system log analysis and patron questionnaire.

This research increases the understanding of what mobile web services can be offered by a library. In addition, many previous studies only describe certain kinds of mobile web services without showing their efficacy; however, this research evaluates the efficacy of two mobile web services in the OIT Library by an unobtrusive system log analysis, which is then complemented by a patron questionnaire.

For decades now, industrial manufacturers’ complex product development (CPD) activities have seen various improvement approaches as well as product development (PD) support processes all in the quest to achieve shorter PD lead-times and higher return on investments. CPD process improvements, in terms of complex engineering design and delivery, still lack a lot more variance to be addressed on the “better, faster and cheaper” paradigm for efficient communication and information exchange flow processes. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper presents employing social network theory analysis and statistical Pearson (r) correlation analysis in a triangulation approach to a proposed optimum conceptual information technology systems’ architecture and a “best practice” information flow process toward enhancing an industrial sustainable competitive advantage. Closed-end questionnaires were used to collect data for the scale or level of communication network from a sample size of eight Ship Power supply chain network complex engineering design and delivery systems-design teams with at least five members from each team.

Two extremely interesting findings and observations were identified from the analysis carried out (isolates and close-harmonic analysis) as well as the findings from the hypotheses’ testing. These essential analyses of the engineering systems-design teams were conducted by using the triangulation or mixed-method described in the abstract methodology identified above.

Effective and efficient real-time communication is seen as the vehicle for effective organization management. Although there may be some studies on effective technical communication in organizational and enterprise supply chain management settings, this research identifies a new robust and extensive analysis and feasible solutions to most of the communication bottlenecks and inefficient socio-industrial information flow processes, which need enhancement for industrial competitive advantage. Furthermore, the contribution of this paper further enhances the level 4 implementation aspect of the supply chain operation reference model in a replicable industry-specific perspective.

Missing in most of the research on selling has been an examination of the process from the point of view of the customer. When satisfaction in selling has been considered, researchers have focused on the satisfaction of the salesperson with his job and/or the impact of this job satisfaction on performance (e.g. Bluen, Barling & Burns, 1990; Churchill, Ford & Walker, 1979; Pruden & Peterson, 1971). To concentrate on salesperson performance while neglecting customers is to ignore the most important half of the relationship between buyers and sellers and entirely disregards the marketing concept and the streams of research in customer satisfaction. This research takes a different approach and examines customers’ satisfaction with salespeople.