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Students investigated whether the commonly accepted net promoter score was an accurate way of measuring the quality of service, whether presenteeism was just as corrosive as absenteeism and what internal and external factors contributed to business success or failure. What the paper tried to foster from the outset was the concept of a learning society in order to gauge how students experienced the need to reinforce their arguments with theory. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The author's interest focused on the link between business and academia, what constituted an academic presence in the workplace and whether or not this academic input helped students to become more effective members of their organisation. The author surveyed 30 students for this qualitative study.

Students welcomed clear direction and an opportunity to translate their experience into a problem-solving exercise. They realised they were in the business of developing themselves and strove to bring clarity to their life and work and to demystify their own texts.

This is not a longitudinal study but a sample of questionnaire responses from 30 out of a possible 150 students. The “measurement” is broad, rather than precise.

By engaging in a partnership with Middlesex University, the Halifax Community Bank appeared to want to effect radical change in its organisational culture. To the students this was no vacuous public relations exercise but a commitment to getting staff/students to re-examine the contingencies of contemporary business and come up with solutions to a range of business problems.

Even the smartest organizations believe that “good enough is never good enough.” Highly intelligent people may be able to do important things individually; still, it is their accumulated brainpower that allows them to do great things. Collective intelligence means when a group of people do things that seem intelligent. On the other hand, when intelligent people are gathered or hired in an organization, they tend toward collective stupidity and slow-wittedness. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to develop a model of the factors affecting and affected by collective stupidity.

This study was conducted using a mixed-method approach and in two phases: qualitative and quantitative. First, in the qualitative phase and in order to achieve new findings, semi-structured interviews with experts from 12 knowledge-based companies were used to design a conceptual model and formulate the hypotheses. At the end of the qualitative phase, the conceptual model and relationships between variables were drawn. Then, in the quantitative phase, by running structural equation modeling, the antecedents and consequences of collective stupidity derived from the qualitative phase findings were analyzed and the research hypotheses were tested in 110 industrial knowledge-based companies.

The results of the qualitative phase revealed that individual, group and organizational factors were the antecedents of collective stupidity, with individual factors having three dimensions, collective ones including two dimensions and organizational ones focusing on the characteristics of managers/companies. It was also found that collective stupidity had individual consequences in three dimensions and organizational consequences in five dimensions; and one-sidedness, non-strategic thinking, organizational injustice and weakness in the management of key personnel were extracted as mediators. The results of the quantitative phase confirmed the research model and showed that individual factors and organizational consequences had the lowest (0.037) and highest (1.084) effect sizes on collective stupidity, respectively.

The study of the phenomenon in a particular context and the difficulty of generalizing the findings to other situations, the small size of the study population due to the disproportionate number of experts to the total staff in the qualitative phase, and the limited participation of experts due to the negative nature of the issue in the quantitative phase. Taking advantage of the diversity of experts' mental abilities through equipping the organization with tools for recognizing collective stupidity, improving collective decision-making, enhancing the efficiency of think tanks and organizational prosperity in the age of knowledge economy, preventing damage to the body of knowledge of the company and reducing social loafing can be the main operational implications of this study.

Using a mixed-method approach for analyzing the antecedents and consequences of collective stupidity in this study and examining such a phenomenon in a knowledge-based organizational context and its implementation in a developing country can be among the innovations of the present research. By following a few studies conducted in this field in addition to the organizational pathology of the phenomenon using a fundamental method, this study obtained deep results on how to make the maximum use of experts’ capacities. This was to the extent that in all of the three sections, i.e. the antecedents and consequences of collective stupidity, a new factor emerged.

The purpose of this paper is to explore ways in which learning and development (L&D) professionals use reflective practice to promote the function of L&D and their own professional growth. The claim that L&D practitioners need to develop their reflective ability to make sense of their own practice is well-argued in the literature, but few studies focus on an in-depth individual self-reflection and its impact on professional growth.

An autoethnography and reflective practice design was deployed. The data was collected by sending a semi-structured, pre-set question as a ‘reflective conversation’ to an L&D manager and a 10-hour tape recording of personal reflection over three months.[AQ1] Data was sanitised, transcribed and edited, and a narrative data analysis method was used to analyse the data developed into reflective narratives.

The authors find that reflective practice emerges through gradual reflective patterns that define the circumstances surrounding the reflection, the content, exploration and interpretation and confirming the fulfilling of the reflection.

This paper offers the journey of an L&D manager working in the hotel industry in India. Through a set of reflective practices, including introspection and reflexivity, the manager considers the changes she has experienced. The paper contributes to the literature on reflective practice based on promoting the L&D function as an essential part of the horizontal integration of human resource management in organisations. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This paper has two objectives in the area of industrialised small- and medium-sized industrial company (SME) export activity. First, it responds to the gap in the literature on the role of market intelligence in the interrelations between perceived psychic distance, marketing mix decisions and export performance. The second objective concerns the influence of resource heterogeneity (size and export department) in the proposed model.

The current paper tests a posited research model and its hypotheses using the data from a multi-sector sample of exporters (196 Spanish industrial SMEs). The data are analyzed using a partial least squares approach.

The results of the empirical study show that: strategic decisions to adapt marketing mix elements to suit foreign markets have a positive effect on export performance; strategic adaptations are more numerous when export managers perceive a greater psychic distance; an export department helps develop market intelligence ability, which positively moderates the impact of strategic adaptations on export performance; and size does not have a significant effect on the interrelations studied.

Export managers in industrial SMEs can use the results and conclusions of this present paper to systematise their decision-making in export activity.

This paper makes a significant contribution towards covering an important gap in research into industrial SME exporters, by demonstrating the importance of market intelligence in export activity.

John Dewey′s thought is the premier philosophic source on reflective methods. Examination of his thought has much to offer current work on reflective administration. It provides philosophical grounding and an intellectual and ethical context for the use of reflective methods in administrative practice and preparation. Reviews relevant features of Dewey′s philosophy and shows implications for the use of reflective methods in educational administration.

Online learning is an effective training strategy to help students, as one of the success factors is academic engagement. Therefore, the use of online training courses to influence academic engagement and performance in emotional intelligence learning experiences is worthy of investigation. This study explores the influence of emotional intelligence as an online training course and its impact on academic engagement and learning outcomes–performance.

The authors used a quasi-experimental study with two groups of participants who were randomly assigned (experimental e control) and with pretest–posttest measurements of the online training. The emotional intelligence online training (for the experimental group) was conducted during a single semester, with eight hours of training. The methodology of reflective, role-playing, case study and group work was followed. Measurements of student academic engagement and emotional intelligence were collected before (one week before the training) and after the intervention (on the last training session). Performance was measured after the intervention.

The mean scores improved for all the variables, with the differences being statistically significant. The students assessed their learning positively. The results also showed that emotional intelligence was positively related to academic engagement but not to performance. This means that emotional intelligence training was effective in increasing the academic engagement of university students.

The results are promising in terms of the students retaining the competencies acquired. Therefore, this type of online training is recommended for the emotional intelligence and academic engagement of future human resources professionals. Moreover, according to the results, it would be possible to use emotional intelligence training programs in schools, besides other programs, to promote the academic engagement and performance of students.

The design of the study provides evidence that is an added value for higher education institutions.

Does intelligence alone explain our achievement at work or in life. Contrary to our belief that academic achievement matters very much in the success we have in working life, Chen, et al. (1998) have shown that close to 90 per cent of success in leadership positions is attributable to Emotional Intelligence (EI). Considering that EI can be a potential determinant of our achievement in working life, this study aims to determine if there is any significant difference in the EI of local and foreign undergraduates studying in universities in Singapore. The “Emotional IQ Test” was administered to 100 undergraduates from various fields of studies from the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, of which 31 had a foreign education background. This study showed that foreign undergraduates have a higher EI score than those with a local education background. In addition, by examining the relationships between variables such as age, gender, year of study and EI, it was found that males have higher EI scores than females. The implication for managers is that staff should be evaluated on their own merits such as their EI rather than on academic results.