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This study aims to explore the objectivity in third-party ratings. Third-party ratings are often based on some form of aggregation of various experts' opinions with the assumption that the potential judgment biases of the experts cancel each other out. While psychology research has suggested that experts can be unintentionally biased, management literature has not considered the effect of expert bias on the objectivity of third-party ratings. Thus, this study seeks to address this issue.

Ranking data from the US News and World Report between 1993 and 2008, institution-related variables and, to represent sports prominence, NCAA football and basketball performance variables are leveraged in testing our hypotheses. A mediating-model is tested using regression with panel-corrected standard errors.

This study finds that the judgments of academicians and recruiters, concerning the quality of universities, have been biased by the prominence of a university's sports teams and that the bias introduced to these experts mediates the aggregated bias in the resultant rankings of MBA programs. Moreover, it finds that experts may inflate rankings by up to two positions.

This study is particularly relevant for university officials as it uncovers how universities can tangibly manipulate the relative perception of quality through sports team prominence. For third-party rating systems, the reliability of ratings based on aggregated expert judgments is called into question.

This study addresses a significant gap in the literature by examining how a rating system may be unintentionally biased through the aggregation of experts' judgments. Given the heavy reliance on third-party rating systems by both academics and the general population, addressing the objectivity of such ratings is crucial.

Multisensory stimulation is integral to experiential consumption. However, a gap persists between recognition of the importance of multisensory stimulation and the research techniques used to study the effects of such stimulation on consumption experiences. This article draws on sensory anthropology to narrow the gap.

Sensory anthropology has the potential to help consumer researchers understand multisensory stimulation and its effect on consumption experiences. To highlight this potential, ethnographic fieldwork is reported for two related experiential settings: yacht racing and adventure racing.

It is shown how consumer researchers can apply concepts and data collection techniques from sensory anthropology to derive powerful insights into consumption experiences. A set of guidelines and examples is derived from the embodied concepts associated with sensory anthropology, namely, kinaesthetic schema, bodily mimesis, the mindful body and local biology. These concepts are used to comprehend how consumers experience sensations phenomenologically, understand them culturally and re-enact them socially.

By acknowledging and engaging the senses, researchers can acquire embodied information that would not be evident from the conventional interview, survey or experimental data. Sensory anthropology adds to what is known from psychological, social and cultural sources to enable organisations to differentiate their offerings by means of the senses and sensory expressions, not only in yacht and adventure racing but potentially in many other experiential settings, such as travel, shopping, entertainment and immersive gaming.

This article offers distinct and original methodological insights for consumer researchers by focusing on concepts and data collection techniques that assist the study of experiential consumption from an embodied and corporeal perspective.

The discipline of management is, among other things, the skill of translating accounting information into behaviour. Where the knowledge and skills of employees are the principal asset of an organisation, current key performance indicators rarely provide appropriate or relevant information and indeed may be misleading to management. Because managing the knowledge and skills of employees is the current organisational challenge (Handy, 1996), it is time that serious consideration is given to the development of measures that meet this challenge. Management accounting provides an attractive concept, namely, the balanced scorecard, to assist management in the assessment of organisational performance. Its usefulness is often questioned because of a lack of relevant measures in the fourth quadrant. This paper considers, in relation to the human element of an organisation, how it may be possible to strengthen the innovation and learning perspective of the balanced scorecard. The aim is to provide information that allows managements to monitor the performance of their human resources and also enables others to assess managements' ability to nurture and to augment the talent and accumulated knowledge of their organisations' human resources. This model may well be considered the beginning of Puxty's (1993) long road in search of a planning, control and performance measurement system that accounts for the human element of an organisation's intellectual assets.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors predicting which employees receive employer‐funded commercial pension insurance contributions in Shanghai's zhenbao (town insurance) program, introduced by the Shanghai Government in 2003.

A series of hypotheses are developed to examine whether employees with characteristics that make them more influential constituencies will be more likely to receive voluntary commercial pension insurance contributions. The hypotheses are tested through application of a ReLogit model to data on 103,095 employees enrolled in the town insurance scheme in one district as at the end of 2004.

The study finds that only a small proportion of individuals in the sample receive commercial pension insurance. The most important determinant of whether an employee received commercial pension insurance is his or her level of education.

The study provides support for the societal corporatist perspective that employers who place a premium on human capital and invest significant resources in the skills of their workers will favor social policies that target benefits to a selected group of workers to reward their performance and foster commitment. A limitation of the research is that it is based on data collected soon after the town insurance scheme was introduced. The low level of employee coverage may improve once employers become more familiar with the operation of the scheme.

Employers should consider social insurance as a labor market strategy to retain staff and enhance the human resource base of the firm.

Little attention has been given to the role of employer‐funded social insurance within the ambit of labor market strategies designed to enhance the human resource base of the organisation. This is the first study to use micro level data to examine the determinants of voluntary employer contributions to social insurance.

Many organizations hold the traditional view that due to the potential of higher job dissatisfaction and employee turnover rates, hiring overqualified job candidates is risky. The purpose of this paper is to take an alternative perspective, using Human Capital and Resource-based theories to propose that hiring overqualified job candidates adds to a firm’s human capital depth. This additional human capital depth, in turn, enables firms to improve near term organizational effectiveness, and ultimately, build long-term competitive advantage. However, the ability of the firm to sustain this competitive advantage is dependent upon the retention of the overqualified human capital. The authors propose that job and career development opportunities made available to the overqualified will increase commitment and reduce turnover intentions, resulting in a long-term competitive advantage. Thus, the conceptual framework makes reference to deployment of the overqualified as an under used source of human capital. Finally, the implications of the proposed conceptualization and directions for future research are discussed.

This paper reviews theory and proposes a conceptual framework for reimaging overqualified human resources.

There are powerful benefits to hiring overqualified job candidates, but by not hiring overqualified job candidates, organizations are missing out on a large, easily available, and potentially lower cost source of highly skilled human capital.

The authors propose that job and career development opportunities made available to the overqualified will increase commitment and reduce turnover intentions, resulting in a long-term competitive advantage. Thus, the conceptual framework makes reference to deployment of the overqualified as an under used source of human capital.

This paper uses Human Capital and Resource-Based theory to propose a conceptual framework which makes four key contributions. First, the authors propose that hiring overqualified job candidates increases an organization’s human capital depth. Next, this increased human capital leads to near term improvements in employee performance and organizational effectiveness. In turn, firms using career development exercises such as job crafting, mentoring, and/or informal leadership to retain overqualified human capital are more likely to covert near term organizational effectiveness into long-term competitive advantage. Finally, the authors offer a conceptual framework that bridges the overqualification and strategic human resources management literatures.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between employee training and bank risk to verify whether and to what extent an increase in employee training, as a soft component of total quality management (TQM), affects bank risk.

The research adopts a panel regression, based on a unique dataset of a sample of Italian banks over the period 2011–2018, to test whether employee training affects bank risk, measured alternatively in terms of Z-score, a proxy of bank stability and non-performing loans (NPLs)/gross loans ratio as a proxy of credit risk.

Research findings reveal that increasing employee training leads to growing bank stability. In contrast, credit risk is not affected by employee training. However, by investigating training heterogeneity, this study found that the increase in the number of managerial training hours, as a proxy for soft skills training, negatively impacts credit risk. Therefore, an increase in soft skills leads to a reduction in bank credit risk.

This study provides empirical evidence in support of the relationship between employee training and bank risk, which seems novel in the literature. From a managerial point of view, this study highlights the need for banks to pay attention to the skills, particularly soft skills, that banks' employees must possess to effectively manage bank risk and, more specifically, the core bank risk.

Empirical evidence on the relationship between employee training, soft/hard skills and bank risk appears limited if not absent. Therefore, the findings provide insights for a more nuanced interpretation of variables that affect bank risk.

This paper aims to clarify the factors that affect the formation of organizational human capital competitive advantage (OHCCA) and construct its structural dimensions.

This research method adopted grounded theory using 20 interviews of managers from 10 companies. Relevant literature was reviewed to conduct open coding, Axial coding and selective coding to ensure OHCCA concept and dimensions.

Studies have shown that OHCCA formation of results from investment and collaboration of three levels: organization, teams and departments and employees. OHCCA formation is composed of three dimensions of organizational human capital investment: planning, practice and stock.

This research enriches the organizational human capital and competitive advantage theories.

The practical significance is to provide theoretical and practical guidance for organizations in creating OHCCAs.

This research is the first to propose and define the OHCCA concept and construct a three-dimensional structure model. Furthermore, this research has revealed the leading factors that affect OHCCA's formation process.

The aim of this paper is to advocate and implement cointegration methods for the estimation of interconnectedness of service quality and customer loyalty as intangible strategic assets within management decision.

Using longitudinal time series quarterly data on loyalty and service quality, the paper uses cointegration methods to empirically estimate the weight of interconnectedness of customer loyalty and service quality as intangible strategic assets.

The research evidence suggests that customer loyalty and service quality are interconnected intangible strategic assets that managers can develop, accumulate, estimate and deploy for superior competitive advantage.

To the extent that the global economies are increasingly service‐driven, managerial capability to estimate intangible strategic assets as drivers of superior competitive advantage will remain strategically important. Assumedly, this paper is the first to illustrate how cointegration methods can be used by managers to estimate interconnectedness of intangible strategic assets. In this sense, to the extent that this method is new to managers, it represents another toolkit of intangible strategic asset management for managers.

Drawing on human capital theory and the human capital resources framework, this study explores the knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics (KSAOs) required by the emerging role of human resource (HR) analysts. This study aims to systematically identify the key KSAOs and develop a competency model for HR Analysts amid the growing digitalization of work.

Adopting best practices for competency modeling set out by Campion et al. (2011), this study first analyzes 110 HR analyst job advertisements collected from five countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the USA. Second a thematic analysis of 12 in-depth semistructured interviews with HR analytics professionals from Canada and Ireland is then conducted to develop a novel competency model for HR Analysts.

This study adds to the developing and fast-growing field of HR analytics literature by offering evidence supporting a set of six distinct competencies required by HR Analysts including: consulting, technical knowledge, data fluency and data analysis, HR and business acumen, research and discovery and storytelling and communication.

The research findings have several practical implications, specifically in recruitment and selection, HR development and HR system alignment.

This study contributes to the evolving HR analytics literature in two ways. First, the study links the role of HR Analysts to human capital theory and the human capital resource framework. Second, it offers a timely and empirically driven competency model for the emerging role of HR Analysts.

To be successful on a global scale, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need government support (GS) for innovation, sustainability and creativity. GS has always been a constructive influence on enterprises. This paper aims to examine the role of GS in assessing financial literacy (FL), access to finance (AF) and green value co-creation (GVC) for the sustainability of SMEs.

This study’s sample comprises SMEs in Lahore, Pakistan. Data collection started in December 2021 and ended in February 2022. Using convenient sampling, 320 responses were collected from SMEs and included in data analysis. Hypotheses were tested, and model fit was checked through the software AMOS 22.

It has been examined that GS plays a pivotal role in acquiring FL, AF and GVC for the sustainability of SMEs.

Increasing the sample size will give a more demonstrative picture as the population size is quite large. Future researchers should design causal relationships, linking these variables through longitudinal research.

No study has been conducted on SMEs of developing economies using these variables. This study contributes to the literature by providing a comprehensive model and identifying GSs importance in achieving SMEs’ sustainability through financial and green lenses. This research significantly impacts government policymakers and SMEs by giving them insight into the importance of green practices, financial capabilities and SMEs’ sustainability.