Search results

This chapter highlights how Malaysia has experienced a successful economy through different stages since independence. The development, administration and institution-building phase was followed by reform initiatives throughout the years. Master Industrial Plans, 5-year development plans and other mid-term plans are used, which include governance and performance management reform. Today, public service reform continues to evolve with emphasis on better services, e-government and one-stop clearance centres. Under the Government Transformation Programme launched in 2010, seven National Key Results Areas have been identified, e.g., reducing crime, fighting corruption, improving education, and raising living standards of low-income households. Within this, political transformation programme, digital transformation programme, community transformation programme and social transformation programme have been created that advance public sector reforms. This chapter shows that while states and leaders remain powerful actors, leaders recognise a need to reform and overcome unethical and inefficient bureaucratic dysfunctions, or keep them at a minimum. Leaders manage such problems by using transparency to address problems of vested interests, stringent audits and punishing civil servants for criminal breaches of trust, removal of ministerial control over government-linked companies and removing resisting actors. Yet, more reforms in shepherding public service renewal are needed in sustaining reforms and reputations of public institutions. The author calls for increased values-based leadership that is inclusive at the highest levels.

With the advent of technology and science, the business environment will keep changing very fast. Today, Information Technology (IT) is used in almost all business applications. The most important improvements are being realized at the management side since IT is fully supporting decision-making processes now. Human Resources Management (HRM) is being affected by IT such as web-based technologies and intelligent systems and these systems make HRM much more effective. Today’s HRM-related software do not deal with just payrolls, they also include recruiting and record-keeping, training and performance appraisal which have transitioned HRM from task-oriented to people-oriented. Today, Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) and electronic HRM (e-HRM) are being utilized by many organizations all over the world and play a strategic role in decision-making processes for effective and efficient HRM. This study investigates the recent literature on HRIS, e-HRM and Decision Support Systems in HRM to identify the improvements and debates on contemporary Human Resources Management.

This paper aims to examine the role of knowledge management (KM) processes in enhancing competitive strategies of differentiation and cost-effectiveness and its impact on innovativeness in knowledge-intensive service organizations (KISOs) in India.

This study collected data from 293 employees working in Indian KISOs through a questionnaire survey. After checking for reliability and validity of data, this study tested the hypotheses by structural equation modeling using AMOS 26.

The results show that KM processes have a significant and positive relationship with competitive strategy and innovativeness. Competitive strategy partially mediates the relationship between KM processes and innovativeness. These KM processes promote differentiation and cost-effectiveness, which in turn enhances innovativeness. A differentiation strategy has a stronger positive relationship with KM processes and innovativeness than a cost-effective strategy.

This study's cross-sectional design limits its ability to establish a general cause–effect relationship. Even so, theoretically, the results corroborate the contingent view of KM in emerging economies such as India. The findings show the mediating role of competitive strategy on the relationship between KM and its processes with innovation and competitiveness – providing a better cost-effectiveness relationship and organizational differentiation capacity.

This study suggests managers to adopt KM processes such as creation-sharing, acquisition and knowledge base enabling firms to be different and cost-effective than their competitors. This study provides evidence on how KISOs can leverage their innovativeness by using KM processes in congruence with its competitive strategy and gain competitive advantage.

This study emphasizes the development of KM processes in the management of KISOs, which contributes substantially to India’s economic growth via Gross domestic product and employment. On the social side, this study suggests to manage cultural issues in KM processes, arising because of presence of multi-cultural workforce and a high-power distance society.

This study bridges a research gap of previous studies providing empirical evidence regarding the mediating effect of competitive strategies in the relationship between KM processes and innovativeness. This study adds proof to the KM contingency view of firms, suggesting when KM processes are formulated to achieve competitive strategy; substantial benefits such as innovativeness can be realized. This study adds evidence from the emerging economy of India, where KISOs are increasingly creating value and employment.

This study examines the economic crisis caused by coronavirus on the global tourism industry in general and the Indian tourism industry in particular. This paper highlights the strategies that tourism companies should implement in times of crisis to reduce the negative impact. It also discovers the business opportunities which can be offered amid this deadly pandemic.

The study is based on a systematic literature review. The literature has been explored by utilizing the keywords “economic crises,” “coronavirus,” “Indian tourism industry,” “Global tourism industry” on the three most popular databases namely Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar. In this study, statistics, current events, published research papers and a synthesis of news transmitted by various media sources were used to assess the economic crisis caused by coronavirus.

The obtained findings demonstrate that coronavirus severely affected the economy of the world and India. The pandemic has hit the economies that are dependent on tourism the worst. These countries are expected to bear the brunt of the crisis's consequences for longer than other economies. This coronavirus outbreak indicates that the tourism industry was unprepared to deal with such a pandemic, which affected and crippled the economy.

This study demonstrates economic crisis, management strategies and business opportunities during any crisis, chaos and disaster, in addition to its academic contribution to the existing body of the literature. Policymakers and industry practitioners might be offered suggestions based on the findings of current study to design futuristic strategies for better economic crisis management. The data given in this study is timely because taking an exact idea of tourism losses through the data is difficult, as the data changes as quickly as the virus spreads.

This paper forms its originality by concentrating on the aspects of economic crisis, strategies to mitigate the negative impact of coronavirus on the tourism economy and detailing the business opportunities which these crises can offer. This paper provides an evaluation of the current status of the tourism economy of the world and India as well.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether transformational leadership matters in promoting corporate entrepreneurship in Tunisian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It has been argued that transformational leadership is a multidimensional construct which is composed of intellectual stimulation, idealized influence, inspirational motivation and individual consideration. Corporate entrepreneurship is also a multidimensional construct composed of new business venturing, innovativeness, self-renewal and proactiveness. Hence, it has been hypothesized that transformational leadership positively and directly influences corporate entrepreneurship.

A hypothetico-deductive and quantitative approach was adopted to test the suggested research model. A 2 × 2 survey was conducted on a random sample of a set of Tunisian SMEs’ workers. Data analysis was performed using the structural equation modeling.

The results highlight the relatively relevance of transformational leadership’s components in triggering the corporate entrepreneurship’s patterns.

The author reports on the importance of transformational leadership in the corporate entrepreneurship development in the Tunisian business context. The paper should be of interest to readers in the areas of management and entrepreneurship. This work seems to be relevant to the extent that few works have highlighted the association between the components of both transformational leadership and corporate entrepreneurship. The findings seem interesting insofar as they show mainly the important effect of the intellectual stimulation and the inspirational motivation, triggered by transformational leaders, on workers’ innovativeness, proactiveness and new business venturing.

It is essential to understand how the countries with the highest number of tourist arrivals have managed to recover or not based on the competitiveness of the tourism industry during the pandemic stage. It is necessary to evaluate the policies implemented by each government to maintain the competitive performance of their industries. This chapter proposes a comprehensive review of the policies implemented in the 10 most visited countries according to UNWTO data. Most of these policies are geared toward economic and financial flexibility strategies for companies and individuals in the industry under study. The effectiveness of these policies is evaluated with statistical information extracted from a unified UNWTO database to reduce biases in the effectiveness analysis. Finally, concluding remarks are offered on the effectiveness of the policies and their contribution to the sector's recovery.

The purpose of this paper is to apply asymptotic waveform evaluation (AWE) to the transient analysis of a two‐layered counter‐flow microchannel heat sink.

A two‐layered counter‐flow microchannel heat sink in both steady state and transient conditions is analysed. Finite element analysis is used in the steady state analysis whereas AWE is used in the transient analysis.

A two‐layered microchannel produces different temperature distribution compared to that obtained for a single‐layered microchannel. The maximum temperature occurs at the middle of the bottom wall whereas the maximum temperature of a single‐layered microchannel is at the outlet of the bottom wall. The time taken to reach steady state is also investigated for different coolant flow rate and heat flux boundary conditions. It is observed that when fluid velocity increases, the time taken to reach steady state decreases, however, when the heat flux increases, the time taken to reach steady state does not change.

The fluid is incompressible and does not undergo phase change. The use of AWE provides an alternative method in solving heat transfer problem.

New and additional data will be useful in the design of a microchannel heat sink for the purpose of cooling of electronic components.

AWE is widely used in analyses of signal delays in electronic circuits, and rarely applied to mechanical systems. The present study applies AWE to heat transfer problems, and reveals that it reduces the computational time considerably. The results obtained are compared with conventional methods available in the literature, and they show good agreement. Hence the computational time is reduced, and the accuracy of results is verified.

This paper aims to illustrate a number of instances where RP and associated technology has been successfully used for medical applications.

A number of medical case studies are presented, illustrating different uses of RP technology. These studies have been analysed in terms of how the technology has been applied in order to solve related medical problems.

It was found that RP has been helpful in a number of ways to solve medical problems. However, the technology has numerous limitations that have been analysed in order to establish how the technology should develop in the future.

RP can help solve medical problems, but must evolve if it is to be used more widespread in this field.

This paper has shown a number of new applications for RP, providing a holistic understanding how the technology can solve medical problems. It also identifies a number of ways in which the technology can improve in order to better solve such problems.

To provide some new and additional data for the design of a triple stack cold plate.

A detailed finite element formulation for the triple stack cold plate with and without heat losses from the top and bottom surfaces of the stack is presented to determine its performance under steady as well as unsteady conditions. The effects of the number of unit cells, different heat losses as well as the governing dimensionless parameter, M (involving stack dimension, properties of the stack material and the variation in the heat transfer coefficient) on the performance of the stack are investigated. The detailed formulation of the asymptotic waveform evaluation scheme is also given and applied to determine the transient performance of the stack.

The methods of analysis described are quite simple to use to determine the steady and unsteady performance of the triple stack cold plate under different operating conditions. The heat losses from the top and bottom surfaces of the stack do affect the maximum temperature of the stack and in such case, the assembled stack should be analysed.

The analysis is limited to an incompressible fluid. The effect of varying mass flow rate of the fluid in the stack passages is also not considered.

New and additional generated data will be helpful in the design of cold plates used in the cooling of electronic components.

The asymptotic waveform evaluation scheme is used for the first time to determine the transient performance of the triple stack cold plate under different operating conditions. The results thus obtained are compared well with those found from the finite element analysis (FEM), but the computational effort and time required in the analysis is much small as compared to those required in the FEM analysis.