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In order to develop a range of positive policies to support and promote equal opportunities it is important to know the current position — how many male and female members, how many members from different ethnic origins, how many disabled members, what age profile, etc.

Global virtual teams (GVTs) – composed of members in two or more countries who work together primarily using information and communication technologies – are increasingly prevalent in organizations today. There has been a burgeoning of research on this relatively new organizational unit, spanning various academic disciplines. In this chapter, we review and discuss the major developments in this area of research. Based on our review, we identify areas in need of future research, suggest research directions that have the potential to enhance theory development, and provide practical guidelines on managing and working in GVTs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the applications of the social networking software, Facebook, currently practiced by “expert user” faculty teaching within a Malaysian Higher Education Hospitality Diploma programme. Of particular interest is whether the faculty experiences with Facebook reveal its functional appropriateness for use on an experiential learning platform. The aim is also to prompt further research and experimentation with the medium on teachers and students.

Phenomenological: the researcher uses a focus group to enable the essence of teachers' experience in the utilisation of Facebook as a teaching and learning tool within the syllabus of their taught subjects in a shared hospitality curriculum to emerge.

The experiences divulged in the focus group reveal the use of Facebook as an “effective” medium for reflective purposes in relation to experiential teaching and learning activities and as a mechanism for reflective and extrapolative cognition on experiential or practical classes.

This lies in the focus on actual Facebook use within the syllabi of a Faculty “community of practice”. It also lies in the focus of the paper on applications within a Hospitality curriculum. In relation to marketing, the visual materials discovered to be uploaded by teachers and students on Facebook are perhaps the real teaching and learning experiences of students that could be used by marketers for promotional purposes utilising the paradigm of experiential marketing and a service‐dominant logic.

A growing body of literature exists on virtual (i.e., geographically dispersed) teams; however, few summaries of this knowledge are available. The purpose of this paper is to help fill this gap by reviewing empirical research that addresses the effectiveness of virtual versus traditional (i.e., co-located) teams. Based on the typical input-process-output model of team effectiveness, we classify almost 200 empirical studies on virtual teams according to key dimensions of the model, including tasks and group characteristics, contextual factors, and supervisory behaviors. We develop propositions to address neglected research areas regarding the differences between virtual and traditional teams. There is still much to learn about virtual teams and how the physical dispersion of team members affects team effectiveness. It is our hope that our review and propositions will guide future research efforts and will help human resource professionals realize the potential for distributed teams in their organizations.

This study aims to explore how and when learning from others promotes creative performance over the contributor’s tenure in the context of open innovation communities.

The authors analyze a publicly available data set that includes 25,923 innovative items developed by 2,194 contributors from an open innovation community of an online game spanning eight years. Logistic regression model is used for analyzing the data.

The results show that multicultural experiences are negatively related to contributor’s creative performance, and this negative relationship weakens as contributor’s tenure increases. While diverse skills are positively related to contributor’s creative performance, and this positive relationship strengthens as contributor’s tenure increases.

This research highlights the importance of online team collaboration in knowledge transfer through learning from others in open innovation communities. By identifying two outcomes of learning from others through online team collaboration, the authors demonstrate the double-edged role of learning from others and advance the understanding on how the effect of learning from others varies over the contributor’s tenure. These results expand the understanding of online team collaboration and provide a new perspective for research on learning from others.

The purpose of our study is to investigate how a manufacturing plant’s internal operations along with its network of connections (upstream and downstream) can have an impact on its recovery time from a disruption. The authors also examine the inverse-U impact of complexity. Finally, the authors test the moderating role that business continuity management plans (BCP) at the plant level have on recovery time.

To test our hypotheses, the authors partnered with Resilinc Corporation, a Silicon Valley-based provider of supply chain risk management solutions to identify focal firms’ suppliers, customers and plant-level data including information on parts, manufacturing activities, bill of materials, alternate sites and formal business continuity plans. The authors employed censored data regression technique (Tobit).

Several important findings reveal that the plant’s internal operations and network connections impact recovery time. Specifically, the number of parts manufactured at the plant as well as the number of internal plant processes significantly increase disruption recovery time. In addition, the number of supply chains (upstream and downstream) involving the plant as well as the echelon distance of the plant from its original equipment manufacturer significantly increase recovery time. The authors also find that there exists an inverted-U relationship between complexity and recovery time. Finally, the authors find partial support that BCP will have a negative moderating effect between complexity and recovery time.

This research highlights gaps in the literature related to supply chain disruption and recovery. There is a need for more accurate methods to measure recovery time, more research on recovery at the supply chain site level and further analysis of the impact of supply chain complexity on recovery time.

Knowledge management is very useful to the most departments and sectors of the economy, and the healthcare sector is no exception. Thus, this paper aims to explore how healthcare professionals share knowledge in the Ghanaian healthcare sector. It also ascertains challenges faced by healthcare professionals in Ghana with regards to knowledge sharing.

The study used a case study research design. Data were collected from some healthcare professions working in the Ejisu-Juaben Municipality in Ghana using face-to-face interview. Data were analysed using thematic analysis technique.

The results show that the healthcare facilities studied do not have any formal knowledge management systems, and therefore healthcare professionals rely on informal conversations and seminars to share knowledge. Again, it was found that lack of trust, lack of technological facilities, lack of organizational policy regarding, fear of getting extra task or responsibility, network failure (both mobile phone and internet) and culture are some of the challenge healthcare professionals face in sharing knowledge.

This study contributes to the knowledge sharing literature especially in the healthcare sector in Ghana, as limited studies have been conducted in this area.

Recent operations management research suggests that adopting and implementing the right practices are essential to attaining “world‐class” performance. The purpose of this paper is to report the leading operations management practices and the strategy deployment framework that emerged from a qualitative study that addressed the question of how managers implement strategy in an organisational excellence environment.

Group work with managers responsible for implementing strategic initiatives was followed by case studies of seven organisations via in‐depth semi‐structured interviews. A survey questionnaire strengthened the validity of the constructs of strategy deployment that were identified in the case analyses.

In total, seven strategy deployment constructs were identified and linkages between them are described. The 50 leading deployment practices indicate a mix of hard and soft management skills applied across the seven constructs.

The leading deployment practices have the potential to raise the performance of organisations by improving the implementation of strategic initiatives. The framework is relevant to the deployment of both corporate and business unit strategy such as manufacturing or operations, and should be of interest to managers in these areas.

Researchers have noted for more than a decade that no generally accepted framework of operations management practices has emerged for strategy implementation. Most strategy studies have focused on strategy formulation, content, or on project/programme management. There have been few multiple case studies of leading strategy deployment practices in diverse organisations from both private and public sectors.