Search results

The wake of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had caused substantial disruptions to the usual delivery of healthcare services. This is because of restrictive orders that were put in place to curb the spread of the infection. Palliative care services in Brunei also face challenges to deliver effective services during this period. However, the impact of advanced illnesses on patients' health and end-of-life care are issues that cannot be planned, postponed or cancelled. Hence, the palliative care team needs to continue to deliver effective palliative care services. As Brunei faced its second pandemic wave in August 2021, crucial adaptations were made to ensure palliative care service was not disrupted. This reflective case study aims to discuss the adaptations made in providing palliative care during this era of disruptions.

The purpose of this (qualitative, multiple-case) study is to determine how small-to medium-sized enterprise (SME) leaders in Nigeria use information and communication technology (ICT) adoption as a business strategy to increase profitability and compete globally.

The participants for this study consisted of executive-level SME leaders who had the authority to approve ICT implementation within their respective organizations. Individual interviews were undertaken with participants to gain an understanding of their experience of determining the merits of and implementing ICT. The technology acceptance model, which specifies the relationship between perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude toward computer use and intention to use technology, was applied as a framework to explain the Nigerian SME’s ICT adoption strategies.

Four major themes emerged from the data analysis: ICT adoption factors, ICT roles and benefits, role of government and SME success factors. The findings of this study may help SME leaders and government leaders address many of the factors inhibiting the adoption of ICT in SMEs in Nigeria.

This study may ensure that SMEs are successful and able to create jobs, which in turn may help to promote socioeconomic development through adoption of ICT.

The findings from this study contribute to the knowledge base regarding factors that affect ICT adoption by SME leaders as a business strategy to increase profitability and compete globally, particularly within SMEs in Lagos, Nigeria. It further addressed the gap in existing literature regarding other factors such as the influence of culture on ICT adoption, cost of ICT implementation, available ICT skills, infrastructure and ICT knowledge gap as the primary impeding factors of ICT adoption in Nigerian SMEs.

This paper aims to explore the pertinent issues, barriers and pitfalls of intergenerational communication in business families during their leadership succession period.

Building on relational leadership theory, the paper makes use of an action research approach using a qualitative single case study to investigate communication barriers and pitfalls in business transition.

Through action research, interventions were taken in the underlying case, which increased the consciousness, as well as the personal and social competencies of the business family. Thus, business families stuck in ambivalent entanglement understand their underlying motives and needs within the change process, get into closer contact with their emotional barriers and communication hindrances, which is a prerequisite for any change, and break the succession iceberg phenomenon.

Future research should undertake multiple case studies to validate and/or modify the qualitative methods used in this action research to increase the validity and generalizability of the findings.

Given the large number of business families in transition, our study shows the beneficial effects action research might have on business families’ communication behavior along a change process. The findings might help other business families to understand the value of action research for such underlying challenges and decrease communication barriers.

This is one of the few studies to have addressed intergenerational communication of business families using an action research approach.

The purpose of this article is to identify design guidelines for online resources based on the subjective assessment criteria used by individuals to assess and process information resources. This method of creating design guidelines targeted at precise user groups has the potential to aid designers and developers to create more user-centred information resources.

The authors gathered data using a prospective longitudinal study investigating the information behaviour of expectant and new mothers. Women were asked to report on their information-seeking activities in a series of semi-structured interviews covering pregnancy and early motherhood.

This research identified 15 assessment criteria that were utilised by women to assess and process information resources. The most popular resource criteria amongst participants were credibility and convenience, while completeness and relevance were the most popular information content criteria. The authors found that assessment criteria were not considered in isolation, with criteria such as formatting and search engine ranking impacting on participants' perception of other criteria.

This research demonstrates the potential of linking a user groups subjective assessment criterion to design guidelines. The authors propose that these guidelines could be used to help design an online information resource. They could also be used to assess if an existing online resource met the needs of a user group. The methodology used in this study could be leveraged to create design guidelines for user groups.

This research uses subjective assessment criteria as a means of understanding how expectant new mothers process information resources. People use subjective judgements when processing information resources, and this should be incorporated into the design of information resources. Analysing longitudinal data allowed the authors to build a rich picture of how participants evaluated and compared different information resources.

One of the urgent questions in the field of diversity is the knowledge about effective diversity practices. This paper aims to advance our knowledge on organizational change toward diversity by combining concepts from diversity studies and organizational learning.

By employing a social practice approach to organizational learning, the author will be able to go beyond individual learning experiences of diversity practices but see how members negotiate the diversity knowledge and how they integrate their new knowledge in their day-to-day organizational norms and practices. The analysis draws on data collected during a longitudinal case study in a financial service organization in the Netherlands.

This study showed how collective learning practices took place but were insufficiently anchored in a collective memory. Change agents have the task to build “new” memory on diversity policies and gender inequality as well as to use organizational memory to enable diversity policies and practices to be implemented. The inability to create a community of practice impeded the change agenda.

Future research could expand our knowledge on collective memory of knowledge on diversity further and focus on the way employees make use of this memory while doing diversity.

The current literature often tends to analyze the effectiveness of diversity practices as linear processes, which is insufficient to capture the complexity of a change process characterized with layers of negotiated and politicized forms of access to resources. The author would argue for more future work on nonlinear and process-based perspectives on organizational change.

The contribution is to the literature on diversity practices by showing how the lack of collective memory to “store” individual learning in the organization has proven to be a major problem in the management of diversity.

This paper presents a co-authorship study of authors who published in Digital Humanities journals and examines the apparent influence of gender, or more specifically, the quantitatively detectable influence of gender in the networks they form.

This study applied co-authorship network analysis. Data has been collected from three canonical Digital Humanities journals over 52 years (1966–2017) and analysed.

The results are presented as visualised networks and suggest that female scholars in Digital Humanities play more central roles and act as the main bridges of collaborative networks even though overall female authors are fewer in number than male authors in the network.

This is the first co-authorship network study in Digital Humanities to examine the role that gender appears to play in these co-authorship networks using statistical analysis and visualisation.

A leader plays an important role in the growth of an organization. The leader is a person who influences the standards, structure, culture and behaviour of the individuals employed in the organization. A leader also has effects on the result and productivity of teams. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of transformational leadership style on team performance. This paper will also analyze the existence of a relationship between transformational leadership style and team performance.

For this study, the researcher collected the data from 354 individuals employed in IT organizations in Pune. The team members answered questions asked about the transformational leadership style, and the team leaders answered questions related to team performance. The data has been analyzed using the latest available version of Statistical Product and Service Solutions.

The results of this examination suggest that there is strong and positive relationship between the transformational leadership style and team performance. Further, it was also found that transformational leader helps in a great way in improving team performance which in turn increases the organization’s productivity.

Few limitations of this research work are that the data collected for this research work is non-cognitive in nature and simultaneously respondents may incline to evaluate the positive facets of opinion poll more propitiously than negative facets. Secondly, the data have been collected only from companies located in Pune.

This research study provides empirical data that will be helpful for human resources department of an organization, as it can help them in the development of policies and practices. It will also provide help leaders to support employees who are seeking effective ways to support struggling employees in context to their team performance.

The present study can be differentiated from past studies, as it thinks over an ensemble of transformational leadership style as an essential antecedent of team performance and also enhances the knowledge of the researchers and practitioners about the leadership style that upshot to the team performance. This will also help the managers, researchers, organizational development specialist and employees who are seeking effective ways to support struggling employees in context to their team performance.

Economic diplomacy refers to methods and processes by which states take advantage of cross-border economic activities to achieve their national interests. It makes connections between the sphere of corporate players, who export or invest abroad, and the sphere of diplomats, who represent the state on the international scene and implement geopolitical decisions. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an overall and coherent framework for asking, classifying and discussing the main issues raised by economic diplomacy. It investigates concepts such as national interest, power and influence. It surveys the relevant literature and deals with various expressions of economic diplomacy such as export promotion agencies, economic role of embassies and consulates, or international economic sanctions. It analyzes the two-way relationship between international economics and international politics, which is at the core of economic diplomacy, and tries to answer the following questions: on the global scene, is diplomacy just accompanying the economy? Is diplomacy driving the economy?

This study aims to, first, propose a valid and reliable scale to document the COVID-19 Pandemic Shopping Experience (CPSE) and, second, determine the impact of its variables on the postpurchase shopping experience (PPSE).

For scale development, published studies were scanned and the variables were shortlisted. These shortlisted variables were validated by 52 faculties from four universities in Saudi Arabia. Data were collected from 318 respondents to purify the CPSE Scale. In Study 2, a path analysis was performed on a sample of 354 respondents to determine the individual impact of each variable on PPSE.

A total of 14 items were found to be aligned under four variables, social distance (SD), shop hygiene, operational time and entertainment venues. SD was found to have the greatest influence on PPSE, followed by operational time and shop hygiene.

This research has important implications for retailers to initiate changes in store layout so that they can implement social distancing by physically marking stickers on the floors and by placing barricading on billing counters. Store hygiene can be ensured by making sanitizers and hand gloves available at the entry points, periodically cleaning the floor and sanitizing the premises. Rationing the operating time proved to be an effective tool to minimize the exposure time, thereby limiting consumers' time inside the store.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to propose a full-scale measure of the customer shopping experience (SE) during a pandemic. This scale can be generalized to measure SE in similar situations.