Search results

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the extent and effectiveness of knowledge management (KM) in community service organisations (CSOs) in Australia. CSOs are focussed on support, care and encouragement, thereby improving the quality of life of many in the community. This study contributes to a wider acceptance and management of knowledge, from a national perspective, and assists CSOs to improve practice.

KM theory and practice is expanded through a national online survey from 89 Australian CSOs, represented by 538 employees. CSOs, as a subset of not-for-profit organisations, were selected because they contribute significantly to the economy. Existing research generally relies on case studies, offering scope for wider quantitative research to address the gap.

The extent and effectiveness of KM were moderate. KM was more extensive in CSOs with a formal KM policy. Face-to-face exchange of knowledge was the major transfer method. Recognition or other incentives are needed to encourage learning and disseminating new ideas.

Other CSOs and other countries could be included, along with very small CSOs.

Shortfalls in practice were discovered. Recommendations should improve client service by enhancing the appropriateness, consistency, quality and timely delivery of assistance. This will aid CSO sustainability by maximising limited resources. The challenge is to harness informal learning for organisation-wide learning and for hard outcomes, such as reducing costs and competing for government funding.

A synthesised large-scale survey integrates more elements of KM practice. Existing KM ideas are combined in new ways, applied in a fresh context, indicating elements of KM that are more significant in not-for-profit CSOs.

Explained pay dispersion theory (Shaw, Gupta, & Delery, 2002) contends that the consequences of pay dispersion depend on two critical contingencies: (1) the presence of legitimate or normatively acceptable dispersion-creating practices, and the (2) identifiability of individual contributions. In this chapter, the first 20 years of empirical evidence and theoretical offshoots of this theory are reviewed. Other recent studies on the outcomes of horizontal and vertical pay dispersion are also evaluated. The review concludes with an evaluative summary of the literature and the identification of several potential fruitful areas for future research.

In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.

Organizations are identifying strategic supply chain relationships as a major source for competitive advantage. Interest in the concept is becoming prevalent in many industries, including new product development within the engineering sector. Collaborative supplier relationships are being used in new product development as a tool to share the development burden and reduce the development life cycle. The purpose of this paper is to develop a business process to act as a roadmap for optimum supplier integration.

An Engineering case organisation (Genco Inc.) is explored to provide an understanding of the extent and timing of supplier involvement, within new product development. Subsequently a high level business process is developed to govern early supplier integration, within a product development phase gate model.

The findings suggest and the business model strives to create a more holistic view of supplier integration; extending the scope beyond the individual firm‐centric factors, the paper develops the importance of supplier collaboration, design for supply chain and consideration of the overall value network. The business process creates a move towards defining supplier commodity types pre‐project launch, strategically timing and managing the extent of supplier integration.

The business process can be used to govern supplier integration by categorising commodity type. Each supplier classification can be phased into the development project to maximise the efficiency of development collaboration. The resulting process also acts to share accountability to create future roadmaps and accountability for future competitive advantage.

Currently, to the best of the authors' knowledge, an individual case organisation has not been documented with regards the extent of supplier involvement or timing, nor has an early supplier involvement (ESI) business process been developed.

Integrating the resource-based view (RBV) with pay dispersion research, the authors examine how the allocation of resources between hiring new employees and compensating current employees, as well as the allocation of resources among new employees, affects organizational performance.

The authors use panel data on Major League Baseball teams. The authors also use system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimations to control for the impact of past performance on current performance, unobserved individual heterogeneity and omitted variable bias.

The authors find that the larger the portion of the human resources (HR) budget allocated to hiring new employees, the poorer organizational performance becomes unless the focal organization has already significantly underperformed. The authors also find that pay concentration among new employees has a positive impact on organizational performance unless the focal organization has already significantly overperformed.

This study extends RBV research by examining how resource allocation patterns affect organizational performance, which has rarely been studied. Moreover, by showing the organizational context's significant effect on the outcome of financial allocation for resource acquisition, this study extends both the RBV research and the pay dispersion research.

While the effect of vertical pay dispersion on the voluntary turnover rate of vice presidents (VPs) has received attention, the existing research conclusions are still divided. Therefore, this study aims to explore the relationship between vertical pay dispersion and voluntary turnover rate of VPs in a Chinese context using data from listed firms.

Integrating tournament theory and social comparison theory, this study examines the non-linear effect of vertical pay dispersion on VPs’ voluntary turnover rates using empirical data from Chinese A-share listed firms from 2007 to 2016.

The results reveal a U-shaped relationship between vertical pay dispersion and the voluntary turnover rate of VPs. After further incorporating the moderating effect of the board governance structure, the effect is found to be enhanced in firms with more efficient board governance (i.e. smaller board size, higher board turnover and higher proportion of outside directors). Further analysis indicates that the aforementioned conclusions mainly exist in non-state-owned enterprises rather than state-owned enterprises.

The findings deepen the understanding of the costs and benefits associated with vertical pay dispersion, enrich the research findings on pay dispersion and contribute to the integration of previously inconsistent findings.

MR. DENIS HOWELL, M.P., Minister for Libraries, who was to have told Conference how public libraries had progressed since the Act, had to withdraw and so we did not find out how the responsible minister felt about us.

At a recent inquest upon the body of a woman who was alleged to have died as the result of taking certain drugs for an improper purpose, one of the witnesses described himself as “an analyst and manufacturing chemist,” but when asked by the coroner what qualifications he had, he replied : “I have no qualifications whatever. What I know I learned from my father, who was a well‐known ‘F.C.S.’” Comment on the “F.C.S.” is needless.