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This study explored students' experiences of creative problem-solving using a design thinking approach in higher education, mainly focusing on the importance of empathetic approach in the problem identification and definition phase.

The authors used a descriptive qualitative research design and thematic analysis, in which observation and 27 semi-structured reports were used to reveal the impact of design thinking on undergraduate students' experience of creative problem-solving.

The authors found multiple themes in students' responses concerning problem identification and definition in design thinking, which could be described as a systematic innovation process. Four major themes were identified. They included identifying and defining problems in a real-world context, empathizing with people from the target beneficiary group as a process of problem identification and definition, working with a team to expand the empathizing view, and perceiving the need for deep exploration in the empathetic process and defining a problem.

This study examined the perceived role of empathy in students' creative problem-solving process. However, the main limitation of this study was the small sample size, which can limit the generalizability of the results of the study. Nonetheless, this study provides valuable insights into understanding the role of empathy and problem identification as an essential process in creative problem-solving.

It is worthwhile to integrate design thinking as an effective teaching and learning strategy in university education, particularly for fostering empathy and creative problem-solving skills in students. Among the processes of design thinking, empathy is critical in the problem identification and definition phase.

This study adds to existing knowledge by examining the role and ways of perceiving real-world problems in a human-centered mindset in university programs.

The purpose of this study is to examine how an organization's ethical climate positively relates to its financial performance by considering an organization's innovation, a support for innovation and performance evaluation.

Data were collected from employees and managers of 41 subsidiaries of a conglomerate in South Korea through survey questionnaires.

The results indicate that an organization's ethical climate is positively related to financial performance, and its positive relationship is mediated by an organization's innovation. The result also shows that a support for innovation has the moderating effect, such that the positive influence of an organization's ethical climate on its innovation increases when a support for innovation is high. However, this study fails to find the moderating effect of performance evaluation.

There might be the issue of generalizability, because the sample of this study is on the sample of a conglomerate in South Korea. Future research with different types of organizations in other nations is needed.

This study indicates that an organization's ethical climate can be a critical predictor of its innovation as well as financial performance. In this regard, organizations should pay attention to employees' perceptions of the organization's ethical climate.

This study explains the mechanisms on how an organization's ethical climate is related to its financial performance, and provides implications for organizations strivings for ethics in developing countries such as South Korea.

The purpose of this paper is to test the mediating effect of organizational identification (OI) in the relationship between organizational justice and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and also to examine the moderating effects of transactional and relational contracts in the relationship between OI and OCB.

Data were collected from employees working for ten companies in South Korea. The participants were asked with a self-reported survey, and 284 questionnaires were used in the analyses.

Among the three types of organizational justice, the effects of distributive and interactional justice on OCB were mediated by OI. The authors also found that the positive relationship between OI and OCB was stronger for both a low level of transactional and a high level of relational contract. In addition, the moderated mediation analyses confirmed that the indirect relationships between distributive, interactional justice and OCB through OI were valid for both high and low level of transactional contract, and only for low level of relational contract.

To facilitate employees’ OCB, organizations have to pay adequate attention to distributive justice which is rather neglected, and also must understand what types of psychological contract employees have.

This study intensively explored the internal mechanism as to how the different types of organizational justice lead to OCB by identifying the mediating effect of OI and moderating roles of psychological contracts.

The investigator of this study examined organizational involvement of employees in Saudi construction companies and a random sample was drawn from the participating companies in Riyadh and Dammam. Employees' levels of involvement in the construction companies, were compared on the basis of their personal characteristics. The sample was divided into two groups on the basis of employees' personal characteristics such as education, organizational tenure, pay, rank, and age. The results showed that there was a difference in the level of organizational involvement between employees on the basis of their five personal characteristics included in this study. Further, the findings of this study showed that the levels of employees' involvement in the construction companies differed as their personal characteristics differed. Employees with a low level of education showed a higher level of organizational involvement than did employees with a high level of education. Employees with long organizational tenure reported a higher level of involvement than did employees with short organizational tenure. Also, employees with a high salary showed a higher level of involvement than did employees with a low salary. Old employees showed a higher level of organizational involvement than young employees. High ranking employees showed a higher level of organizational involvement than did employees with a low rank.

The authors explore the nature of commitment, job satisfaction and job characteristics, and the nature of the interrelationships among these variables concerning expatriate employees in Saudi Arabia. An examination of a sample of 504 expatriate employees reveals that these employees are, by and large, indifferent with respect to their perceptions of commitment, job satisfaction, and job characteristics. In addition, the results provide strong support for (1) the influence of job satisfaction on commitment, (2) the influence of job variety on commitment, and (3) the influence of job autonomy, identity, and feedback on job satisfaction.

The Incheon Region has numerous assets that fall within a Pentaport model.' These include the Incheon International Airport, the Port of Incheon, a coastal industrial park, free economic zones, a leisure port, and Songdo new town designed to be the future Silicon Valley of Korea. This paper looks at how Northeast Asia trade flows between China and Korea might be enhanced by application of the Pentaport model in making the Incheon region a North East Asian Hub. It looks also at their trade and logistics systems as well as their water borne commerce. It proposes an integrated transportation system for the Yellow Sea Region being beneficial to the economies of the Northeast Asia. It also stresses that innovative technologies for ships, terminals and cargo handling systems should be introduced to develop a competitive short sea shipping system in the region and cooperation among the regional countries will be essential to achieve the final goal. The potential of methods of container shipping is discussed as it might apply to short sea shipping in the Yellow Sea Region that could greatly facilitate Incheon's situation with respect to the broader region in application of the Pentaport model.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the contextual differences and causes of police corruption in Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan and to assess their governments’ effectiveness in minimising this problem.

The paper begins by identifying the contextual differences in the five countries before analysing their major causes of police corruption and their governments’ effectiveness in minimising it.

Police corruption is a more serious problem in Indonesia and the Philippines because of their more difficult governance environments, low salaries of police officers, red tape, lack of meritocracy in recruitment and promotion, and lack of accountability of police officers. By contrast, the perceived extent of police corruption has declined in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in recent years because of the improvement in the salaries of their police officers and the implementation of various police reforms.

This comparative analysis of combating police corruption in five Asian countries will be of interest to policy makers and scholars concerned with minimising this problem.

For those who plan research funds and assess the research performance from the funds, it is necessary to overcome the limitations of the conventional classification of evaluated papers published by the research funds. Besides, they need to promote the objective, fair clustering of papers, and analysis of research performance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to find the optimum clustering algorithm using the MATLAB tools by comparing the performances of and the hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithms using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and the conventional K-means clustering method.

The clustering analysis experiment for each of the three fields of study – health and medicine, physics, and chemistry – used the following three algorithms: “K-means+Simulated annealing (SA)+Adjustment of parameters+PSO” (KASA-PSO clustering), “K-means+SA+PSO” clustering, “K-means+PSO” clustering.

The clustering analyses of all the three fields showed that KASA-PSO is the best method for the minimization of fitness value. Furthermore, this study administered the surveys intended for the “performance measurement of decision-making process” with 13 members of the research fund organization to compare the group clustering by the clustering analysis method of KASA-PSO algorithm and the group clustering by research funds. The results statistically demonstrated that the group clustering by the clustering analysis method of KASA-PSO algorithm was better than the group clustering by research funds.

This study examined the impact of bibliometric indicators on research impact of papers. The results showed that research period, the number of authors, and the number of participating researchers had positive effects on the impact factor (IF) of the papers; the IF that indicates the qualitative level of papers had a positive effect on the primary times cited; and the primary times cited had a positive effect on the secondary times cited. Furthermore, this study clearly showed the decision quality perceived by those who are working for the research fund organization.

There are still too few studies that assess the research project evaluation mechanisms and its effectiveness perceived by the research fund managers. To fill the research void like this, this study aims to propose PSO and successfully proves validity of the proposed approach.

The purpose of this paper is to identify security technologies that are essential in making home network systems secure and to describe specialized security mechanisms for the home network and the relationships among them.

The research model is designed to support three functions: authentication, authorization, and security policy. Authentication is tested in several methodologies such as id/pw, certificate, or bio; authorization is tested using RBAC methodologies; and security policy is specified using newly‐designed script language, such as xHDL.

The findings for “authentication” suggest that home network users can access services conveniently and securely. In addition, the findings for “security policy” suggest that security policy for home network requires specialized rather than general specification.

The paper identifies three security functions essential for home network: authentication that supports most existing authentication mechanisms, so as to maximize user accessibility; authorization that is middleware‐independent and beyond the physical transport layer; and security policy optimized for the home network environment.

The paper focuses on an implementation‐based security model for the home network. Though interest and research in home network security are increasing, only limited authentication applications have been adopted in real deployment up to now. This paper introduces an integrated security model and emphasizes safety and convenience so as to promote reliability in home network services.

The paper provides a step-by-step guide in the guise of a roadmap for service improvement initiatives using importance performance map analysis (IPMA).

To empirically illustrate how IPMA can be applied to any service industry, three sectors are considered; sports and fitness (study A), hospitality (study B) and higher education (study C). Following the proper selection of measuring instruments and their evaluation using structural equation modeling-partial least squares (Smart-PLS), IPMA is applied to identify those attributes having strong total effects (high importance) over the targeted construct (satisfaction) but which also have low average latent variable scores (low performance).

For sports and fitness (study A), the physical aspects and programme quality require managerial attention. For the hospitability sector (study B), it is service commitment, interaction quality and internal sense of happiness. Whereas for higher education (study C), it is administrative quality as well as the element of transformative quality, namely the university’s role in adding to its students’ emotional stability, which needs the attention of the top management.

This study provides researchers and practitioners with a roadmap for applying PLS-SEM and IPMA for continuous service quality improvement. The roadmap extends upon Ringle and Sarstedt’s (2016) work. It highlights critical decisions that need to be considered in the pre-analytical stages of the IPMA application, i.e. at the research design phase in selecting the most appropriate service quality measurement model specifications. It not only contributes to the existing body of knowledge by providing empirical evidence to advance theory development in the quality management field but also has implications for the practitioners in any service sector on where to focus their attention for an effective service improvement.