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This paper reconsiders the approaches to measuring Confucian values, and tests their association with workforce performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine how such values and performances are prioritized across three East Asian societies, but more importantly, identifies how variations across societies might result from the way in which Confucianism has been transformed/appropriated differently across history.

A Best-Worst experimental design is used to measure three aspects of Confucianism (relational, pedagogical, and transformative), and three aspects of workforce performance (mindset, organization, and process) to capture the trade-offs by respondents from three East Asian societies: China (n=274), Taiwan (n=264), and South Korea (n=254). The study employs analysis of variance with post-hoc tests to examine differences between societies. A hierarchical cluster analysis using Ward’s method is utilized to identify clusters based on similarities within the data. And last, multiple regression analysis is applied to determine the explanatory power of Confucian values on workforce performance.

Findings confirm the prioritization of three aspects of Confucianism (relational, pedagogical, and transformative) to differ between Mainland Chinese, Taiwan Chinese, and Korean respondents – producing five distinct clusters based on similarities across three societies. Overall, between 7 and 27 percent of the variance in workforce performance could be explained by the Confucian values included in this study.

This study highlights the “different shades of Confucianism” across East Asian societies, which we coin as Confucian Origin, Preservation, and Pragmatism, and demonstrates the need to take a multifaceted perspective in the measurement of Confucian culture. The study provides empirical support for the link between Confucianism and performance at the micro-level, as originally proposed by Baumann and Winzar (2017), and identifies specific antecedents of behavior for research moving forward.

How should managers organize their R&D workforce in order to maximize the benefit of internal R&D and R&D outsourcing strategy? The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of R&D workforce diversity on firms’ performance when the firms use internal and external knowledge acquired from R&D outsourcing. Diversity of R&D employees as R&D workforce can enable firms to utilize the knowledge of internal R&D and internalize the external knowledge.

Panel data analysis with fixed effects is used. The authors conduct hierarchical multiple regression analyses to test the moderating effect of R&D workforce diversity with 10,401 data from Korean manufacturing firms.

This study finds out that age and education diversity of R&D workforce have positive moderating effects on the relationship between the R&D outsourcing and firm performance. In contrast, internal R&D is negatively associated with firm performance when the age diversity of R&D workforce increases. The results point to the significant role of R&D workforce diversity in R&D unit since firms often use both internal R&D and external R&D.

For practical implications to be more effective, CEOs and managers of firms should employ differentiated approaches to manage the diversity of R&D workforce based on whether they primarily focus on their internal R&D or utilize external R&D.

This research extends recent efforts to better understand the effect of organizational diversity on the firms’ performance when firms use internal R&D and R&D outsourcing strategy.

The use of linear models has major limitations for accurately representing the true link between gender diversity and organizational performance. This study aims to explore two curvilinear models and tests which one – the U-shape or the inverted U-shape – best represents the gender diversity–performance link at two hierarchical levels: the board of directors and the workforce.

Both models are tested using data collected from a representative sample of Spanish educational organizations, which are dominated numerically by women, although women are still slightly underrepresented in managerial positions.

The results show the existence of an inverted U-shape and, therefore, the existence of a potential “optimal” level of gender diversity for both the board of directors and the workforce. While the highest performance by the board of directors is attained when the proportion of women and men is balanced in the workforce, the highest level of performance is attained when the proportion of women is greater.

There are hardly any studies simultaneously exploring the gender diversity–performance linkage at two hierarchical levels where the proportion of women/men is substantially different: the board of directors and the workforce. Thus, this study contributes to better know whether such relationship is dependent on the hierarchical position. It is important to know this because each level is related to different functions and tasks and shape a social status that can significantly influence performance.

The purpose of this eight-country study is to examine what drives performance at the individual worker’s level and compare the explanatory power of such drivers between emerging, newly developed and developed markets around the globe.

The study combines established behavioural theory developed in a Western context with three factors anticipated to be most relevant in Asia (competitive attitude, willingness to serve and speed) as drivers of workforce performance. Four thousand working and middle-class respondents from eight countries were sampled. The associations were tested using structural equation modelling, and workforce performance was measured using univariate analysis.

Three country clusters emerged from the research: emerging economies in Asia (Indonesia, India), where the three factors powerfully explain performance; “Confucian orbit countries” (China, Japan, Korea), where the factors explain 81-93 per cent; and highly developed Western countries (the USA, the UK, Germany), where the factors account for only 20-29 per cent.

As well as providing a framework for modelling workforce performance, particularly in Asian countries, the findings indicate that workforce performance should be incorporated in performance indexes. The findings as to which drivers best explain workforce performance in each country can inform workforce recruitment and management, as well as the location of businesses and outsourcing.

For the first time, the study addresses the anomaly between economic growth and development experienced by Asian countries and their relatively low rankings in global competitiveness indexes by making the link between workforce performance and country performance.

Globalization has brought many challenges to organizations, namely, in managing the performance of multicultural workforces to achieve organizational objectives. Past researchers have highlighted many factors that influence the employee’s performance, but the nature and scope of these factors is limited to the conventional setting. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive framework to better understand the role of the psychological diversity climate, HRM practices and personality traits (Big Five) in job satisfaction and performance of the multicultural workforce.

Data were collected from 258 faculty members working in Saudi Arabia’s higher educational sector. Structural equation modeling was used with Amos 18 to analyze the data.

The findings of this study suggest that managers should adopt diversity practices to improve the psychological diversity climate among multicultural workforce. In addition, diversity training and unbiased performance appraisal systems also increase the faculty member’s job satisfaction and performance in multicultural settings. Finally, managers should consider openness to culture and sociability traits while selecting faculty members to work in multicultural settings.

This framework has never been tested in higher educational institutions and in multicultural setting.

This paper aims to examine the impact of gender diversity both at operational and leadership levels on the financial performance of firms in India.

The study is based on a panel data set of 100 large Indian corporate firms. This study uses the Blau index and Shannon index to compute gender diversity. First, this paper uses system generalized method of moments model to deal with the potential endogeneity issue in the association between gender diversity and firm performance. Second, to unveil heterogeneity in such a relationship, the study applies panel data quantile regression model. Finally, the study adopts a generalized estimating equation model to investigate such relationships for group affiliated and standalone firms.

This study finds a significant positive impact of workforce gender diversity and board gender diversity on the financial performance of firms. Further, the results of the quantile regression model indicate that the impact of gender diversity (workforce and board) on firm performance is more pronounced at higher quantiles of the conditional distribution of firm performance. However, the study fails to extricate any significant impact of audit committee gender diversity on firm performance. Finally, the study also finds a significant positive impact of gender diversity at both workforce and board level for a group affiliated, as well as standalone firms.

The present study makes a novel contribution to the extant literature on the association between gender diversity and financial performance of firms by examining such diversity at both operational and leadership levels in the context of an emerging country such as India that captures the complex realities pertaining to gender issues. Further, the study contributes to the empirical literature regarding the heterogeneous impact of gender diversity on firm performance in the Indian context.

The paper aims to introduce a model for measuring individual performance named Workforce Competency Model (WFCM). Notable aspects of the model including its validation/verification are explored and presented by means of a case study.

The model is developed by referring to the previously developed models in literature, which are concerned with the measurement of human or individual performance. Taking into account the organization's needs for each of the workers to be evaluated on identified indicators, performances of individual maintenance workers are quantified according to factors that contribute to those indicators.

Previous studies show the significance of human involvement in maintenance has been highlighted in many industries; the human element is one of the primary aspects that influence maintenance effectiveness. A model for quantifying individual workers' performance is introduced. A case study carried out in an electronic packaging company for verification and validation purpose demonstrates the developed model is efficient, accurate, flexible and feasible.

This paper presents a unique approach to developing a model that can be used as a tool to effectively evaluate maintenance workforce performance. This study involves a thorough review of the past literature to design the concept to be used, the development process of the model, and validation of the developed model through a case study. The great challenge to the success of this project is to develop the model so that a robust and feasible measurement tool can be built.

The concept of workforce agility has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, defining it has sparked much discussion and ambiguity. Recognizing this ambiguity, this paper aims to inductively develop a behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility.

The authors interviewed 36 experts in the field of agility and used concept mapping and the critical incident technique to create a behavioral taxonomy.

The authors identified a behavioral taxonomy consisting of ten dimensions: (1) accepting changes, (2) decision making, (3) creating transparency, (4) collaboration, (5) reflection, (6) user centricity, (7) iteration, (8) testing, (9) self-organization, and (10) learning.

The authors’ research contributes to the literature in that it offers an inductively developed behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility with ten dimensions. It further adds to the literature by tying the notion of workforce agility to the performance literature.

The authors’ results suggest that it might be beneficial for companies to take all workforce agility dimensions into account when creating an agile culture, starting agile projects, integrating agility into hiring decisions or evaluating employee performance.

This paper uses an inductive approach to define workforce agility as a set of behavioral dimensions, integrating the scientific as well as the practitioner literature on agility.

This study aims to investigate whether organisational climate (OC) predicts academic staff performance at Malaysian higher education institutions (HEIs). The study equally aims at validating the psychometric properties of OC and workforce performance (WFP) constructs.

Survey questionnaires were administered to 800 academic staff of eight selected HEIs. Principal component analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, full-fledged structural equation modelling and multiple regression analysis were performed to explore the underlying factors and test the factorial validity of the constructs.

The analysis yielded a five-factor index for the OC construct, whereas the WFP construct comprised two factors. The findings reveal a strong predictive causal effect between OC and WFP. These results suggest that establishing a positive OC enhances academic staff performance. Furthermore, the hypothesised model adds new knowledge to the literature of OC, from the Malaysian context, which could be used to predict WFP at the tertiary level.

The study concludes by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the findings for HEIs.

This paper makes a significant contribution to the understanding of how OC could be used as an effective instrument in improving academic staff performance in the context of Malaysian HEIs.

More and more, the leaders of business functions are turning for competitive insights to the massive data they can now capture. But to date, human resources departments have lagged behind the efforts of marketing, IT, CRM and other functions. The purpose of this article is to show how executives can start using data to measure and improve HR's contributions to business performance.

The article identifies six analytical tools that HR can use to connect HR efforts to business performance. Survey results underscore the value of an analytical approach while revealing that many HR departments are heavily focused on internal measures rather than business outcomes. Each analytical tool is exemplified through case studies. A model is presented to suggest how executives can get started by focusing on five key areas.

Leading companies are using six analytical tools to improve the connection between HR investments and business returns: employee databases; segmentation of talent; targeted investments; customization of the employee value proposition; long‐term workforce planning; and talent supply chains.

As the case studies reveal, the tools identified here can help HR leaders actively shape their organization's future – managing talent and directing programs toward the long‐term needs of the business. Survey data shows that most companies increasingly seek to use analytics for long‐term advantage, and the model presented here can help HR executives take the first critical steps.