February 2012
The roles of information and communication technology (ICT) systems in construction supply chain management and barriers to their implementation
Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) have impacted on supply chain management in various application scenarios, including the construction industry. Previous studies have shown that the use of appropriate ICT systems has the potential of integrating the plethora of supply chain participants, leading to successful accomplishment of end objectives. Nonetheless, these studies have also revealed the...
February 2012
The role of religiosity in family communication and the development of materialistic values
While studies of communication effects on consumer behavior of the young have focused mainly on the effects of mass media, little research has examined the effects of interpersonal communication. One finds relatively little theoretical and empirical work regarding the role of interpersonal communication in the development of materialistic values of young people. This article deals with one important type of...
February 2012
Brain drain and African development: Any possible gain from the drain?
Everyday, Africa loses her best academics, scientists, doctors, nurses, accountants, and other sought-after professionals, through brain drain, into other richer countries. The question is: Why? The impact of the problem is to the detriment of development of the African continent. It also seems to be a continuous issue without any trend of ceasing. This paper explores the nature, effects (positive and negative) and...
February 2012
The impact of downsizing on the performance of survived employees: A case study of Pakistan
The author has proposed a conceptual model of the after-effects of the downsizing on the survived employees of the organization. The proposed model is the logical integration of the inevitable after-effects of the downsizing and is supported by previous researches on the consequences of the downsizing. The downsizing affected employees’ loyalty, perception about the job insecurity and their commitments toward the...
February 2012
The impact of website development on organisation performance: Malaysia’s perspective
This study focuses on the impact of website development on organisation performance in Malaysia. The study of Website development will be based on four factors (planning and preparation; development and design; management and maintenance; and security, privacy and trust) and organisation performance will be based on three factors (internal, market and competitive factors). The finding shows that there is a positive...
February 2012
The impact of background music and sound in decision making: A case study in experimental economics laboratory
This paper experimentally studies the impact of background music and sound on the preference of the decision makers (DMs) for rewards in pairwise intertemporal choice tasks and lottery choice tasks. The participants took part in the current experiment, involving four treatments: (1) familiar music, (2) unfamiliar music, (3) noise and (4) no music. The experimental results confirm that background noise influences human...
February 2012
Management practices: An analysis of gender differences in the strategy execution
The paper sets out to investigate the difference between female and male managers in the context of strategy execution in their organizations with regard to the conceptual framework of leadership and performance. A survey questionnaire was administered to 322 managers to study the 5 dimensions regarding obstacles in strategy execution previously identified. The study primarily used principal component analysis...
February 2012
Assessment of teaching corporate entrepreneurship to master’s level students
Tertiary education in terms of entrepreneurship is not adequate to stimulate entrepreneurial activity in South Africa. By assessing the effect and successfulness of tertiary modules offered in entrepreneurship (and in this case specifically corporate entrepreneurship) an improvement can be made to these courses which would lead to increased entrepreneurial activity. The purpose of this paper is to determine the effect...
February 2012
European policy for the promotion of inland waterway transport: A case study of the Danube River
This research is based on the analysis of the waterway transport on Danube River and its aim is to point out the facts, based on which it will be possible to predict further directions of sustainable transport development on the most important waterway of Europe. The research indicates the basic rules of European politics of sustainable inland waterway development. The River Danube is considered to be the backbone of...
February 2012
Neuroticism and job outcomes: Mediating effects of perceived organizational politics
The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediated link of perception of organizational politics (POP) between neuroticism and intent to leave; job stress. In this cross sectional field survey, the data was collected from 212 employees of various public and private sector organizations of Pakistan. The results revealed that perception of politics fully mediated between neuroticism and intent to leave. In...
February 2012
Consumer trust in e-commerce: A study of consumer perceptions in Pakistan
This cross sectional field survey is aimed at exploring the factors which determine consumers’ trust in online purchases. Using data from 311 employees in various organizations, we found out that all the studied factors significantly determined consumers’ trust as well as word of mouth generation. The unique contribution of this study is significant in the sense that it tried to establish how word of mouth...
February 2012
Exploring whistle blowing intentions in South Africa: A quantitative analysis
The purpose of this paper was to examine the influence of individual and situational level factors on internal whistle-blowing intentions, within a South African context. This is the first quantitative study of whistle-blowing in South Africa. Quantitative survey data, encompassing 250 senior, middle and lower-level management/administration personnel was analysed. Majority of surveyed participants indicated positive...
February 2012
Market value coverage (4A) in terms of fast food adoption
This study explored the elements of market value coverage (MVC) (awareness, acceptability, accessibility and affordability) as applied to adoption diffusion of innovations. Reviewed of these factors as consumer-focused marketing concept were other important aspects of this study. Statistical tools in this research were analysis of variance and post HOC test. This research found market value coverage elements pattern in...
February 2012
Relationship of unemployment with social unrest and psychological distress: An empirical study for juveniles
This study was initiated to measure the effect of unemployment on youths of the society. From the literature, two important factors, social unrest (SU) and psychological distress (PD) were found as a result of unemployment. Both factors were measured by developing a questionnaire of SU and PD from the literature. The population comprised juveniles from higher education institutes of Peshawar. Data were collected from 2...
February 2012
Common stochastic trend and co-integration in the stock exchange markets: European countries and Turkey
According to modern portfolio theory, there are some benefits from diversifying assets. In the literature, the possibility of this diversification is mostly investigated by analysing the correlation coefficients between the returns of the assets. However, this analysis can only give some ideas about short term decisions. For long term decisions, existence of common stochastic trends should be investigated. In this...
February 2012
Consumer characteristics influencing natural gas consumption preference in Tokat, Turkey
This study investigated the main factors affecting natural gas consumption preference of households in Tokat town of Turkey. Households’ choices for natural gas and other energy alternatives were analyzed using the data collected from a household survey. Descriptive analysis was carried out to describe the socio-economic characteristics of the households. Educational level and career of household head, household...
February 2012
Psychological ownership: A managerial construct for talent retention and organisational effectiveness
Many scholars, consultants and practitioners have recently focused their attention on ‘ownership’ as a psychological, rather than just a business phenomenon. Psychological ownership is defined as a state in which individuals feel as though the target of ownership or a piece of it is ‘theirs’ (that is ‘It is mine!’). It suggests that, the presence of psychological ownership among...
February 2012
Models of the ATM-based alternative distribution channel development
This paper describes the economic model for bank’s automated teller machine (ATM) network outsourcing services and the Economic model for the shared ATM network services. The structure of the costs has been presented; as well as the comparative analysis of these two models. This paper highlights the need for rationalization of the invested funds in ATM infrastructure development, which is especially...
February 2012
Survey and prioritization of human capital by fuzzy network analysis process approach
The present research intends to determine components affecting human capital as well as to identify relationships and prioritization of the mentioned components. The effective factors on human capital and their reciprocal relationship and interactions have been identified through study of the literature and using experts’ opinions. In this article, a proposed model based on “fuzzy network analysis process...
February 2012
Mediating roles of intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy in the relationships between perceived person-job fit and work outcomes
Most fit scholars primarily focused on the direct relationship between perceived person-job fit and work-related outcomes. However, they offered little understanding of the mediating process linking these relationships. Hence, the present study specifically considered intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy as the mediating variables. After analyzing 256 sets of employee and supervisor questionnaires collected from 12...
February 2012
The relationship between strategic processes of knowledge management and organizational intelligence
This paper aims to discuss the strategic processes of knowledge management in order to study the impact of these processes on organizational intelligence in 3 public organizations in Shiraz, Iran. This paper has identified strategic processes of knowledge management based on research done in the literature. For this purpose, a comprehensive questionnaire based on American productivity and quality center(APQC)...
February 2012
Dysfunctional psychological aspects of working in a fast food industry
The management within fast food industry has the ability to make their employees’ jobs equal, either enjoyable and rewarding or miserable and boring. Employees are the striking force of an organization, and without them, the organization cannot not function. Therefore, giving employees some forms of autonomy and offering them challenging work can enhance their levels of motivation and satisfaction....
February 2012
A study of building the crisis prevention model for the innovation development of green marketing: A case of the automotive industry
For sustainable operation, business circle not only attaches importance to cultivating external competitiveness, but also values innovation of green technology gradually. Green technology brings along the industries, it enables enterprises toward sustainable development when making the best use of innovative technology. This study aimed to build a crisis prevention model for the innovation development of...
February 2012
The driving factors that promote e-purchasing implementation in organisations
There has been a rapid increase in the number of organisations undertaking business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce initiatives. One of such initiative that has a far reaching impact on electronic communication, information exchange and business transaction is e-procurement. With the view to promote the use of e-procurement in enterprises, this review endeavours to identify the prominent factors that significantly...
February 2012
Romanian healthcare system capacity of responding to population needs as perceived by key persons
Difficulties of Romanian healthcare system generated by “Semasko inheritance”, a decision making process not properly substantiated, inadequate administration of resources, continuous change of regulations, health reform discontinuity, poor endowment of many health facilities and migration of medical personnel, within the low economic development in comparison with EU and country potential, have a...
February 2012
An integrated model for designing supply chain network under demand and supply uncertainty
This paper presents an integrated network design model for a supply chain in which supplier and distribution centers are unreliable. When there is an unreliable supplier, the amount of yield which is received at each distribution center may be different from the original orders. Similarly, because of imperfect performances of distribution centers, the quantity of products which is transformed from each DC to each...
February 2012
Impact of job satisfaction on employee performance: An empirical study of autonomous Medical Institutions of Pakistan
In Pakistan, the doctor’s profession is considered gorgeous and dignified because it is directly related to the lives of human beings. In Pakistani society, there is a general inclination that in government hospitals, the patients are not properly treated by the doctors. The purpose of this study is to find out factors that influence level of job satisfaction among the workforce of autonomous medical institutions...
February 2012
Effect of corporate governance mechanisms on the relationship between legal origins and cost of debt: Evidence from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region
How do differences in country-level governance and enforcement mechanisms affect firms? Using a large dataset from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, we document that differences in legal traditions translate into differences in cost of debt. Our results show that firms headquartered in the common law countries have lower cost of debt than firms headquartered in the civil law countries. Our...
February 2012
Political influence on economic decision-making in government-owned companies: From the perspectives of key players
This study assessed the perspectives of key players on political influence in government-owned companies. The purpose was to provide in-depth or detailed understanding of political influence in such companies and how political influence affects company economic decision-making. Data was collected via face-to-face interviews based on open ended questions. A total sample of twenty-four top management personnel of...
February 2012
Uncovering the chaotic behavior of ISE 100 stock-market index
This study tested for both unit root and chaos in the daily returns on Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE 100) all share equity indices from 01.01.1990 to 07.10.2009. In order to detect unit root, we applied Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF), Phillips-Perron (PP), and Kwiatkowski–Phillips–Schmidt–Shin (KPSS) test statistics and to compute maximal Lyapunov exponent (LE), we applied Kantz’s algorithm, Kantz...
February 2012
A geometrical approach for fuzzy production possibility set in data envelopment analysis (DEA) with fuzzy input - output levels
Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a managerial tool used to measure the relative efficiency of decision making units (DMU). Classic DEA models estimates a production frontier using efficient DMUs. This frontier bounds all feasible production plans named production possibility set. Traditional DEA models require crisp input and output data. However, in real-world problems inputs and outputs are often imprecise like...
February 2012
The study of the relationship between firms' board of directors’ structure and criteria in assessing the firm performance
The main purpose in this article is to study the relationship between firms' board of directors’ structure and accounting and economic criteria in assessing the performance of companies listed at Tehran Stock Exchange. To do this, 94 firms from our statistical society were chosen. We had access to the needed information for a period of six years (2004 to 2009) about those firms. Some criteria were chosen as...
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