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This study examines whether the behavioral attributes, such as overconfidence, of chief executive officers (CEO) and chief operating officers (COO) affect firm's inventory leanness. If they do, how are they interacting with each other? Moreover, incorporating market competition into the analysis, this study explores how the competition moderates the relationship between managerial overconfidence and inventory leanness.

Using a large panel data of US manufacturing firms between 1998 and 2015, this study measures top managers' overconfident characteristics using stock option information. Then, a panel regression analysis is adopted to test the effects of managerial overconfidence on inventory leanness. Moreover, a moderation model is applied to investigate the interaction effects of market competition.

Firms with overconfident COOs (CEOs), other circumstances being equal, increase (decrease) the inventory leanness as the market becomes more competitive.

The study suggests that firms should understand top managers' behavioral characteristics to manage inventory efficiently. Collectively, CEOs (COOs) tend to increase (decrease) inventory levels due to their overconfidence as the market gets competitive. Firms should establish a systematic process to be reviewed by diverse stakeholders to deal with managerial overconfidence.

This study is an exploratory study that examines whether and how top management's behavioral attribute relates to a firm's operations performance. It underlines that CEO and COO's overconfident characteristics determine the inventory leanness when market competition is considered. Numerous studies on firm-level strategies emphasized the top managers' overconfidence as a key factor. However, behavioral characteristics at the top management level have rarely been studied in operations management fields. Based on the results, scholars could compare and understand the effects of CEO and COO overconfidence to provide insights into inventory management.

In the present study, the authors have explored the research questions, “How do companies in the engineering and automobile manufacturing sector in India determine the coordination strategy with their suppliers?” and “Can we develop a framework which helps the company adopt a particular coordination strategy?” The authors also aimed for developing a generalizable theory of supply chain coordination (SCC) strategy.

The authors have studied upstream SCC practices at eight Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in the Indian engineering manufacturing and automobile sector and identified 11 types of SCC in three categories of suppliers, namely large, medium and small. Each SCC is characterized by the category of items as the authors found the OEMs follow different strategies for different types of items. Initially, the authors started the study with the objective of strategy discovery, and later on, they prescribed a strategic framework based on the consolidated knowledge that they gathered at the discovery phase. The authors propose a SCC strategy framework consisting of four dimensions, i.e. time horizon, the formality of engagement, price and volume for the upstream supply chain. With the framework, the authors have identified the driving factors for choosing a particular strategy. The authors have found both OEMs and suppliers in India prefer to have a long-term relationship for building trust, which helps both the OEMs and the suppliers to go the extra mile when needed. Apart from large suppliers supplying technology and proprietary items, OEMs prefer to have an informal relationship so that they enjoy flexibility and attain agility. The price and volume dimensions are dependent on who enjoys more bargaining power.

The authors propose a SCC strategy framework consisting of four dimensions, i.e. time horizon, formality of engagement, price and volume for the upstream supply chain. With the framework, the authors have identified the driving factors for choosing a particular strategy. The authors have found that both OEMs and suppliers in India prefer to have a long-term relationship for building trust, which helps both the OEMs and the suppliers to go the extra mile when needed. Apart from large suppliers supplying technology and proprietary items, OEMs prefer to have an informal relationship so that they enjoy flexibility and attain agility. The price and volume dimensions are dependent on who enjoys more bargaining power.

This study made a substantial contribution to the literature by presenting a SCC strategy framework, ISCM (Indian Supply Chain Coordination Model). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, in the literature, there was no concrete framework for analyzing the coordination strategy specific to the Indian situation. The framework proposed has been derived based on empirical findings; hence, it is not a conceptual one. The authors also developed a supply chain typology. This study made a substantial contribution to the literature by presenting a SCC strategy framework, ISCM. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, in the literature, there was no concrete framework for analyzing the coordination strategy specific to the Indian situation. The framework proposed has been derived based on empirical findings; hence, it is not a conceptual one. The authors also developed a supply chain typology.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze research methodologies and publication trends across geographical regions in the field of supply chain innovation (SCI) and provide a discussion of future research in the SCI.

Using a content analysis approach, this paper investigates 26 years of SCI research based on a sample of 473 journal articles published in 77 peer-reviewed international journals.

There has been an increasing focus on empirical quantitative research design as compared to empirical qualitative, conceptual quantitative and conceptual qualitative designs in the field of SCI. Continued research interest in SCI from all parts of the world including North America, Europe and Asia illustrates the importance of SCI in the broader field of management.

The inclusion of a large number of journals provides greater confidence in the identified trends. However, as the top-tier journals publish only the most rigorous studies, considering all journals as equally weighted will give rise to a mixed pool of studies. Identifying trends from this mixed pool may provide more comprehensiveness at the cost of inclusion of non-core journals of the field.

The current study builds a holistic view of the methodological progress made so far in the field of SCI.

It is important for an IT service company (IS company) to fully take into account the differences in customer satisfaction across different customer groups. In this article, we consider three layers of customers in the client company. There are project directors who interface with and accept the final product (i.e. IT system) from the IS company, users who actually use the IT system for their daily operations, and finally operators who do maintenance works for the IT system. We propose that each customer group (i.e. project director, user, or operator) evaluates the IT systems success with a different set of criteria. Transaction relationship and partnership turn out to be important determinants for the project directors: task‐related and IS‐related output performances seem to be less influential. The reverse conclusion can be made for users and operators. One additional insight is that IS company’s efforts to understand its customer’s tasks and share risks with the customer company might have unexpected effects. Although the project directors seem to like such close involvement, it can be detrimental to the users’ satisfaction with the IS outsourcing projects.

As an exploratory study, our research aims to investigate what factors would influence choices of foreign market entry mode by system integration (SI) companies. There are two distinct points. First, we specifically focus on a service industry, i.e., SI (System Integration) industry, which has unique features compared with other industries, yet not been studied extensively. Second, we indirectly examine whether forces influencing firms in an advancing country like Korea are different from those in more advanced countries: in this paper we investigate the Korean cases only, since most of the previous studies viewed this issue from the perspective of advanced countries.

This study is to develop the standards and indexes for evaluating the open university as an institution. Having successfully taken root in their societies since their launching, Asian open universities now need to further up their teaching and learning system which demands a rigid evaluation and assessment of a university as an institution. For the past ten years, Korea National Open University (KNOU) was evaluated twice by Korean Council for University Education (KCUE), which is in charge of the evaluation of the Korean universities; the result was not so satisfactory. It was because its evaluation standards and indexes were not appropriate for KNOU as an open university. They were primarily for the conventional universities. Thus KNOU needed its own assessment indexes, and this is a research looking for the proper ones for evaluating KNOU within the frame of university evaluation in Korea. Other open universities in Asia also have experienced or will face such problems in terms of the university evaluation. The result of this research will be helpful not only for KNOU but for other Asian open universities preparing for the university evaluation.

This article is the second part of the research on the institutional evaluation of the open universities. The title of the first one was ‘Evaluation Standards for Institutional Evaluation of Open Universities,’ which was presented at the 22nd AAOU Annual Conference, Tianjin, China. In the previous study we discussed the definition of university evaluation and some of the controversial points in the existing evaluation. The focal point was that the existing standards and indexes are not appropriate for Korea National Open University (KNOU) as an open university, and that it is necessary to establish a new evaluating system for the university. We believe it is true of the other open universities throughout Asia and the world. In short, the present research provides the practical and effective data on the evaluation standard. It also includes some new qualitative, quantitative and modified evaluation indexes reflecting the distinctive features of the open universities. The main part of this article elaborates on 5 evaluation domains, 23 evaluation sections, 81 evaluation items and 229 evaluation indexes. These evaluation domains, sections, items and indexes result from the practical surveys and AHP and Swing analyses. The result of this research will prove a good and essential element for ranking indicators in ODE universities. At the end of the paper we add some new standards and indexes for evaluating regional campuses of the open universities, which is another important agenda for upgrading the learner support throughout the country.

This paper aims to explore how cultural forces and historical events interact to form a country's organizing principles.

Culture influences management in significant ways. In order to understand true influences of culture on a country's economy and management, the paper looks at the dynamic interface between cultural forces and historical events that occurred in the country during the particular time period in point. It proposes that cultural forces and historical events are combined to form organizing principles in the country, which guide managers and workers in the economy to develop unique sets of work ethics: particular historical events reinforce or suppress particular elements of culture. Detailed case studies in Korea are used to support the proposition.

Based on the case studies in Korea, the paper shows how the country's culture and modern history have been intertwined to form organizing principles, which in turn have influenced and guided the country's economic development and firm's management.

This paper makes a rather unique contribution by suggesting an exploratory perspective that the dynamic interplay between cultural forces and historical events forms an economy's work ethics as organizing principles.

Firms face a great deal of uncertainty in developing new technology. This uncertainty poses much more serious problems when development projects are new to firms and there are few historical data applicable to the development process in point. Examines operations‐improvement processes in two shipbuilding firms and proposes an extended version of “parallel R&D” theory, called “learning‐updating strategy”. Based on a field study, presents empirical evidence for the effectiveness of the learning‐updating strategy in allocating managerial resources for operations improvement.

Strong and productive partnerships between buyers and suppliers are important for effective outsourcing. Such partnerships should be based on mutual understanding, which can be hampered by a perception gap between the supply chain partners with respect to what are the critical factors for a successful buyer‐supplier relationship. The nature of such a perception gap is explored by looking into the partnership between a Korean semiconductor manufacturer and its suppliers. Results indicate that there exist statistically significant differences in some of the perceptions both between the manufacturer and its suppliers and among the suppliers according to their production capability and product requirement.