Search results

To most people, money is a motivator, which is robustly true for salespeople. A high love of money attitude predicts university students’ poor academic performance in a business course and cheating in laboratory experiments and multiple panel studies, but money (income) itself does not predict dishonesty. Extrinsic reward undermines intrinsic motivation. Very little research has incorporated the grit construct in the sales literature and explored the relationship between grit and the love of money. Further, a growth mindset and a fixed mindset may also impact salespeople’s job performance. This study aims to explore a brand-new theoretical structural equation model (SEM) and investigate the relationships between individual characteristics (growth and fixed mindsets and grit orientation) and job performance directly and indirectly through a mediator – salespeople’s love of money attitude.

This study uses Qualtrics and collects data from 330 business-to-business (B2B) salespeople across several industries in the USA. This study uses a formative SEM model to test this study’s hypotheses.

First, there are significant correlations among grit, a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, revealing no construct duplication or redundancy. Second, both a growth mindset and grit indirectly enhance job performance through the love of money attitude – a mediator, offering a brand-new discovery. Third, counter-intuitively, a growth mindset and grit do not directly improve job performance. Fourth, grit is significantly and negatively related to the love of money attitude, adding a new twist to this study’s theoretical model. Fifth, a fixed mindset undermines job performance directly but is unrelated to the love of money. Overall, B2B salespeople’s love of money attitude (employee demand) undermines sales personnel’s self-reported job performance (organization demand) in the organization and employee’s supply and demand exchange relationship.

The findings reveal that a growth mindset, a fixed mindset and grit contribute differently to sales personnel’s love of money attitude and job performance in this study’s theoretical model. The love of money serves as a mediator. A commonly accepted belief is that money is a motivator. Money (income) itself and the love of money attitude are two separate constructs. This study’s novel discoveries provide the essential missing monetary-aspirations-to-job-performance link in the literature – ardent monetary aspiration undermines self-reported job performance. This study offers inspiration to help decision-makers make happy, healthy and wealthy decisions and improve performance.

This paper aims to develop the building information modeling (BIM) investment decision model (BIDM) for Hong Kong architecture, engineering, construction and operation (AECO) industry utilization in early BIM investment decision-making. The developed BIDM is designed to assist company leaders in measuring and amending their investment decisions and BIM strategy by considering estimators [features and net positivity (NP)] and results based on BIDM.

This research is conducted using a mixed methodology of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The necessary indicators were collected from literature and interviews with relevant researchers, where 545 semistructured questionnaires were distributed to selected AECO company leaders and collected by the authors. The least absolute contraction and selection operator (LASSO)-based result was conducted to help company leaders. The results of the validation test validated the model based on the LASSO method and the outcomes of the p-value test also supported the significance of BIDM.

More than 80 determinators were processed to conduct 19 main indicators for generating BIDM, and 6 significant main indicators on final BIDM. The data set of this research included 483 samples, which are categorized into 7 groups according to their role in an infrastructure project.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first LASSO-used investment decision-making model integrated with the proposal of NP in the AECO industry. The value of current knowledge is the development of BIDM, which benefits company leaders in BIM investment decision-making and commercially benefits consulting cooperators as an investment forecasting tool. BIDM will help future users make better, more dynamic investment strategies.

Companies are increasingly appointing a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) to anchor the need to highlight climate change at the senior management level. This study aims to examine how CSO power and sustainability-based compensation influence climate reporting and carbon performance.

Using one of the largest data sets to date, consisting of 18,834 company years through the author’s observations, spanning an 11-year period (2011–2021) in 33 countries. This paper used quantitative methods – specifically, ordinal logistic regression estimation. This paper measures the level of climate change disclosure based on the carbon disclosure leadership methodology. Carbon performance is based on the intensity of carbon emissions (Scope 1, Scope 2), which is a quantitative and relatively more objective measure.

The results suggest that climate change disclosure continued to increase and the carbon emissions intensity of the companies in this study gradually decreased over the sample period. This paper finds that the presence of the CSO within the top management team has a positive and significant influence on the level of information on climate change of the companies in the sample. This finding confirms the idea that the managerial capacity of CSOs motivates the disclosure of climate change. The empirical results confirm that there are differences in the role that the CSO and sustainability-based compensation play in influencing the quality of climate information disclosure in developed and developing countries.

The recourse on a mixed theoretical framework, which highlights upper echelons theory, argues the understanding of the role of CSOs in explaining the relationship between climate change disclosure–carbon performance relationship. The novelty of the study lies in the approaches adopted to describe the quality of climate change disclosure. To control for endogeneity, this paper uses a difference-in-difference analysis by adding a firm to the Morgan Stanley Capital International index as an exogenous shock.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the rise of online learning in Hong Kong. Online learning was identified as the only solution to meet students’ learning needs in the higher education sector during this chaotic period. This research aims to explore students’ perceptions of online teaching and learning from home under a health emergency via a comparison of undergraduate and postgraduate students’ experiences.

A total of 174 postgraduate students and 286 undergraduate students in various universities and colleges in Hong Kong were surveyed in this study.

The results show that postgraduate students generally gave more positive feedback on individual and environmental prerequisites, alongside pedagogical and institutional support, and were more motivated in online classes as compared to undergraduate students. Undergraduate students considered the shift to online education in light of the COVID-19 pandemic to be timely and rated their level of discipline with respect to online learning higher than did postgraduate students.

This study enables educators to better understand the first-hand experiences of students across different levels of study in Hong Kong, as well as to examine the possibility of establishing online education as a more prevalent mode of study in the future. The COVID-19 pandemic has educated us on the significance of being well-prepared to ensure quality education continues when emergencies and disturbances arise.

This study aims to use fractal theory to investigate the contact mechanics of two bidirectional anisotropic surfaces, taking into account the friction coefficient of the contact interface. This study introduces a model that centers on normal contact load and contact stiffness, providing an extensive framework to elucidate the interactions between these surfaces.

The research adopts the Weierstrass–Mandelbrot (W-M) function for simulating bidirectional surface profiles. Through the application of elastic-plastic contact theory, it evaluates the contact area and load of a singular asperity across elasticity, elastoplasticity and plasticity phases. The contact load and stiffness of the rough surface are determined using a refined asperity density distribution function, and these findings are juxtaposed with extant models to validate their precision and rationality.

The study delineates the influence of fractal dimension (D), surface roughness (G), ellipse eccentricity (e) and friction coefficient (µ) on the contact area, load and stiffness. It reveals that the contact area enlarges with the fractal dimension (D) yet diminishes with increased eccentricity (e), roughness (G) and friction coefficient (µ). These elements considerably affect the contact load and stiffness, underscoring their significance in comprehending surface interactions.

This study applies fractal theory to analyze the contact mechanics of bidirectional anisotropic surfaces, considering the geometry and mechanics of ellipsoidal asperities on rough surfaces to develop a contact mechanics model. This model clarifies the deformation of an asperity in normal contact, presenting a more rational alternative to current models.

Organic coatings are widely used for protecting metal equipment and structures from corrosion. Accurate detection and evaluation of the protective performance and service life of coatings are of great importance. This paper aims to review the research progress on performance evaluation and lifetime prediction of organic coatings.

First, the failure forms and aging testing methods of organic coatings are briefly introduced. Then, the technical status and the progress in the detection and evaluation of coating protective performance and the prediction of service life are mainly reviewed.

There are some key challenges and difficulties in this field, which are described in the end.

The progress is summarized from a variety of technical perspectives. Performance evaluation and lifetime prediction include both single-parameter and multi-parameter methods.

This study primarily examines the link between carbon and financial performance in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition, the study also explores how the economic impact of carbon performance varies in carbon-intensive and non-carbon-intensive industries.

This study takes a sample of 1,539 non-financial firms from 13 Asia-Pacific countries from 2014 to 2021. It employs a firm-fixed effect panel regression model to examine the objective.

The findings indicate that carbon performance improvement enhances accounting-based and market-based financial performance. The positive impact of carbon abatement stems from increased operational efficiency, energy efficiency and lower production costs. Further, the stock market participants also reward the firm for carbon efficiency. However, the carbon intensity of industrial sectors presents a conflicting picture for this association.

This study adds insights to the literature by providing a contemporary reflection on the nexus between carbon emissions and economic outcomes in the understudied Asia-Pacific region. It also unveils the nuanced difference in the carbon-financial performance relationship attributed to industries' carbon sensitivity.

The study aims to investigate the components of photographs that are important in building the perception of tourists towards any destination. The study quantitatively employs secondary data analysis. An extensive literature review is conducted to identify the components of a photograph that impact the tourist perception. These components were analysed for importance using a quality tool called Pareto analysis. The results of the Pareto analysis is categorised under two heads viz Vital few and useful many. The ‘vital few’ are the components of the photograph which are responsible for 80% of the perception building of tourists for a destination. Whereas useful many is the category in which the components are responsible for only 20% of perception building. As depicted in Table 14.1, Visual Aesthetics in Photographs, Nature and Landscape, Colours in Photographs, Excitement Component, People in Photographs and Display of Archaeological Sites fall under the vital few categories as reported by the past literature. Visual Styles of Processing, Shot Composition, Shot Angle, Shot Density and Shot Scale are the components that fall under the category of many. The results of the study will help photographers and destination marketers to understand what builds the perception of the tourist by looking at a photograph. Thus, they can strategise those components accordingly to increase the tourism of a particular destination.

This study aims to systematically review the current academic literature on supply chain transparency (SCT) to explore the impact of SCT on firm performance and identify factors that influencing SCT-related practices.

This review follows the six steps and 14 decisions of conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) to comprehensively review 91 identified papers published between 2007 and 2024.

Based on the content analysis of the selected papers, this study summarizes the antecedents, practices, outcomes as well as potential barriers of SCT. We develop a conceptual framework from the descriptive and thematic findings to enrich the relevant aspects of SCT and propose some critical gaps and directions for future research.

This study links SCT with several outcomes of firm performance, with a particular focus on how SCT affects sustainability in terms of its economic, social, and environmental dimensions as well as supply chain resilience. It proposes potential avenues for enriching SCT in future research.

This study aims to improve the acceleration in the additive manufacturing (AM) process. AM tools, such as extrusion heads, jets, electric arcs, lasers and electron beams (EB), experience negligible forces. However, their speeds are limited by the positioning systems. In addition, a thin tool must travel several kilometers in tiny motions with several turns while realizing the AM part. Hence, acceleration is a more significant limiting factor than the velocity or precision for all except EB.

The sawtooth (ST) scanning strategy presented in this paper minimizes the time by combining three motion features: zigzag scan, 45º or 135º rotation for successive layers in G00 to avoid the CNC interpolation, and modifying these movements along 45º or 135º into sawtooth to halve the turns.

Sawtooth effectiveness is tested using an in-house developed Sand AM (SaAM) apparatus based on the laser–powder bed fusion AM technique. For a simple rectangle layer, the sawtooth achieved a path length reduction of 0.19%–1.49% and reduced the overall time by 3.508–4.889 times, proving that sawtooth uses increased acceleration more effectively than the other three scans. The complex layer study reduced calculated time by 69.80%–139.96% and manufacturing time by 47.35%–86.85%. Sawtooth samples also exhibited less dimensional variation (0.88%) than zigzag 45° (12.94%) along the build direction.

Sawtooth is limited to flying optics AM process.

Development of scanning strategy for flying optics AM process to reduce the warpage by improving the acceleration.