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This study aims to enhance pedestrian safety by investigating the slip resistance of facility floors with ceramic tile surfaces and identifying critical surface roughness parameters that influence slip resistance.

Dynamic friction tests and comprehensive surface roughness analyses were conducted on ceramic tiles. Statistical analysis identified optimal roughness ranges for key parameters (R_a, R_p, R_t, R_z and R_v) to ensure the dynamic friction coefficient exceeds 0.5 to meet safety requirements. This study assessed different textures under dry, damp and foamy conditions.

The findings reveal that ceramic tile surfaces with higher peak heights and deeper valleys provide superior traction, particularly in damp and foamy conditions. The results demonstrate that specific surface textures can effectively mitigate slip and fall hazards by enhancing grip and increasing surface interaction points. This study establishes optimal roughness ranges for the critical parameters, providing a robust framework for improving slip resistance.

This study offers practical guidelines for designing safer ceramic tiles, emphasising the importance of tailored surface roughness to improve traction. It highlights the importance of considering environmental factors in slip resistance assessments, offering valuable insights for manufacturers, designers and policymakers. By focusing on specific surface textures, this study advances the development of safer built environments in public facilities. Future research directions should explore a broader range of tile finishes, footwear types and contaminant scenarios to refine the understanding of traction performance further.

Disasters, including health crises and weather emergencies, are increasingly prevalent. While many people are highly resilient, the traumatic experience of emergencies and disasters can affect individuals and communities, including library staff and library users. Traumatic effects can persist long after the immediate impact of an event and may be magnified by cumulative exposure to traumatic events. Libraries are not immune from emergencies and disasters and also experience many other hazards. With attention to trauma and a focus on resilience, libraries can build strong organizations even during difficult circumstances presented by emergencies and disasters. This chapter shares research-based approaches from the literature along with promising practices shared by contributing libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how fractional derivatives affect the transient and steady-state behaviour of nonlinear transmission lines. This problem is of significance for high-frequency design of systems such as high-speed sampling systems and radar systems.

This paper shall consider the transient and steady-state responses of nonlinear transmission lines when fractional derivatives are considered. A lumped-parameter model is considered and the product-integration implicit trapezoidal rule shall be used for simulations.

The important observation is that small deviations of the order of the derivative from an integer order can have a significant effect on the transient and steady-state behaviour. This includes a change in the speed of the wave on the transmission line and on its damping.

The work is novel as it uses a lumped-parameter model with nonlinear capacitors and explores the effect on the dynamical behaviour when fractional derivatives are present. This is in contrast to the typical approach of using a partial differential equation derived under certain assumptions such as the nature of the nonlinear capacitor.

As the search engine platform, Baidu has already developed keyword advertising as one of its main business scopes, while in-feed advertising is emerging as another intelligent choice for the company. Our purpose is to validate the effectiveness of keyword and retargeted in-feed advertising on offline sales and whether the effectiveness of these two advertising strategies relies on keyword attributes work.

We utilize data from the ad campaigns of a prominent manufacturer within the machinery and equipment (hereinafter referred to as “the company”) on Baidu. To scrutinize the research hypotheses, we have employed linear regression models. Subsequently, we address potential endogeneity issues and use various techniques to ascertain the reliability of the results.

Empirical evidence indicates that both keyword and in-feed advertising enhance offline sales. Upon examining the moderating role of keyword attributes (specificity and length), we observe that specific keywords (price and word-of-mouth (WOM)) accelerate the boosting effect of advertising on sales; similarly, the longer the keywords, the more obvious the enhanced impact of advertising on sales. Moreover, the positive influence of specific keywords (price and WOM) on advertising effectiveness is more outstanding when the keywords are longer.

To our knowledge, no empirical investigation has yet to analyze keyword and retargeted in-feed advertising concurrently within the search engine context. Our research is the inaugural work to reveal that they serve as mutual substitutes regarding their impact on sales. Furthermore, this paper pioneers examining the moderating effects exerted by keyword attributes (specificity and length) on the effectiveness of these two ad types. The findings presented herein offer valuable insights into the harmonious coexistence and collaboration among companies, advertisers, users and search engine platforms.

Following Joseph Schumpeter's conception of innovation as ‘new innovations’, this chapter contends that innovations that transform lives in developing countries of Southern Africa are not radically new and different novelties but rather ‘new combinations’ at the interface of new materialisations (creative expression) and exploitations of new opportunities (entrepreneurship). We argue that this posture is not a contestation of the reality that novelty enter the system through the development of new technologies, processes and new ways of organising, but rather such novelty is a process of recombining existing elements in new ways. I build on this argument to demonstrate that in resource-poor contexts where institutional voids frustrate entrepreneurs' potential to deploy innovation capabilities for generating groundbreaking innovation, innovations and entrepreneurship are outcomes of ‘tinkering’, improvision and refinement of unsophisticated creative ideas. Drawing on exemplars from health, education, finance and poverty alleviation interventions that support sustainable human development, I also demonstrate that high knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship (KIE) and low knowledge-intensive frugal innovations are mutually constitutive and recursive outputs of the interaction of knowledge application and innovation conversion rather than serial processes of cause and effect. Using combinative innovation, internal coupling and combinative capabilities as heuristics for understanding the entrepreneurship–innovation nexus, I provide empirical support to the view that entrepreneurial effectuation, new combinations, bricolage and improvision constitute useful cognitive arena for the conversion of entrepreneurial and innovation behaviours, practices and processes into KIE and frugal innovation outputs.

This study aims to assess how envy, both directly and indirectly, through negative behaviors such as ostracism, negative word-of-mouth and alignment with the negative behaviors of superiors, influences innovative behavior based on the cultural dimension of individualism versus collectivism.

The data was collected using a survey applied to 305 individuals between October 2022 and June 2023. The model developed was analyzed and validated using partial least squares estimation with structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and PLS-SEM multigroup analysis techniques.

The results suggest that for individualistic individuals, negative word-of-mouth exerts a greater positive mediating influence on the relationship between envy and ostracism, and that envy exerts a greater positive influence on both alignment with the negative behaviors of superiors and on ostracism. In addition, the results indicate that negative word-of-mouth and ostracism together negatively influence the relationship between envy and innovative behavior.

This research provides empirical evidence that envy triggers negative behavior in both individualistic and collectivist individuals. Thus, in practical terms, envy can be considered as something more primitive that goes beyond the accepted values of sociability, especially in the organizational environment.

The main contribution of this research is to understand the effects of envy on innovative behavior, based on a conceptual model that considers the mental programs that differentiate one group of individuals from another. In addition, it presents theoretical and empirical implications that provide descriptive evidence of behaviors, making it possible to broaden the psychological understanding of them. In this specific sense, this research differs from other organizational studies, whose objectives are to standardize behavior.

Based on upper echelons theory, this paper aims to explore the mixed impacts of chief executive officer (CEO) Machiavellianism on new venture performance. At the same time, this paper tests the mediating and suppression effect of top management team (TMT) collective organizational engagement, and the moderating effect of entrepreneurial orientation.

The authors conducted a three-wave survey of a sample of 1,550 enterprises established within three years, finally retained the full sample of 216 companies (216 CEOs, 733 vice presidents) with complete responses in all surveys. By using SPSS 26.0 and Amos 26.0 software to conduct data analysis, the authors empirically tested the hypothesized relationships.

Regression results show that CEO Machiavellianism negatively affects new venture performance through TMT collective organizational engagement, whereas there is a direct positive relationship between CEO Machiavellianism and new venture performance when TMT collective organizational engagement is controlled for. In addition, entrepreneurial orientation plays a boundary role in this mechanism, which can weaken the negative effect of CEO Machiavellianism on TMT collective organizational engagement.

By expanding the application contexts of the upper echelons theory, this paper enriches the research on Machiavellianism in the organizational research and further clarified the simultaneous positive and negative effects of CEO Machiavellianism on new venture performance.

Work factors affecting the career intentions of young construction workers in structured traineeship programs are not well understood despite the increasing use of such programs as pathways to career entry. To address this gap, work factors affecting the career intentions of participants in a construction-related traineeship program were investigated.

A questionnaire comprising measures of organisational fairness, organisation inclusion, time for life, job characteristics, and intention to pursue a career in construction was administered to 136 Australian trainees. Bivariate and logistic regression analysis explored the relationships and combined effects of work factors on career intention.

Trainees’ perceptions of the needs-supplies component of person-job (P-J) fit were a strong and significant predictor of their intention to pursue a career in construction on completion of the traineeship program. Specifically, the greater the extent to which trainees perceived a job in construction would satisfy their needs, desires or preferences, the more likely they were to indicate they would pursue a career in construction.

Findings provide new insights that can help to improve the industry’s ability to attract and retain school leavers in employment which is especially critical in light of the skills shortage facing the Australian construction sector.

The instrument used to measure subjective needs-supplies (P-J) fit enabled a fine-grained analysis of job characteristics considered important by trainees and their perceived availability in construction. Job characteristics relating to having work-life balance and health and wellbeing were of high importance but were perceived to be low in availability in construction jobs.

This study has been conducted to understand the elements of the employee health and safety climate in a steel factory with 1,200 employees, the focus was on employee participation and communication, which are at the center of the ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Management System standard. The main aim has been to provide the framework to manage OHS risks and opportunities. Data were obtained through 14 focus group (FG) interviews with 133 blue- and gray-collar workers, including foremen, assistant foremen, shift supervisors, and engineers, in February 2023. The data were analyzed using the MAXQDA 2022 qualitative data analysis program. It was aimed to create a unique inductive model from the data collected under nine themes, and the model was created with grounded theory based on detecting, defining, and integrating meaning categories in the qualitative research literature. Analyses focused on the themes of communication and participation, modeled as “intervening variables” in the study conducted with a qualitative method. The results revealed that effective communication, including providing direct information to employees and establishing trust-based relationships, training and development programs and interventions strengthening employees’ approaches related to OHS are required. Employee participation in work and decisions, as an act of doing–learning–understanding related to real life, has the power to transform employee behavior more than issues that are “known on paper.” Additionally, in terms of social sustainability, it is important to underline for employees to be heard in the process of creating successful workplaces that ensure employee well-being.