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The purpose of this paper is to determine the attractiveness or unattractiveness of cyberloafing in the workplace using Q methodology and the Kano model.

The perception of employees towards cyberloafing was investigated based on Q methodology, and then they were prioritized using Kano model. Ten IT companies were selected for the case study. In this study, a mixed method was used. First, 30 participants were interviewed. Next, after extracting the comments, Q-matrix was presented to 30 participants and they completed the matrix cells. Finally, Kano questionnaire was designed using the items obtained from Q methodology and distributed among 30 participants.

Q methodology led to nine perceptions, and the priorities of Kano model were proponents of increasing employees' dependence on the internet, economic thinkers, the indifferent, dissatisfied, proponents of receiving information, self-control proponents, the profit-minded, mind destroyer and satisfaction-oriented. Cyberloafing is considered unattractiveness with adverse effects. The combination of Q methodology and Kano model can improve the analysis of the results.

This study is one of the few studies in which Q methodology is improved by Kano model. In the past, Q methodology alone examined people’s perception, but by combining these two methods, it is determined which perception is more satisfying and which one is more important, and then a general result can be reached.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the usefulness of Q Methodology for business research, as an alternative technique for accounting researchers.

Q Methodology is an innovative technique that provides quantitative structure to individuals' opinions via factor analysis. The authors present the results of a case study where Q Methodology was used to examine attitudes towards an on‐line wiki, a Technology Encyclopaedia (TE), amongst 35 engineers and technical employees at a manufacturing company. Management wanted to understand whether employees were willing to embrace social conversational technology as a way of sharing knowledge. The aim of the case study is to demonstrate how Q Methodology works in a practical setting. The authors also examine a published journal article to assess how Q Methodology might be used to enhance accounting research.

The results show that Q Methodology may provide advantages in data gathering (less respondent burden), data analysis (deeper insight into respondent sub‐conscious), and results (better respondent “ownership” of organisational problems and solutions). However, it also has weaknesses in terms of managerial application.

A limitation is that the discussion is based on a single case study.

When working with an industry partner, researchers may need to consider a more positivist approach and be prepared to explain context behind the statements.

Q Methodology appears to offer most value as a data gathering technique. It may also be used to capture respondents' subconscious views on a topic. While the limited time involved will be attractive to practitioners, there is also the potential benefit of increasing respondents' awareness and understanding of the topic under investigation (i.e. action research), enhancing change management and other sensitive organizational issues.

The purpose of this paper is to show the application of Q methodology in the practice of policymaking, namely, in the field of the wine business. Today, Q methodology has a rising significance in all aspects of human behavior where there is a need for gathering and analyzing qualitative data. This paper discusses the applicability of Q methodology as a participative bottom-up tool for extracting priorities for tailor-made sectorial policies in the field of the wine business.

Developed by William Stephenson almost a century ago, Q methodology was primarily used to study human behavior in different psychoanalysis practices and personality tests. But it can be used also as a tool to extract important opinions of stakeholders in the process of making new sectorial policies. To prove the applicability of Q methodology for this task, data collected from 30 small and medium Croatian winemakers are used as a case study. Selected winemakers originate from coastal and continental regions of Croatia covering the whole country. Gathered data were analyzed using the PQMethod ver. 2.35 software.

The results of the data analysis have given an insight into Croatian small wine business perspectives, rapidly revealing factors which matter the most to them (luck, value added tax, import lobby, margins in HORECA). On the other side, factors like automated grape harvesters, subsidized fair participation were identified that matter the least, and factors like prices and procedures for mandatory analyses, paperwork for exports and development of new sales channels are considered as neutral.

The selected participants are a small, but representative, group of Croatian winemakers and generalization of findings to the whole winemaking sector should be undertaken with caution. Q methodology is primarily an explorative technique, which brings a sense of coherence to the relation of the research question and contested answers, but prone to straightaway change.

Q methodology enables a participatory approach, rapid analysis and focus on the most important factors for changing relations and effects of planning and execution of sectoral policies. It can be used to effectively extract relevant factors common to group of different individuals acting in the same sector with the same goal.

This research provides an insight into potentials of Q-methodology approach when considering the theoretical framework for the policy making process. Therefore, it also widens its applicability in research of subjective viewpoints on different issues in a particular business sector.

This paper provides an overview of a form of factor analysis, Q Methodology, and suggests how it might be applied in an institutional analysis setting. Q Methodology provides for a middle ground between positivist and phenomenological methods, and that its usage will not necessarily result in overly contextualized findings that render generalization impossible. The paperʼs primary focus is to suggest several uses of Q Methodology within different established policy studies frameworks, namely the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), and the policy process as conceptualized by Lasswellʼs Policy Sciences approach.

The QS World ranking framework is a globally renowned ranking framework that ranks institutions globally as well as on a regional basis. This research aims to examine an alternative methodology for obtaining world rankings. This ranking is very popular, yet the research presents a case to have a re-look on the methodology used in the ranking.

The QS Ranking framework uses a simple additive weighting (SAW) approach to get a total weighted score for each candidate institution, and these are ranked according to descending order of total weighted score. An illustrative example of QS world ranking 2025 of four institutions is taken, and the results are compared with ranks obtained using the SAW methodology implicitly employed by the QS ranking framework. In our research, a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method, TOPSIS, is employed to rank and compare institutions with the QS ranking.

In the QS World University Ranking 2025, RWTH scores 59.9 with a rank of 99. The University of Copenhagen, Denmark, scores 59.6 with a rank of 100; IIT Bombay scores 56.6 and IIT Delhi 52.1. These ranks are interchanged with subtractive differences in the TOPSIS Score of 0.6350 for Copenhagen University and 0.4617 for RWTH and remain unchanged for IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi.

This paper adopted a small dataset of four universities/institutions to test the alternative methodology that appears intuitively appealing to derive meaningful inferences. However, this paper does not comment on the basic structure of the QS ranking system, giving large weight to academic and employer reputations based on a survey-based approach.

This paper suggested an alternative but well-known MCDM technique (TOPSIS) for ranking world universities rather than the SAW technique implicitly employed by QS.

Engaging with stakeholders in “a personal, intimate way” (Men and Tsai, 2016, p. 932) or “includ[ing] the ‘personal touch’” (Kent and Taylor, 1998, p. 323) is often seen as desirable in internal communication management. While the importance of personal communication is undisputed from the perspectives of internal communication, its communicators, and from internal stakeholders, this is not true when it comes to the dimensions and characteristics that constitute an experience of communication as feeling personal. The present study aims to explore what makes communication personal from the employees' perspective.

The study used the Q methodology and Q method, thus focusing on an individual's subjective perspective. The Q methodology was implemented in the form of a Q-sort survey exploring the perceptions of 32 German employees (selected from a representative cross-section of 400 employees in Germany, using a balanced-block design to maximize heterogeneity).

The results show that while direct and dyadic communication is often perceived as personal, many other dimensions and characteristics are also considered “personal” in both the literature and based on stakeholder perceptions. The Q-sort survey revealed four perception types whose perceptions of communication as “personal” vary widely, with all these types rejecting non-human communicators.

This study contributes to the limited understanding of employees' perceptions of internal communication as “personal.” It shows how the Q methodology and Q method—a rarely used perspective—can complement existing theoretical and empirical research on internal communication. For internal communication management, the findings show that a “one-size-fits-all” approach must be questioned and that a communication team's involvement in personal communication can have negative consequences.

There is limited participatory research, including, organic winemakers and none with natural winemakers. To get a preliminary insight into the perspectives of Georgian natural winemakers, this research aims to identify their perceptions regarding the major problems facing Georgia’s wine industry by applying Q-methodology. The research uncovers two existing perspectives and provides relevant policy suggestions for the Georgian wine sector.

This research applied Q-methodology. Ten in-person Q-sorts and interviews were carried out in Georgia, with five natural winemakers filling out an additional follow-up survey rating 26 possible policy recommendations to increase the relevance of the study’s findings.

The study revealed two groups of winemakers: the idealists and the pragmatists. The idealists are characterised by their focus on environmental awareness and a lack of trust of government institutions. The pragmatists focus on production-related issues, such as lack of financing and lack of irrigation infrastructure. The development of a local wine bottle supplier, regulation of agro-chemical use and a leading role for natural winemakers in teaching about organic viticulture were the most positively rated policy recommendations.

Using the research results, relevant sectoral policies can be drawn up that support the sustainable development of Georgia’s wine sector and help with the establishment of Georgian wine on the international market.

The growth of natural winemaking through small-scale producers could improve the environmental sustainability of the wine industry in Georgia, as well as reduce rural poverty through increased rural household income and employment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no participatory research currently exists that includes natural winemakers and their attitudes, and there are no participative studies with Georgian winemakers. This is the first study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to apply Q-methodology and a follow-up survey exclusively to Georgian natural winemakers and provides a first insight into their perceptions.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal and describe the divergent viewpoints about cybersecurity within a purposefully selected group of people with a range of expertise in relation to computer security.

Q methodology [Q] uses empirical evidence to differentiate subjective views and, therefore, behaviors in relation to any topic. Q uses the strengths of qualitative and quantitative research methods to reveal and describe the multiple, divergent viewpoints that exist within a group where individuals sort statements into a grid to represent their views. Analyses group similar views (sorts). In this study, participants were selected from a range of types related to cybersecurity (experts, authorities and uninformed).

Four unique viewpoints emerged such that one represents cybersecurity best practices and the remaining three viewpoints represent poor cybersecurity behaviors (Naïve Cybersecurity Practitioners, Worried but not Vigilant and How is Cybersecurity a Big Problem) that indicate a need for educational interventions within both the public and private sectors.

Understanding the divergent views about cybersecurity is important within smaller groups including classrooms, technology-based college majors, a company, a set of IT professionals or other targeted groups where understanding cybersecurity viewpoints can reveal the need for training, changes in behavior and/or the potential for security breaches which reflect the human factors of cybersecurity.

A review of the literature revealed that only large, nation-wide surveys have been used to investigate views of cybersecurity. Yet, surveys are not useful in small groups, whereas Q is designed to investigate behavior through revealing subjectivity within smaller groups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the leadership roles the Ethiopian civil service managers preferably embody in their setting. As such, contextually preferred roles were identified and briefly contrasted with the leadership literature. It also outlined the directions for the future research agenda.

Q-methodology, an approach reasonably like “grounded-theory” was used. It is suited to embrace life as lived by the actors themselves. In this specific case, Q-methodology allows the managers to conceptualize their definitions or preferences of leadership roles. The data were obtained from 51 managers working in the federal civil service organizations covering a broad range of public policy and service fields.

Based on the Q-sorts of 51 managers, the authors found three distinct yet interrelated archetypes of role preferences, which the authors labeled as the change agents, affective leaders and result-oriented realists. The study, however, demonstrates that although the ostensible echoes of each of these perspectives were professed, there were overlooked functions that are needed to be performed for full practice of each.

Understanding the contextually preferred leadership roles, if considered in designing the management training and development programs, could prove productive. It also informs the staff recruitment and promotion activities of the civil service organizations.

Conceptualizations of public leadership roles are abound in the literature. As they mostly emerged in a Western context, their applicability to other settings is questionable. Studying the subject in the context of Ethiopia, this paper contributes to the growing body of African literature on administrative leadership and informs the practice as well as the scholarship in this area.

Purpose – This study explores U.S. consumer attitudes toward organic foods in order to demonstrate that multiple and meaningful segments can be identified based on attitudes and beliefs rather than demographics and that a more targeted marketing strategy could likely create a better fit with consumer wants and needs.

Methodology – Q-methodology is employed, in part to demonstrate its usefulness for segmentation purposes.

Findings – Six meaningful segments of consumers are generated based on attitudes toward organic foods: Health Enthusiasts, Organic Idealists, Hoban's Hogwashers, Unengaged Shoppers, Bargain Shoppers, and Cynical/Distrustfuls. These groups vary in attitudes toward organic food, and despite conventional wisdom, exhibit a reasonable match between attitude and purchase behavior. Segments are also generated for viewpoints toward conventionally grown foods, revealing that consumers do not simply hold binary positions (pro-organic, anticonventional), but instead consider each food type on its respective merits. Positioning and media choice strategies are considered for each organic food segment.

Originality – This chapter distinguishes between different types of consumers of organic food by using Q-methodology, with the result being a rich, detailed description of the values and preferences of each group. With these descriptions, the organic food industry can better align its marketing efforts with the priorities of individual consumer groups, rather than their simplistic demographics as are commonly utilized. The chapter also offers a unique perspective on the attitude–behavior gap, revealing that when the attitude is understood in greater detail, the gap appears to disappear.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a controversial psychiatric diagnosis. Despite an increasing amount of research looking at the BPD diagnosis when applied to young people, there is limited understanding of the key viewpoints of mental health professionals working with young people in the UK. This research aims to use Q-methodology to contribute to understanding the multiple views of the diagnosis.

Q-statements about views of the BPD diagnosis were selected from relevant journals, internet sites and social media platforms and were validated by a Q-methodology research group, the research supervisors and an online group of individuals with BPD. Q-sorts were then used to explore the viewpoints of 27 mental health professionals in the UK working with children and adolescents. Analysis of the data was completed using Q-methodology analysis software.

Three main factors emerged from the data, explaining 66% of the variance. Of the 27 participants, 24 loaded onto these three factors, defined as: harmful not helpful; language and optimism; and caution and specialist services. Three Q-sorts did not load significantly onto any one factor.

There appears to be at least three ways of understanding the BPD diagnosis for young people. It may be useful for clinicians to consider and share their own viewpoint, be open to difference and formulate difficulties from an individual perspective.

This paper aims to use Q methodology to investigate Millennial perceptions toward private label or national brand apparel.

Q methodology was chosen to identify factors, which correspond to patterns of perceptions prevalent among Millennials. Participants were supplied with 14 statements that they sorted into two Q sorts – One representing perceptions of private label and the other representing perceptions of national brands. The Q sorts were completed through Qualtrics and participants answered open-ended questions on the placement of each statement within each Q sort.

Two factors emerged on private labels, highlighting patterns in price consciousness and uniqueness (acknowledged as patterns surrounding the desire for particular apparel characteristics). Three factors arose for national brand apparel, emphasizing the need for national brands to provide consumers with product security, quality and uniqueness (as identified through the unpreferred qualities national brands typically exhibit).

This study illustrates the various viewpoints retailers must consider when marketing apparel to a specific target demographic. In addition, a single perception (uniqueness) was found to connect motivations, which led to the development of a model for future inquiry.

Despite complete Q sorts and qualitative statements, participants' unfamiliarity with Q methodology and the sorting action of statements could be considered a limitation. The use of MTurk is also considered a limitation owing to the anonymity and possible deception of the workforce.

Private label brand personality growth has many retailers expanding their brand portfolios. Based on the findings of this study, specific opportunities are highlighted for the expansion and marketing of private labels and brand labels based on specific perceptions of a broad Millennial cohort.

Innovation and technology development policy-making naturally encounters numerous uncertainties and complexities, especially in developing countries, for the sake of the prevailing prospect of decision makers focusing on hard evidences, and neglecting key and effective social ones; in this research, a context-based method by means of Q-methodology was designed to facilitate policy-making for complex systems by bridging between policy and practices (latent in viewpoints) through providing context-based evidences.

Due to the nature of knowledge-based systems, the performance of Innovation and Technology Development (ITD) systems is highly dependent on the standpoints of key players/stakeholders of the system. In consideration of Iran’s economy characteristics, Upstream Oil and Gas (UOG) Industry, which is one of the complex Large Technical Systems (LTS), was selected as a case study. Regarding the features of LTSs, the designed model was completed by adding hierarchical clustering method, as well as using the framework of innovation and technology learning transition model to analyze the results.

The results showed the capability of the model in providing credible evidences to inform policy-making processes.

This study is one of the first real experiences which used Q-method for providing evidence-based policy-making model in a complex Large Technical System, namely, Upstream Oil and Gas (UOG) Industry.

Academic rankings are facing various issues, including the use of data sources that are not publicly verifiable, subjective parameters, a narrow focus on research productivity and regional biases and so forth. This research work is intended to enhance creditability of the ranking process by using the objective indicators based on publicly verifiable data sources.

The proposed ranking methodology – OpenRank – drives the objective indicators from two well-known publicly verifiable data repositories: the ArnetMiner and DBpedia.

The resultant academic ranking reflects common tendencies of the international academic rankings published by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy (SRC), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE). Evaluation of the proposed methodology advocates its effectiveness and quick reproducibility with low cost of data collection.

Implementation of the OpenRank methodology faced the issue of availability of the quality data. In future, accuracy of the academic rankings can be improved further by employing more relevant public data sources like the Microsoft Academic Graph, millions of graduate's profiles available in the LinkedIn repositories and the bibliographic data maintained by Association for Computing Machinery and Scopus and so forth.

The suggested use of open data sources would offer new dimensions to evaluate academic performance of the higher education institutions (HEIs) and having comprehensive understanding of the catalyst factors in the higher education.

The research work highlighted the need of a purposely built, publicly verifiable electronic data source for performance evaluation of the global HEIs. Availability of such a global database would help in better academic planning, monitoring and analysis. Definitely, more transparent, reliable and less controversial academic rankings can be generated by employing the aspired data source.

We suggested a satisfying solution for improvement of the HEIs' ranking process by making the following contributions: (1) enhancing creditability of the ranking results by merely employing the objective performance indicators extracted from the publicly verifiable data sources, (2) developing an academic ranking methodology based on the objective indicators using two well-known data repositories, the DBpedia and ArnetMiner and (3) demonstrating effectiveness of the proposed ranking methodology on the real data sources.

The Q method is an inherently mixed-method approach suitable for tackling issues regarding theory, conceptualization and operationalization in the social sciences. Nevertheless, the application of this method in organizational behavior (OB) studies is still limited. This paper aims to delineate to what extent, regarding what topics, and in what ways the Q method has been applied in OB studies. Moreover, it aims to systematically explore the strengths and weaknesses of this method for the OB field.

We present a systematic literature review of 47 studies employing the Q method in OB research.

There is an upward trend in the application of Q in OB research. The studies in our sample address the following OB topics: Human resource management (HRM) (14), leadership (10), group decision-making (6), collaboration (4), culture (9) and organizational change and development (4). We describe how Q is used in a wide variety of ways.

This study shows how performance-oriented organizations can benefit from the Q method as a managerial diagnostic and intervention tool in organizational change and development and in human resources management.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic literature review on the Q method that spans the field of organizational behavior across topics and research levels, including the individual, team and organizational levels.

This paper investigated the intrinsic and extrinsic sources of academic well-being among university teachers at one university in Qatar, to understand how different factors influence their well-being within academia.

Drawing on systems theory, this study employs Q methodology research. Data were collected and analyzed using 35 statements (Q-items) related to academic well-being. Twenty-one university teachers participated in the study, providing a range of perspectives on the factors that influenced their academic well-being.

The analysis revealed two distinct perspectives among the participants concerning the sources of academic well-being. Factor 1 (F-1) emphasized workplace conditions as the primary source of well-being, whereas Factor 2 (F-2) highlighted individual conditions. Additionally, a significant portion of participants did not align strongly with either factor, indicating diverse and individualized sources of well-being that suggest a complex interplay of various elements affecting academic well-being.

The study’s sample size is limited to twenty-one university teachers at a single institution, which may affect the generalizability of the findings. Future research should consider a larger, more diverse sample to explore the universality of the findings across different academic contexts.

The implications for university teachers, researchers, leaders and policymakers include a better understanding of the sources that contribute to academic well-being and the need for adopting systems thinking in addressing these sources.

This study employs a unique application of Q methodology within a systems theory framework to explore the sources of academic well-being among university teachers. Unlike previous research that has primarily focused on anxiety, stress and burnout, this study provides a holistic perspective by capturing the complex interplay between organizational structures and individual identities.

The integration of ESD is a complex problem. It calls for an innovative, student-centred curriculum, as well as professional learning and agency, by which university teachers feel empowered to change their practice and direct their peers and institutions towards ESD. This study aims to explore what university teachers consider to be the most important attitudes in supporting their agency to deliver Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) via a Problem Based Learning (PBL) programme.

This study presents a theoretical framework for professional agency comprising three domains: intrapersonal, action and environmental. A Q methodology is adopted to explore university teachers’ perceptions of the most important environmental factors in supporting their ability to deliver ESD via a problem-based learning (PBL) programme. Twenty-eight participants from six Southeast Asian universities took part in a PBL-based professional development programme designed to improve teachers’ ESD- and PBL-based skills and competencies.

The results indicate that the participants were confident in their ability to implement PBL and saw PBL as an approach suitable for addressing current educational, professional and societal challenges. This study offers a series of recommendations to help university teachers develop their ESD and PBL practices.

Although the literature on human agency is extensive, research surrounding teachers’ professional agency in the context of ESD and PBL in higher education is lacking. The present study addresses this gap by capturing individual teachers’ beliefs, perceptions and views and by using Q methodology to examine the subjectivity of study participants.

Reverse logistics (RL) is a type of supply chain management that moves goods from the end customer to the original manufacturer for reuse, remanufacturing and disposal purposes. Owing to growing environmental legislations and the development of new technologies in marketing, RL has attracted more significance among experts and academicians. Outsourcing RL practices to third-party reverse logistics provider (3PRLP) has been identified as one of the most important management strategies due to complexity of RL operations and the lack of available resource. Current sustainability trends have made 3PRLP assessment and selection process more complex. In order to select the 3PRLP, the existence of several aspects of sustainability motivates the experts to establish a new multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach.

With the growing complexity and high uncertainty of decision environments, the preference values of 3PRLPs are not always expressed with real numbers. As the generalized version of fuzzy set, intuitionistic fuzzy set and Fermatean fuzzy set, the theory of q-rung orthopair fuzzy set (q-ROFS) is used to permit decision experts (DEs) to their assessments in a larger space and to better cope with uncertain information. Given that the combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) is an innovative MCDA approach with higher degree of stability and reliability than several existing methods.

To exhibit the potentiality and applicability of the presented framework, a case study of S3PRLPs assessment is taken from q-rung orthopair fuzzy perspective. The assessment process consists of three sustainability aspects namely economic, environment and social dimensions related with a total of 14 criteria. Further, sensitivity and comparative analyses are made to display the solidity and strength of the presented approach. The results of this study approve that the presented methodology is more stable and efficient in comparison with other methods.

Thus, the objective of the study is to develop a hybrid decision-making methodology by combining CoCoSo method and discrimination measure with q-ROFS for selecting an appropriate sustainable 3PRLP (S3PRLP) candidate under uncertain environment. In the proposed method, a novel procedure is proposed to obtain the weights of DEs within q-ROFS context. To calculate the criteria weights, a new formula is presented based on discrimination measure, which provides more realistic weights. In this respect, a new discrimination measure is proposed for q-ROFSs.

Despite the essential role of entrepreneurs in creating social value, there is limited understanding of their mindsets concerning this value. This study aims to investigate the mental models of tourism entrepreneurs regarding the social value they create. We hypothesize that their perspectives on tourism influence the type of value they generate

Q methodology was employed. Initially, a concourse was established in this area, followed by selecting a representative sample of 36 statements. The Q questionnaire was administered to 30 tourism entrepreneurs, and the data were analyzed post-collection.

Three distinct mental patterns emerged from the data: Destination Fans, Host Fans, and Tourist Fans. Among these, Destination Fans were the most prominent, indicating that most entrepreneurs perceive the destination as a critical factor in attracting tourists and developing their businesses.

Given the high competition within the tourism sector, many entrepreneurs seek to enhance their competitive positions by creating unique destination identities and tourism services. Consequently, they view the destination as pivotal for attracting tourists. This study illustrates that entrepreneurs leverage various methods to create value in the tourism sector, with differences stemming from their perspectives on the role of entrepreneurship in value creation.