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This study aims to shed light on the relationship between gender diversity and group performance by considering the moderating role of relative cultural distance. Drawing from the categorization–elaboration model (CEM), the authors hypothesize that gender-diverse collaborative learning groups perform better when a low level of relative cultural distance in country-level individualism–collectivism or power distance exists among group members.

To test this hypothesis, the authors conducted a study on 539 undergraduate students organized into 94 groups. The assessment of group performance was based on scores given by external raters.

The authors found that relative cultural distance significantly moderated the gender diversity–group performance relationship such that gender diversity was positively related to group performance when the collaborative learning group included members who similarly valued individualism–collectivism or power distance (i.e. relative cultural distance was low) and was negatively related to group performance when the collaborative learning group comprised members who differently valued individualism–collectivism or power distance (i.e. relative cultural distance was high).

This study contributes to understanding when gender diversity is positively associated with group performance by expanding the range of previously examined diversity dimensions to include relative cultural distance in country-level individualism–collectivism and power distance.

Collaboration between universities and industry is increasingly perceived as a vehicle to enhance innovation. Educational institutions are encouraged to build partnerships and multidisciplinary projects based around real-world open problems. Projects need to benefit student learning, not only the organisations looking for innovations. The context of this study is a multidisciplinary innovation project, as experienced by the students of an University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The purpose of this paper is to unfold students’ conceptions of the learning experience, to help teachers and curriculum designers to organise optimal conditions and processes, and support competence development. The research question was: How do students in higher professional education experience their learning in a multidisciplinary innovation project?

The study took a phenomenographic approach. The data were collected in the form of weekly diaries, maintained by the cultural management and social services students (n=74) in a mandatory multidisciplinary innovation project in professional higher education in Finland. The diary data were analysed using thematic inductive analysis.

The results of the study revealed that students’ understood the learning experience in relation to solvable conflicts and unusual situations they experienced during the project, while becoming aware of and claiming their collaborative agency and internalising phases of an innovation process. The competences as learning outcomes that students could name as developed related to content knowledge, different personal characteristics, social skills, emerging leadership skills, creativity, future orientation, social skills, technical, crafting and testing skills and innovation implementation-related skills, such as marketing, sales and entrepreneurship planning skills. However, future orientation and implementation planning skills showed more weakly than other variables in the data.

The findings suggest that curriculum design should enable networked, student-led and teacher supported pedagogical innovation processes that involve a whole path from future thinking and idea development through prototyping to implementation planning of the novel solution. Teachers promote deep comprehension of the innovation process, monitor and ease the pain of conflict if it threatens motivation, offer assessment tools and help in recognising gaps in individual competences and development needs, promote more future-oriented, concrete and implementable outcomes, and facilitate in bridging from innovation towards entrepreneurship planning.

The multidisciplinary innovation project described in this study provides a pedagogical way to connect higher education to the practises of society. These results provide encouraging findings for organising multidisciplinary project activities between education and working life. The paper, therefore, has significant value for teachers and entrepreneurship educators in designing curriculum and facilitating projects. The study promotes the dissemination of innovation development programmes in between education and work organisations also in other than technical and commercial fields.

The purpose of this paper is to extend current discussion on the drivers of innovative work behavior (IWB) by exploring how individual perceived diversities (visible dissimilarity and cognitive group diversity) and climates (team/clan and innovative/entrepreneurial) impact IWB.

Data had been collected from a cross-national study of working professionals (n = 584) from five different cultural contexts.

Findings of this study indicated that cognitive group diversity mediated the negative relationship between visible dissimilarity and IWB. Further, both innovative/entrepreneurial and team/clan climates moderated the relationship between visible dissimilarity and cognitive group diversity. Such a moderation effect reduced the negative effect that visible dissimilarity had on IWB.

A cross-sectional single-source data set.

From a managerial perspective, climates (team/clan and innovative/entrepreneurial) are central for IWB in the diverse (visible and cognitive) working environment. Thus, organizations should pay attention to create a climate (team/clan or/and innovative/entrepreneurial) that reduces the negative impact of perceived diversity in the working environment while supporting IWB.

This study is the first of its kind that is based on social categorization theory, empirically examining how different types of diversity (visible dissimilarity and cognitive group diversity) simultaneously reduce individuals’ IWB. Furthermore, this paper provides insights that climates (team/clan and innovative/entrepreneurial) are crucial for IWB in the diverse working environment.

Besides diversity's positive effects, groups of “we” against “them” may form in accordance with social categorization theory, showing diversity's negative consequences. The authors aim to reconcile these results and examine their boundary conditions.

The authors studied 584 working professionals from five contexts (transnational companies dealing with multicultural interactions) and analyzed data using moderated-mediation procedures.

A leader-promoting diversity climate plays a crucial role in moderating the negative relationship between perceived dissimilarity and group identification, which is mediated by value dissimilarity.

This study mainly contributes by treating dissimilarity as a multicomponent construct, emphasizing the crucial differences embodied in various conceptualizations of dissimilarity – namely visible and value dissimilarity. For dissimilarity to result in group identification, the results highlight leaders' crucial role, beyond that of organizations and individuals, in stimulating a diversity-embracing climate in work units.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how inspection team members work together to conduct surveys of hospitals, the challenges teams may face and how these might be addressed.

Data were gathered through an evaluation of a new regulatory model for acute hospitals in England, implemented by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) during 2013-2014. The authors interviewed key stakeholders, observed inspections and surveyed and interviewed inspection team members and hospital staff. Common characteristics of temporary teams provided an analytical framework.

The temporary nature of the inspection teams hindered the conduct of some inspection activities, despite the presence of organisational citizenship behaviours. In a minority of sub-teams, there were tensions between CQC employed inspectors, healthcare professionals, lay people and CQC data analysts. Membership changes were infrequent and did not appear to inhibit team functioning, with members displaying high commitment. Although there were leadership authority ambiguities, these were not problematic. Existing processes of recruitment and selection, training and preparation and to some extent leadership, did not particularly lend themselves to addressing the challenges arising from the temporary nature of the teams.

Conducting the research during the piloting of the new regulatory approach may have accentuated some challenges. There is scope for further research on inspection team leadership.

Issues may arise if inspection and accreditation agencies deploy temporary, heterogeneous survey teams.

This research is the first to illuminate the functioning of inspection survey teams by applying a temporary teams perspective.

Agri-food supply chains are facing a number of challenges, which cause inefficiencies resulting in the waste of natural and economic resources, and in negative environmental and social impacts. Food waste (FW) is a result of such inefficiencies and supply chain actors search for economically viable innovations to prevent and reduce it. This study aims to analyse the drivers and the barriers that affect the decision of supply chain operators to adopt innovations (technological – TI, organisational – OI and marketing – MI) to reduce FW.

The analysis was carried out using a four-step approach that included: a literature review to identify factors affecting the decision to adopt innovations; analysis of FW drivers and reduction possibilities along agri-food supply chains through innovations; mapping the results of Steps 1 and 2 and deriving conclusions regarding the factors affecting the adoption of innovations to reduce and prevent FW.

Results show that different types of innovations have a high potential in reducing and preventing FW along the supply chain; however, they still must be economically feasible to be adopted by decision makers in the food supply chain. TI, OI and MI are often interrelated and can trigger each other. When it comes to a combination of different types of innovation to reduce and prevent FW, a good example of combining TI, OI and MI may be observed in the retail sector in Europe. Here, innovative smartphone apps (TI) to promote the sale of products nearing their expiration dates (OI in terms of organising the sales differently and MI in terms of marketing it differently) were developed and adopted via different retailing channels, leading to the creation of a new business model.

This study analyses the drivers of FW generation together with the factors affecting the decision to adopt innovations to reduce it and provides solutions to supply chain operators to prevent and reduce FW through different types of innovations.

Literature has not systematically addressed innovations aiming at the reduction of FW yet. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of the determinants of innovation adoption and offers a novel view on the problem of FW reduction by means of innovation, by linking factors affecting the decision to innovate with FW drivers.

This paper aims to estimate a New Keynesian small open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model for Egypt using Bayesian techniques and data for the period FY2004/2005:Q1-FY2015/2016:Q4 to assess monetary and fiscal policy interactions and their impact on economic stabilization. Outcomes of monetary and fiscal authority commitment to policy instruments, interest rate, government spending and taxes, are evaluated using Taylor-type and optimal simple rules.

The study extends the stylized micro-founded small open economy New Keynesian DSGE model, proposed by Lubik and Schorfheide (2007), by explicitly introducing fiscal policy behavior into the model (Fragetta and Kirsanova, 2010 and Çebi, 2011). The model is calibrated using quarterly data for Egypt on key macroeconomic variables during FY2004/2005:Q1-FY2015/2016:Q4; and Bayesian methods are used in estimation.

The results show that monetary and fiscal policy instruments in Egypt contribute to economic stability through their effects on inflation, output and debt stock. The monetary policy Taylor rule estimates reveal that the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) attaches significant importance to anti-inflationary policy and (to a lesser extent) to output targeting but responds weakly to nominal exchange rate variations. CBE decisions are significantly influenced by interest rate smoothing. Egyptian fiscal policy has an important role in output and government debt stabilization. Additionally, the fiscal authority chooses pro-cyclical government spending and counter-cyclical tax policies for output stabilization. Again, past values of the fiscal instruments are influential in the evolution of the future fiscal policy-making process.

A few studies have examined the interaction between monetary and fiscal policy in Egypt within a unified framework. The presented paper integrates the monetary and fiscal policy analysis within a unified dynamic general equilibrium open economy rational expectations framework. Without such a framework, it would not be easy to jointly analyze monetary and fiscal transmission mechanisms for output, inflation and debt. Also, it would be neither possible to contrast the outcome of monetary and fiscal authorities commitment to a simple Taylor instrument rule vis-à-vis optimal policy outcomes nor to assess the behavior of monetary and fiscal agents in macroeconomic stability in context of an active/passive policy decisions framework.

This study aims to investigate the influences of global uncertainty indicators volatility on the domestic socioeconomic and environmental vulnerability in a sample of 54 developing countries.

The two-step system generalized method of moments estimator is recruited to deal with autoregression and endogeneity matter in our dynamic panel data. Seven different global uncertainty indicators (US trade uncertainty; world trade uncertainty; economic policy uncertainty; world commodities and oil prices; the geopolitical risk index and the world uncertainty index) have been mobilized and compared for their empirical impact on the economic (growth and GDP), social (the misery index and income inequality) and environmental (CO₂ emissions) vulnerabilities of nations.

Our empirical estimations suggest that the socioeconomic and environmental vulnerability cannot be solved through the same pattern: all decrease of a particular aspect will necessarily have a cost and an opposite influence on at least one of the other aspects of the nations' vulnerability.

The originality of this article is to combine these three dimensions of vulnerability in the same investigation. To our knowledge, our research is one of the few providing a joint analysis of the influence of global uncertainty on the economic and socioenvironmental countries' vulnerabilities – given the fact social, economic and environmental aspects are at the heart of the UN sustainable goals, our study can be seen as an investigation of the nations' capabilities to work proactively on meaningful sustainable goals in an increasingly uncertain world.