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Effective leadership of human capital is a major managerial issue. Hiring and keeping employees is key to sustainable competitive advantage. E‐recruiting as a general process is job‐specific and offers computer‐assisted screening interviews and statistical prediction to aid in reducing recruiting costs, time‐to‐hire and employee turnover. This paper examines the application of this technology to recruiting and retaining knowledge workers in an e‐commerce, information‐intensive environment.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management a sense of the importance of strategically leveraging social responsibility in the pharmaceutical industry, such that it provides a sustainable competitive advantage is that it requires a culture that can successfully execute a combination of activities. These firms should educate their employees towards the value‐added processes that accompany CSR‐based strategies. The internal as well as the external stakeholders of the pharmaceutical industry should also buy in the concepts of being socially responsible. CSR should be strongly supported in the company culture; thus including CSR in the training process of new employees and reinforcing the concepts to existing employees. Design/methodology/approach – A review of the applied literature on practices and actual examples of international firms with major headquarters in the Pittsburgh area have shown that innovative responsible strategy, exceeding government requirements and considering multiple stakeholders, as a long‐term objective. Findings – Case studies of GlaxoSmithKline and Bayer Corporation, which are two of the world's leading research‐based pharmaceutical companies, highlight the need and practice for sound corporate social responsibility. Historically, a concentration on improved operational effectiveness and overcapacity created a temporary economic advantage accompanied by increased profit and firm value. Such an advantage is short‐lived; investors may be satisfied, but competing companies will eventually mimic technological and material improvements. Practical implications – It is particularly difficult for pharmaceutical companies to allocate its strategic resources necessary to CSR strategies, due to so much of its funds are allocated for R&D and promotional activities, which are relatively risky in nature. The demand for its products is based on consumer motivation, which can vary greatly amongst different countries depending on the responsibilities of consumers, government and economies, and insurance companies or a mix of the three.. Originality/value – The pharmaceutical industry is under immense pressure by external and internal stakeholders with hopes of developing and distributing drugs efficiently. The pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists command considerable influence on healthcare initiatives by governmental agencies and must continually emphasize effort and investments in R&D in order to compete in the industry on a global perspective. The pharmaceutical industry must take into account the ability to be socially responsible to the external stakeholders. The prolonged advantage of corporate social responsibility ensures sustainable economic advantage of any organization.

Historically, performance appraisals were intended to focus on three areas: development, motivation, and recognition of achievement. One major purpose of performance appraisals is to determine individual merit, especially where pay for performance systems are employed. Based upon expectancy theory, high performance ratings should entail high merit increases while low performance ratings result in low merit increases. However, it appears that decoupling performance ratings and merit increases is common practice. This paper explores the effects of receiving a low performance rating and high merit increase or a high performance rating and a low merit increase and empirically investigate its impact on knowledge workers’ motivational and general morale.

The traditional methods of managing human capital, creativity, innovation, and the learning culture within an organization have long over‐shadowed the management of the professional intellect. As with the resource based view (RVB) of the firm, the intangible strategic intelligence creates most of the professional intellect of an organization, and operates on the following four levels (in increasing importance): cognitive knowledge or basic mastery of a professional discipline; advanced skills or the ability to translate theory into effective execution or practice; systems understanding or the deep knowledge of the cause and effect relationships underlying the professional discipline; and self‐motivated creativity or the motivation and adaptability for success. The interaction of these factors, along with enhanced communications, allow nurturing organizations the ability to thrive in the face of today’s rapid changes and renew their cognitive knowledge, especially where it increases the loyalty of knowledge workers.

The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management and interested research a sense of how the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament is affecting worker productivity in the workplace. There are several positive and negative issues concerning how some employees are willing to spend work time following the NCAA tournament and related office gambling activities.

A review of the applied literature on sports‐related gambling and bracketing that is quite widespread in the USA and other countries was provided. The sample consisted of relatively well‐paid professionals, who may routinely engage in office pools and most universally are involved in bracketing March Madness plays. This resulted in 145 useable questionnaires recording responses to 28 variables from an initial sampling frame of slightly over 200 potential respondents associated with a major Pittsburgh‐based financial service provider. Factor analysis and multivariate statistical analysis were used to test several hypotheses.

Management appears to be successfully delivering the message that office gambling activities harm productivity if management activity discourages office gambling, but there appears to be a trade‐off as labor productivity may be slightly reduced on the short term, and employee cohesiveness may increase on the long term. It was also found that the degree of personal involvement is important; the more an employee is involved, the more negative the impact that March Madness activities will have on his/her productivity.

March Madness is a time‐honored tradition that many employees take for granted and will engage in regardless of the extrinsic controls that management may care to implement, making the extrinsic controls too expensive for a questionable return in enhanced labor productivity during March Madness.

It is an interesting academic research question concerning the balance of productivity losses and gains in employee cohesiveness that warrants additional research in the intrinsic motivations of both management and their employees.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and test certain assumptions concerning the employee productivity and employee morale associated with the annual participation in March Madness activities.

The sample consisted of relatively well‐paid professionals many of whom routinely engage in office pools and most universally are involved in bracketing March Madness plays, from a major Pittsburgh‐based financial service provider. Multivariate statistical analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Although management may advertise that their companies lose operational productivity, respondents generally agree that there is little drop off in workplace productivity. Apparently, there is a trade off between labor productivity, which may be slightly reduced on the short term, and employee cohesiveness, which may increase on the long term.

March Madness activities are such time‐honored traditions that it may be questionable whether any efforts on the part of management to curb office pooling would be effective, due to the expense, uncertain consequences, and doubtful impacts on productivity arising from such initiatives.

Continued research to determine the balance of productivity losses and gains in employee cohesiveness and morale is needed to develop appropriate strategies to effectively deal with the complexities posed by March Madness activities in the workplace environment.

The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management with a sense of how collaborative team integration processes were required in order to be reasonably successful in attaining the required manufacturability goals. It aims to accomplish this by investigating: the role of team collaborative efforts in high‐technology projects associated with comparing aggressiveness towards and actual achievement on meeting time targets and manufacturing costs; the moderating effects of project‐team autonomy and control issues; and management involvement and top management support activities.

A review of the applied literature on collaborative team integration processes of manufacturers and direct suppliers of the smart card and automatic identification and data capture (AIDC)‐related industry in the USA was conducted. Only project managers and/or their designees were asked to complete the survey. The results of two mailings netted a total of 180 usable questionnaires out of an original sampling frame of 311 (response rate of appropriately 58 percent, with some missing data on a number of variables).

The paper finds that especially the variables of product acceleration, technological uncertainty, complexity, and product newness are traditionally outside the immediate control of the firm's project managers. The team integration variables, as measured by the factor scores of top management. manufacturing involvement, collaborative working environment, and supplier influence, offered the most explained variance in the present study.

By understanding the variety of team performance and integration constructs in high technology‐intensive and manufacturing environments, management may be able to take the steps to become more sensitive to the roles of not isolating team members and being able to relinquish control at the appropriate times in order to enhance manufacturability.

The rapid pace of internet products and web‐enabled services, especially in the high‐technology manufacturing industries, presents new strategic management issues to be addressed in project management. Understanding the many issues associated with project team management and integration within new‐product development/new‐product manufacturability processes may ultimately decrease the cost and promote timely introduction of beneficial commercial developments, if properly managed.

With the rapid growth of e‐commerce, governmental and corporate agencies are taking extra precautions when it comes to protecting information. The development of e‐security as a discipline has enabled organisations to discover a wider array of similarities between attacks occurring across their security environment and develop appropriate countermeasures. To further improve the security of information, there is a need for conceptualising the interrelationships between e‐security and the major elements involved in changing a company's infrastructure. Organisations should act in an ethical manner, especially when it comes to e‐security and e‐privacy policies, procedures, and practices. The consequential theory of utilitarianism is used and applied to a conceptual model to help explain how organisations may develop better secured information in an information‐sharing and globally networked environment.

To provide practitioners of information management with an overview and framework to explore the various controversies associated with the methods of traditional methods of voting with electronically enhanced voting via the internet (I‐voting). The current paper is centered on the assumption that I‐voting is the next logical step in applying online information‐gathering and retrieval technologies to the field of e‐government.

A review of the applied literature on electronically enhanced voting methods with potentials associated with internet voting, as well as from practical experience, resulted in a basic model for discussion of the emergent nature of I‐voting.

I‐voting would reduce the cost for staffing polling stations, and also the funds needed to pay for voting machines. I‐voting could also reduce the number of errors made by both the voters and the electoral administrators, and allow for easier adoption of uniform standards in the ballot format, since it could be transmitted via the internet from a central election agency to all local and regional polling places. Bridging the digital divide and internet security issues may be the most important barriers that must be overcome if I‐voting becomes a viable option in the USA.

It may be years, if ever, before a truly secure, relatively risk‐free internet service, such as I‐voting, is developed. However, despite the controversies associated with election fraud, the numerous current voting systems that are in place suffer from the same problems associated with online informational exchanges; but, for the most part, nations still conduct their businesses and the political systems are still relatively stable.

Owing to recent voting débâcles in the USA, the public is demanding a more reliable and secure method of voting. Currently, many nations are moving more toward electronically enhanced voting methods with the long‐term goal being internet voting. Unfortunately, there are heated debates about the pros and cons of handing over the right to vote, using a system that is prone to security risks from outside sources.

In the short term, there should be increased interest in establishing national and international standards for testing and certification of electronic and I‐voting systems and their IT‐infrastructure. It is a basic premise of the present study that voting online increases voter participation, which can only be viewed in a positive light.

The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management a sense of how a major grocery retail business may flourish on the internet, but by employing a more brick‐and‐mortar approach, through the extensive use of a knowledge‐management system, namely KnowAsis™.

The paper is a review of the applied literature on practices and actual examples of companies' practices through personal interviews and basic empirical analysis of managers located in Pittsburgh, PA.

Giant Eagle's new knowledge‐based system utilizes interactive capabilities and attempts to standardize valuable knowledge in a properly stored format in order to made available to those employees that ot would benefit the most. Among other benefits of its knowledge‐management system, data mining and support for the front‐end personnel could be especially enumerated. It is recommended that the company should pay closer attention to the scalability of the system and the technologies involved, since it would be the key of successful future development. The primary feature is that the posted content is essentially owned and managed by the particular business area and reviewed on a periodic basis; thus the shared information through the various departments and knowledge shared is not permanent.

By investing heavily in its knowledge‐management portal, Giant Eagle, a major grocery retailer in the US marketplace, is looking at improved financial competitiveness, efficiency of operation, and increased market share. The management at GE is hoping that by leveraging its digital‐sharing system to promote the sharing of important ideas, best business practices, and lessons learned; the entire organization will become transformed by a new culture of knowledge sharing.

The paper highlights the retail grocery industry is under immense pressure by external and internal stakeholders to remain competitive in a high volume transactional environment by sharing best business practices, policies, and procedures. Today, many of the most dramatic and potentially powerful uses of Internet‐based technology involve networks that connect the people in a company, allowing them to share, manage and create data readily accessible by everyone in the company.