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The purpose of this paper is to present an in‐depth analysis of the Islamic work ethic (IWE) and its influence on innovation capability in the public sector.

The foundations of IWE and innovation capability were assessed using a validated questionnaire. A total of 472 employees from the Malaysian public sector participated in the survey.

The empirical results indicate that the IWE is highly adapted in the public sector. In addition, the respondents collectively declared that the innovation strength in the Malaysian public sector is mounting. The IWE measure was found to be significant with moderate correlation and positive relationship with the innovation capability scale.

While the study was confined to the Malaysian public sector, it has considerable implications for the development of an optimistic workforce in other regions and across sectors.

An understanding of the commitment of the workforce to the IWE and its consequences for innovativeness facilitates HR professionals in designing and implementing change initiatives.

In response to the substantial need to examine IWE and workplace outcomes in a non‐Western environment, therefore, the paper embraces the extent to which IWE sways innovation capability in the public sector. Both scholars and practitioners will find the study valuable.

Drawing on the organizational psychology literature and social resource theory, this research aimed to investigate how attitude toward the employer (i.e. loyalty) and attitude toward the client (i.e. approach to work: professional, market-oriented and person-centered) relate to the perceived importance of socio-emotional resources in providing care to older people.

Swedish frontline care staff members participated in an electronic survey using a cross-sectional design. Mediation analyses were conducted to examine proposed direct and indirect effects of loyalty on the perceived importance of socio-emotional resources in care through three different approaches to work in care settings.

In general, the results confirmed the hypotheses. Thus, the analyses showed a positive association between employee loyalty and the perceived value of socio-emotional resources in care, which was partially mediated by the person-centered and professional approaches to work. Moreover, the analyses showed that the person-centered approach was more strongly related to the perceived value of socio-emotional resources in care than the other two approaches, lending support to the superiority of the person-centered approach in this context.

The study highlights that there exist multiple approaches to work in care settings. Also, the insights about how loyalty toward the employer relates to approach to work in care settings and the perceived value of socio-emotional resources in care are novel and of crucial importance to practitioners and the outcomes of care.

National Board of Health and Welfare claims that the quality of elderly care services differ considerably between municipalities in Sweden. This study aims to analyze to what extent these variations can be accounted for by the older person’s municipality affiliation (i.e. receiving elderly care in a certain municipality).

Addressing this issue, national survey data from 78,538 older respondents receiving elderly care services in Sweden were analyzed using multilevel modeling (MLM).

The results showed that municipality affiliation only marginally explained the variance in satisfaction with care, i.e. its variations were larger within than between municipalities. Instead, user-oriented care accounted for the variation in satisfaction with care. Specifically, the way the care workers behave toward the older person proved to be much more crucial for satisfaction with care than municipality affiliation. Moreover, random effects analyses revealed that the effects of user-oriented care on satisfaction with care varied across municipalities. Care setting (i.e. home care or nursing home) only marginally accounted for its variance.

Developing care quality should start and primarily be discussed at the interpersonal care level, and not, as is customary, at the municipality level.

The present research is the first in its kind to quantitatively investigate the sources of variation in perceived quality of Swedish elderly care using MLM.

The current conceptualizations and measurements of well-being are inadequate in the context of work. Specifically, well-being research has neglected the social aspects of well-being. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the validity of a multi-dimensional view of occupational social well-being.

Data were collected in an educational setting, i.e. six different schools in a Swedish municipality. A total of 314 teachers and other categories of school staff (239 females and 75 males) participated in a survey study.

Results provided empirical support for a multi-dimensional view of occupational social well-being. The dimensions were integration, acceptance, contribution, actualization and coherence, and they were differentially correlated with previous measures of well-being. Furthermore, occupational social well-being accounted for additional variance in work tension, overall job satisfaction and organizational commitment over and above the variance accounted for by positive and negative affect and satisfaction with life, indicating the value of taking domain-specific social indicators of well-being into account in explaining various employee outcomes.

Occupational social well-being is an umbrella term for describing the well-lived social life in the context of work. As such, this is a crucial part of a holistic view of well-being at work. Thus, effective employee well-being enhancement programs should not only focus on physical and mental health promotion or competence development but must also include measures of relational experience and functioning as discussed in the present study.

This is the first study to measure and validate occupational social well-being as an attempt to complement existing measures of subjective and psychological well-being. Measures of social aspects of well-being are crucial to assess as it has been argued in previous research that context-free measures of well-being might render misleading results.

This study explores the effects of competitive intensity and innovation orientation on export outcomes, including export entrepreneurship (EE) and export performance (EP), and determines the direct and moderating impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) among exporting agricultural and food (agri-food) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Iran.

Using systematic random sampling, 296 firms participating in the international food and agricultural industries exhibition filled out a questionnaire. Smart PLS3 software was used to analyze the data.

The competitive intensity has positive effects on export entrepreneurship of Iranian agri-food SMEs. Additionally, innovation orientation, CSR and EE positively impact EP. However, the moderating impact of CSR on the relationship between innovation orientation and EP was not supported by data.

The current study enriches the existing knowledge in international business in the specific setting of exporting agri-food SMEs operating in a developing economy.

As marketization has gained ground in elderly care, satisfaction with care has come to play a crucial role in designing for high-quality care. Inspired by the service-profit chain (SPC) model, the authors aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the intricate interplay between supportive leadership practices, organizational climate, job satisfaction and service quality in predicting satisfaction with care.

A Swedish sample of frontline elderly care staff (n = 1,342) participated in a cross-sectional questionnaire study. Mediation analyses were conducted to test the proposed model.

As predicted, engaging in supportive leadership practices was directly and positively associated with satisfaction with care. In addition, as predicted, this relationship was partially mediated by organizational climate and job satisfaction. Moreover, job satisfaction predicted satisfaction with care with service quality explaining a statistically significant part of this relationship.

Managers in elderly care services may improve satisfaction with care in multiple ways but primarily by showing that they care about the staff and ensuring that they are satisfied with their working conditions. Employee job satisfaction seems to be particularly crucial for satisfaction with care, beyond what can be accounted for by care service quality.

The authors proposed a novel service-outcome model. Adding to the original SPC model, the model in this study suggested previously unexplored relationships including a direct path between leadership practices and satisfaction with service and a multiple-mediator model explaining this relationship. Also, new measures of organizational climate and supportive leadership were developed for which satisfactory reliability estimates were obtained.

The purpose of this paper is to describe three different approaches to work in elderly care (i.e. professional, market-oriented and person-centred) and examine whether these theoretically derived approaches can be confirmed empirically. Additional aims were to examine the endorsement of these approaches and whether there were differences in the endorsement of these approaches in nursing home vs home care and municipality vs privately run care units.

Data were collected using a cross-sectional survey study of frontline care staff (n=1,342). Exploratory factor analysis was used to investigate the empirical validity of the proposed approaches to work in elderly care. A series of paired and independent samples t-tests were conducted to analyse mean differences between the proposed approaches to work.

A principal axis factoring analysis yielded three theoretically meaningful factors as proposed. These results indicated that the respondents were able to differentiate between three distinct but related approaches to work with older persons. The results also showed that the professional care approach was the highest endorsed and the market-oriented the lowest endorsed approach. No notable differences in approaches to work were observed in nursing home vs home care and municipality vs privately run care units.

This is the first study to examine multiple approaches to work in elderly care as previous research studies mainly have investigated the person-centred care approach. Current findings indicate that these approaches to work often coexist in various combinations and that the care staff adopts all these approaches but to varying degrees. The approaches differ in several important respects (e.g. legitimacy and view of the older person) and most likely affect the way care staff treats the older person and how the older person perceives their relationship with the care staff. Knowledge about these differences facilitates management of the care staff’s work situation and helps to improve the quality of care.

Studies show that economic sanctions have had major negative impacts on health systems during the past years. The aim of this study is to identify the impacts of US sanctions on the performance of public hospitals in Iran.

A qualitative research study was conducted between October 2019 and September 2020 in Kermanshah Province, Iran. Semi-structured, face-to-face interviews, lasting between 25 and 90 min, were carried out with 20 participants in seven public hospitals affiliated to the authors’ institution in Kermanshah Province. Inductive thematic analysis was used to identify themes in the data.

Five main themes emerged from the analysis: resource management challenges; financial restrictions; interruptions in planning; reductions in the quality of service delivery; and changes in organizational relationships.

The results of the present study demonstrate that US economic sanctions have considerably reduced access to necessary medical equipment and medicines for public hospitals in Iran. Policymakers should monitor the distribution of equipment and pharmaceutical products within public hospitals in Iran and take actions to ameliorate shortages during times of economic sanctions.

Poor health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is one of the important issues in the health sector. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence and socio-economic inequality in poor HRQoL in Tehran city, Iran.

In total, 562 adults were included in this cross-sectional study. The cluster sampling method was used for data collection from May to June, 2016 in Tehran city, Iran. Data on HRQoL, using EuroQol 5-dimensions questionnaire, and data on socio-economic and demographic variables were gathered. Convenience regression method was performed to measure the concentration index (CI). Decomposition analysis was performed to determine the contribution of variables on socio-economic inequality in poor HRQoL. All analyses were performed by Stata v.14.

The prevalence of poor HRQoL was 28.3 percent. The value of CI for “poor HRQoL” was −0.299 (95% confidence interval: −0.402 to −0.195). Socio-economic status (SES) was the largest contributor to socio-economic inequality in poor HRQoL (69.44 percent of inequality was explained by SES). Age, obesity and race had a positive contribution to socio-economic inequality in poor HRQoL among the participants. Nonetheless, sex and smoking intensity had a negative contribution to inequality in poor HRQoL.

There is little evidence about the prevalence of poor HRQoL in insured people. This study provided new evidence in this area through the investigation of socio-economic inequality in poor HRQoL and its determinants among people with health insurance in Iran using decomposition analysis.

To thrive in today’s competitive market, international small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) recognize the importance of building strong brands. Choosing the right capabilities to effectively drive brand performance remains a key challenge for SMEs. This study aims to explore how marketing capabilities affect brand orientation and performance. Specifically, the study considered the mediating impact of value cocreation and the moderating effect of innovation capabilities on the association between brand orientation and performance.

The population of interest included SMEs exporting food and agricultural products. A sample of 296 managers and export executives completed the questionnaire. Structural equation modeling (SEM) using Smart PLS3 was applied to analyze the data.

The findings revealed that export market planning capabilities positively affect brand orientation, but the impact of marketing information capabilities on brand orientation was not supported. The results showed that brand orientation was directly and indirectly associated with brand performance through the mediating effect of value cocreation, and that innovation capability adversely moderated the relationship between brand orientation and performance.

This research focused only on two primary internal marketing capabilities affecting brand orientation, i.e. market information and product planning capabilities.

Explaining why some international SMEs adopt brand orientation activities, the results may help international firms increase their brand performance by emphasizing their marketing capabilities and creating covalue with their customers.

This research expands the existing knowledge of branding in international markets.