Search results

This paper aims to identify the factors that are constraining technological innovation to support the development of coalbed methane in China.

The analysis applies ideas relating to national and sector systems of innovation to explain why China’s strategies to support research and technological innovation have failed to stimulate the desired progress in coalbed methane production. It also provides a counter-example of the USA that implemented a number of measures in the 1970s that proved very effective.

The deficiencies of China’s research and development strategies in support of coalbed methane development reflect the national and sectoral systems of innovation. They are exacerbated by the structure of the national oil and gas industry. Key constraints include the excessively top-down management of the national R&D agenda, insufficient support for basic research, limited collaboration networks between companies, research institutes and universities and weak mechanisms for diffusion of knowledge. The success of the USA was based on entirely different systems for innovation and in quite a different industrial setting.

The originality of this analysis lies in placing the challenges facing research and innovation for China’s coalbed methane development in the context of the national and sectoral systems for innovation and comparing with the approach and success of the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the relationship between job scope and in-role performance is contingent upon the level of social support (i.e. supervisor support) received in the workplace.

A total of 640 questionnaires were distributed to employees of Pakistani companies, yielding 328 useable responses for analysis. Regression analysis was used to test for both hypotheses.

The results support the role of supervisor support as a moderator in the relationship between in-role performance, a dimension of job performance and job scope. The findings show that a higher job scope would facilitate higher job performance from employees who receive high levels of supervisor support.

The results provide useful insights for managers and consultants, especially HR professionals involved in job design and redesign. Organizations that encourage high levels of social support can help employees improve their job performance as they foster an environment where employees can get direct assistance and advice from their supervisors.

This paper makes three key contributions to the literature on job design. First, this inquiry shows that a strong link does exist between job scope and job performance; previous studies have failed to find a strong relationship. Second, it highlights how social context, especially in highly challenging work settings, can shape employees’ proficiencies and behaviors. Third, this paper offers a novel perspective in job design research by incorporating a contextual moderator (i.e. supervisor support).

Drawing upon conservation of theory, this study aims to extend the scant literature on the effect of leader-member exchange (LMX) on workplace deviance behaviour (WDB) and adaptive performance by investigating the role of Islamic work ethics as moderators.

A time-lagged and multi-source data of (269 paired responses) of employees working in Islamic banks were used for hypotheses testing.

Taken together, the findings revealed that Leader Member Exchange (LMX) has a positive and significant impact on adaptive performance and is negatively related to employees’ WDB. The results of the moderation effect showed the positive relationship of LMX with adaptive performance and the negative relationship with WDB is stronger for high Islamic work ethics (IWE).

This study provides practical insight that Islamic business ethics plays a significant role in fostering adaptive performance and reducing the deviance behaviour of employees.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examined the moderating role of IWE between LMX-adaptive performance and LMX-WDB. This study has also filled the gap of scant literature about the impact of LMX on adaptive performance and WDB.

This study aims to dissect and understand the latent themes of Islamic work ethic (IWE) and explore the driving factors of IWE research.

Structural topic modeling (STM), a sophisticated machine learning technique, was used to analyze a corpus of 205 articles sourced from the Scopus database. These articles cover the 36 years of research on IWE, from 1988 to 2024. Moreover, negative binomial regression was applied to examine the driving factors of IWE research.

The STM analysis unfolds ten topics in conjunction with IWE including individual success, workplace dynamics, organizational work ethics, knowledge management, employee citizenship behavior, financial ethics, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, performance enhancement and leadership. The further STM outputs included word clouds, prevalence proportions, correlation matrix, heatmap, relationship of topics with metadata, topic prominence in the publishing journals and, finally, illustrating trends and future prospects of research on IWE. The results of negative binomial regression reveal that number of authors, article age, journal indexing, authors from multiple countries and number of references are strong drivers of fostering research in IWE, by having significant positive impacts on total citations.

The insights from this study provide valuable guidance for businesses and organizations looking to integrate IWE principles into their operations. By promoting values such as fairness, hard work and ethical behavior, organizations can foster a more inclusive and morally grounded workplace culture. This, in turn, may lead to enhanced employee satisfaction, greater organizational commitment and improved overall performance. Additionally, the emphasis on ethical practices can contribute to broader societal benefits, such as increased trust in business practices and a stronger alignment with social responsibility initiatives.

This is a unique study that explores the latent themes and characteristics of the IWE literature through STM and provides insights on the future research directions. In addition, this study also examines the driving factors of IWE research.

The increasing ethical misconduct at job place demands to understand the role of ethics in a wide variety of disciplines. This paper aims to empirically investigate the mediating mechanism of life satisfaction and subjective happiness between Islamic work ethics – innovative work behavior (IWB) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).

The sample comprised 296 employees and 58 head of departments (HODs) of top 11 business schools in Pakistan. The data of the study were collected in three waves and from two different sources (faculty members and their HODs) through questionnaire. The statistical technique SEM analysis was applied to inspect the proposed direct and mediating hypotheses.

Taken together, the findings revealed that Islamic work ethics (IWE) improves quality of life and by following IWE at workplace, employees feel pleasure and show satisfaction from life. The results supported the mediating role of both life satisfaction and subjective happiness between IWE-IWB and IWE-OCB.

This study provides practical insight that Islamic business ethics plays an important role at workplace and improves quality of life and individual behavior.

The current research is unique, as it empirically investigates the mechanism quality of life phenomena which connects IWE and individual behavior (innovative and citizenship). The mechanism quality of life is less studied, and therefore this study fills the gap of scant literature.

Blockchain technology, renowned for its decentralization, security, reliability, and data integrity, has the potential to revolutionize businesses globally. However, its full potential remains unrealized due to adoption barriers, necessitating further studies to address these challenges. Identifying these barriers is crucial for businesses and practitioners to effectively tackle them. This systematic review analyzed 70 eligible studies out of 1944 gathered from various databases to understand and identify common blockchain adoption barriers. The Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) framework was the most popular theory used in these studies. Despite differences in variable definitions, financial constraints, lack of stakeholder collaboration and coordination, and social influences like resistance to change and negative perceptions emerged as the top three barriers. The supply chain domain had the highest number of studies on blockchain adoption. Notably, there was a significant increase in studies addressing blockchain adoption in 2023, comprising 34.2% of the total reviewed studies. This review provides a comprehensive overview of identified barriers, serving as a valuable foundation for future research. Understanding these challenges allows researchers to design targeted studies aimed at developing solutions, strategies, and innovations to overcome obstacles hindering blockchain adoption.

This study aims to theoretically discuss and empirically test the mediating mechanism of psychological distress and the moderating effects of Islamic work ethics (IWE) in the relationship between despotic leadership and adaptive performance.

A three-wave survey was used to gather the data from middle managers and their supervisors of construction firms in Pakistan. The final sample consisted of 304 respondents and data analysis was performed through SEM analysis.

Despotic leadership enhances employees’ psychological distress which results in a negative impact on adaptive performance. In addition, IWE played a buffering role in mitigating the harmful impacts of despotic leadership on adaptive performance.

The study is among the pioneers that have investigated how despotic leadership impacts employees’ adaptive performance via the underlying mechanism of psychological distress through the conservation of resources and social exchange theory lens.

The purpose of this paper is to study differing demographic factors affecting fast-food customers loyalty towards national or international fast food chains. It also compares the variation between global and local fast food chains as the products offered are culturally different.

A variety of variables used to gain a holistic view, which includes factors such as quality, price, food and demographic profile of consumers affecting loyalty of fast food chains. The study adopts the theory and method of the trust-commitment-loyalty explanation chain and examines the consumer survey adapted from Fast food by Sahagun et al. (2014). The present analyses 542 filled questionnaires in which systematic sampling is used. Systematic sampling procedure is adopted.

Indians prefer global fast food chains compared to Indian fast food chains. Loyalty towards global brands is higher than that for Indian brands because they are found to be of better quality which leads to higher frequency of visit and recommendation of the brands to their friends and colleagues. There are ethnic variations towards global and Indian fast food chains. Global brand of food chains generated more good word of mouth publicity compared to Indian food chains. Demographic factors play a role in the patronage of fast food chains.

One of the limitations of this research is the study adapts the theory and method of the trust-commitment-loyalty explanation chain and examines the consumer survey adapted from a study of Sahagun et al. (2014) on fast food for emerging markets. Only India is studied, but the addition of other countries like Brazil, China, Russia and South Africa can add value.

Fast food managers had to illustrate the satisfaction on affective response, such as quality of food, convenient location, variety, service and value for money. Demographic variables like gender, age, education, income and ethnicity, global and local Brand will affect the perceptions.

This is the first attempt to study the loyalty of consumers in emerging markets, which is witnessing the entry of many fast food global chains. It studies the demographic variables effect on the loyalty and the behaviour of consumers and compares to local and global brand fast food chains. The research will be use to global managers who are planning to expand in emerging markets like India.

This study aims to gain new insight into how a set of maqasid-based consumption intelligence variables mediates exogenous variables (i.e. religiosity, Islamic university role and normative belief) and halal purchase intention as an endogenous variable.

The research model is empirically tested with a data set of 370 responses retrieved from the students of the millennial generation from the cross Islamic state university in Indonesia. Data were analysed with Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). The sample size of this study is computed with preliminary power analysis.

The SEM finding revealed that two maqasid-based consumption intelligence variables had mediated the exogenous and endogenous variables, i.e. halal purchase intention. These variables mediating the exogenous and endogenous variables have explained 63.5 R² variances in halal purchase intention. Concerning individual impact size of cognition and motivation as a component of maqasid-based consumption intelligence has shown medium-level effect size (f²) in mediating the halal purchase intention. Interestingly, the exogenous variable does not directly affect halal purchase intention but must be mediated with maqasid-based consumption intelligence variables. However, before including variables of maqasid-based consumption intelligence, the R² was relatively small. It is just 30.4% in R² that explains the variance of halal purchase intention.

This study explores maqasid-based consumption intelligence as a relatively new model to explain the variable halal purchase intention. Therefore, it takes many types of exogenous variables to test how relevant maqasid-based consumption intelligence variables can define endogenous variables. Notwithstanding, this study does not do that because it only limits three exogenous variables (i.e. religiosity, Islamic university role and normative belief). Therefore, in further research, these limitations seem to be perfected by other scholars concerned about halal purchase intention.

The findings of this study allow Islamic universities to mainstream halal issues as a subject of learning, especially concerning consumption ethics. In addition, the empirical results of this study encourage the industry to pay attention to the essential components in determining the halal quality of the products offered because the millennial generation is now very aware of the importance of halal products.

This study contributes to the existing literature on halal purchase intention by testing maqasid-based consumption intelligence variables as mediators. Moreover, this is a pioneer study to consider and construct maqasid-based consumption intelligence as a model that explains halal purchase intention.

In light of the widely acknowledged significance of GHRM practices, this study improves comprehension pertaining to GHRM practices and employee workplace outcome relationships. Drawing on the conservation of resource (COR) theory, the association between GHRM practices and employee workplace outcomes, namely green commitment and thriving at work, was explored, with a specific focus on the mediating role of organizational pride.

A quantitative research design was adopted, and data was collected through a multistage sampling technique, yielding a sample of 255 employees working in six textile manufacturing organizations in Pakistan, all of which held the ISO 14001 certification. The model was tested using Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM).

The findings of this study reveal a significant link between GHRM practices and organizational pride. Moreover, organizational pride was found to mediate the relationship between GHRM practices and thriving at work while partially mediating the relationship between GHRM practices and green commitment.

The outcomes of this study have implications for organizations seeking to enhance sustainability and employee well-being by adopting GHRM practices. Specifically, fostering a sense of organizational pride can further enhance thriving at work and green commitment among employees.

The findings contribute to the existing literature by highlighting the positive impact of GHRM practices on employee workplace outcomes and the importance of organizational pride as a mediating mechanism.