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Failure prevention is recognised as one of the major enablers of attaining continuous quality improvement in total quality management (TQM) projects. Theoreticians have been propagating the employability of failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) as the technique for identifying and rectifying failures in achieving continuous quality improvement. However, FMEA does not facilitate holistic failure prevention and suffers from certain deficiencies. Hence a modified and improved technique named as total failure mode and effects analysis (TFMEA) has been proposed in this paper. Its design details, implementation procedure and practicality are presented in the paper. The article is concluded by suggesting that future researchers can work towards developing change management strategies for successfully implementing TFMEA in organisations.

This study aims to focus on assessing the influence of human resource development (HRD) interventions and learning agility (LA) on organizational innovation (OI).

Based on the social exchange theory, the theoretical research model was developed in this study. This study used cross-sectional data to test the research hypotheses. In addition, partial least square structured equation modelling was used to analyse 413 sample responses from Indian managerial professionals.

The findings suggest that HRD interventions and LA have an effect on OI. Additionally, age as a control factor also influences OI.

The study’s findings show that an organization must use HRD interventions effectively to improve innovation. Additionally, learning agile employees also helps in bringing innovation to an organization.

This study is one of its kind in exploring LA for OI by using the existing LA scale. Further, this study is a significant contribution to the existing literature by using HRD interventions, LA and OI in an extensive research model.

A learning-focused culture promotes creativity, innovativeness and the acquisition of novel insights and competencies. The study aims to explore the relationship between human resource development (HRD) practice and employee competencies using organizational learning culture as a mediating variable.

Data were collected from 828 employees of 37 health care institutions comprising 24 (internationally-owned) and 13 (indigenously-owned). Construct reliability and validity was established through a confirmatory factor analysis. The proposed model and hypotheses were evaluated using structural equation modeling.

Data supported the hypothesized relationships. The results show that training and development and employee competencies were significantly related. Career development and employee competencies were significantly related. Organizational learning culture mediates the relationship between training and development and employee competencies. However, organizational learning culture did not mediate the relationship between career development and employee competencies.

The generalizability of the findings will be constrained due to the research’s health care focus and cross-sectional data.

The study’s findings will serve as valuable pointers to policy makers and stakeholders of health care institutions in developing system-level capacities that promote continuous learning and adaptive learning cultures to ensure sustainability and competitive advantage.

By evidencing empirically that organizational learning culture mediates the relationship between HRD practices and employee competencies the study extends the literature.

This study aims to investigate the impact of augmented reality (AR) training modules on knowledge retention in corporate settings, focusing on the context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and existing literature, the study examines the relationships between AR training modules, employees’ engagement, interactive learning environments and knowledge retention.

This study uses a quantitative technique by using a structured survey to collect data from participants in service sectors in the UAE. The survey gathers information on their attitudes, views and behaviors toward using AR in business training. This study used a stratified random selection to guarantee representation across several service sectors in the UAE, including hospitality, tourism, retail and finance. A SEM analysis tool was used to test the relationship that exists between the construct under investigation, that is, employees’ engagements (EE), AR training modules (ARTM), interactive learning environment (ILE), Fintech training content (FTC), the moderating role of technological aptitude (TA) on knowledge retention (KR).

Findings reveal a significant positive correlation between AR training modules and knowledge retention, emphasizing the potential of immersive technologies in enhancing learning outcomes. Moreover, the study underscores the importance of engaged employees, customized training materials and technological proficiency in shaping knowledge retention. Limitations and avenues for further research are also discussed.

Overall, this study contributes to understanding the factors influencing knowledge retention in corporate training contexts and provides practical insights for organizations seeking to optimize their training programs.

The purpose of this paper is to generate awareness of contributions made by benchmarking toward building performance of Indian service industries in globally market. Ranking of Benchmarking is done on the basis of their application which give confidence for the managers to adopt in their Industries so that they may become best in their field.

Methodology consists of three phase: define, phase include definitions, factors of benchmarking as literature outcomes, questionnaire survey and outcome of survey. In the second phase, analysis of collected data and applications of multi-criteria decision-making approaches [technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and analytical network process (ANP)] are used. The last phase includes comparison of results which gives validation in similarities of ranking obtained.

The study identifies seven different benchmarking techniques used for service industries. Using TOPSIS and ANP approaches shows similarity that external benchmarking, performance benchmarking and internal benchmarking are the first three ranks that give basis for several critical success factors s, namely, planning, reliability, standardization, time behavior, usability, etc., as part of benchmarking using in service industries.

The limitation is the assumptions made by multi-criteria decision-making approaches which may effect the analysis of the study as these are taken theoretically.

This study is a first attempt to find similarities in both techniques while comparing benchmarking in Indian service industries.

Conventional Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) may lead to wrong decisions in terms of a company's financial objectives. Thus, the aim of this paper is to develop an improved approach to prioritizing failures within the procedure of the FMEA.

First, the current “risk priority number” (RPN) being used within the FMEA is developed. Second, a case study is conducted in cooperation with an automotive supplier in order to test the applicability and benefits of the new approach.

By implementing the cost‐oriented FMEA, quality management can be improved. In order to decide on improvement actions, costs arising from faults detected by the customer, costs of faults detected within the boundaries of the company and costs associated with false positive inspection results should be included in the evaluation of potential failures. This case study confirms the benefits of the new approach.

In order to implement this modified FMEA, a precondition is to estimate failure costs precisely and comprehensively. This precondition could constitute a serious obstacle, because quality costs are often difficult to quantify. In addition, future research should focus on the potential to include interdependencies among various failure modes and effects.

The proposed approach enables managers and designers to prevent expensive faults and hence facilitates decisions, which make better use of resources in optimising products and processes.

The paper provides a new approach to FMEA and thus contributes to the development of cost‐oriented quality management.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an innovative and integrated approach based on service quality measurement (SERVQUAL), quality function deployment (QFD) and failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) for service quality improvement.

The SERVQUAL scale is used for service quality measurement, QFD is used for service design and FMEA is used to prevent possible failures during service delivery.

A case study in a public hospital in Turkey is performed to show how the proposed approach works in practice. The results of the study show that the proposed approach can be used effectively to assess service quality in practice.

Service quality has become an important issue for service enterprises facing a fiercely competitive environment to provide sustainability. This is the first study that applies an integrated methodology based on SERVQUAL scale, QFD and FMEA to service quality improvement.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the history and existing research on continuous improvement (CI).

Extensive review of the literature.

This paper provides an overview of CI, its inception, how it evolved into sophisticated methodologies used in organizations today, and existing research in this field in the literature.

The literature on classification of CI has so far been very limited. The paper reviews a large number of papers in this field and presents the overview of various CI implementation practices demonstrated by manufacturing organizations globally. It also highlights the sophisticated CI methodologies suggested by various researchers and practitioners in the field of CI.

The literature on classification of CI has so far been very limited. The paper reviews a large number of papers in this field and presents the overview of various CI implementation practices demonstrated by manufacturing organizations globally. It also highlights the sophisticated CI methodologies suggested by various researchers and practitioners in the field of CI.

The paper contains a comprehensive listing of publications on the field in question and its classification. It will be useful to researchers, improvement professionals and others concerned with improvement to understand the significance of CI. It should be of value to practitioners of CI programmes and to academics who are interested in how CI has evolved, and where it is today. To the authors’ knowledge, no recent papers have provided an historical perspective of CI.

The purpose of this study is to propose a comprehensive benchmarking approach to help subsidiaries of a company to implement continuous improvement (CI).

The proposed approach classifies subsidiaries of a company into the three stages of CI. After that, the proposed approach employs data envelopment analysis (DEA)-super slacks-based measure (SBM) model and Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) to evaluate the operational efficiency of the subsidiaries and selects benchmarking targets and sets benchmarking goals based on the operational efficiency for benchmarking of input and output criteria. Then, the proposed approach suggests a four-step benchmarking process for benchmarking of detailed efficiency. Finally, the proposed approach makes the subsidiaries achieve CI by implementing the input and output benchmarking and the efficiency benchmarking.

The results show that the proposed approach can help subsidiaries of a company to implement a staged benchmarking which considers input and output criteria and Malmquist productivity and efficiency comprehensively.

Generally, benchmarking is implemented in many aspects. However, due to the restriction of a company’s resource level, a practical and staged benchmarking is preferred. This study proposes a comprehensive approach to benchmark systematically and gradually, and provides a more reasonable benchmarking process for implementing CI.

The study aims to explore language style and gender match as a key part of initial trust among potential donors and how this leads to funding success based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories. Empirical analyses of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

Crowdfunding (CF) is an internet-based method of funding employed by project founders, allowing individuals to raise funds from the crowd to support their projects. It is important for project founders to attract the crowd’s interest as potential funders commonly have limited information about projects. One of the early cues about a project that can be picked up by the crowd in CF projects is the text description of the proposal. This text description is crucial for giving the crowd an understanding of the project and for promoting the crowd’s trust in the founder, encouraging them to fund the CF project. Based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories, this study sets out to explore language style and gender match as key elements of initial trust among potential donors and how they lead to funding success. A 2 × 2 factorial experimental design (e.g. subject, male and female, × male language style and female language style) was used for the study. To determine the sample size of the experiment, this study applied power and sample size estimations to measure how many respondents were needed for the experiment. Based on the power table of effect size, 128 respondents were considered to be a sufficient number for this experiment to ensure sufficient statistical power of 0.8 and a significance level of 0.05. This study fulfilled the requirement by recruiting 160 respondents, which corresponded to 40 subjects per group based on a 2 × 2 factorial design (the respondents’ gender, male and female, and text language style, male and female). The empirical analysis of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

This paper contributes to project founders’ understanding and knowledge of the importance of linguistic style, which can determine the success of a CF project. One of the important results of this study is that the crowd can identify the author’s gender based on their writing style. Through an experiment applying factorial analysis (2 × 2), it was found that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than with “who it is written by” (gender). This means that the project founder, if they know who their audience is, should know how to write the project proposal so that it fits the audience’s preferences. More specifically, the success rate of CF projects can be increased by integrating suitable word dimensions in promotions of projects on CF platforms. Therefore, it can be argued that linguistic style is a powerful agent for building a connection with a target audience. The findings of this study can be used as theoretical guidance, and eventually, the potential antecedents of funding intention can be further explored.

This study is subject to several limitations. The result is limited to donation-based CF. As this study focuses on the language style of project founders when they describe their CF projects, donation-based CF was the most appropriate platform for this research. In donation-based CF, the style words are more emotion-based, compared to other CF platforms. The experiment, however, could also be replicated for other CF types such as reward-based CF. One important part of CF projects is persuading the crowd to fund them. It is worth mentioning that reward-based CF involves individuals pledging to a business in exchange for a reward. Yet, even though reward-based CF offers rewards, it is generally considered a subset of donation-based CF because there is no financial return to the backer. Therefore, it is suggested that future research should also consider case studies in reward-based CF. Second, from the persuading perspective, this study focusses on narrative language style only, as it facilitates the crowd’s understanding of a CF project. Future study can further focus on other information content such as videos in the project proposal. Prior research has found that providing a video in a CF project increases the crowd’s confidence in funding (Mitra, 2012). The study is also supported by previous studies that suggest producing a higher quality of video in the project proposal positively related to the success of CF projects (Mollick (2014)).

The result of this study empirically confirmed that the crowd’s willingness to fund a project proposal and their trust are dependent on the text description of the project proposal. The project founders need to know how to describe the content of a project so that it signals the quality of the project, especially in early start-ups. In other words, the way that a project is created and published through a CF platform will send a valuable signal to the potential donors about the project, and they will either find it acceptable or reject it. If the project appears to lack demand among potential donors, it is easier for project founders to quickly identify that the project will fail, without the need to invest additional capital.

The findings of this study have important social implications that provide guidelines for project founders on establishing a strategy to help the crowd understand their projects. At the same time, the findings can help the crowd to make their funding decisions. First, the text language used in the CF project by the project founder plays an important role in presenting the campaign and all the ideas need to be presented in a clear way so that the crowd understands the project. In CF projects, pitch is everything (Varsamis, 2018). The pitch refers to the text or video that is provided by the project founder to show their project proposal to the crowd. Compared with traditional funding channels (such as venture capital, i.e. banks), CF is more convenient for raising funds. This is because the project founders need to show their ideas in a creative way to the crowd online, rather than preparing a complex plan and racking their brains on how they can persuade investors to participate (Wang and Yang (2019)). This research intends to help project founders understand how they can influence the crowd by improving the text language used in their CF projects.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how the linguistic style of the project founder would lead to the success rate of crowdfunding projects.