The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of perceived quality and perceived value on learner motivation and engagement in executive education e-learning programs.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of perceived quality and perceived value on learner motivation and engagement in executive education e-learning programs.
Design/methodology/approach
The structural model comprising four constructs – perceived quality (PQ), perceived value (PV), self-regulated learning (SRL) and intrinsic motivation (IM) – was empirically validated through path analysis. Mediation analysis and importance-performance map analysis (IPMA) was also conducted.
Findings
This study shows that PQ has a positive effect on PV; PV has a positive effect on SRL and on IM; and SRL has a positive effect on IM. Further, variance accounted for (VAF)-based mediation analysis established the partial mediating effect of SRL between PV and IM.
Practical implications
One, perceived quality and perceived value play a pivotal role in driving learner engagement and motivation in e-learning-based executive education programs. Two, the “pathway” effect of self-regulated learning between perceived value and intrinsic motivation has a crucial bearing on the design-execution-outcome lifecycle of such programs. Three, low-moderate performance scores of PQ, PV, and SRL in IPMA analysis implies these inputs are inadequate, adversely impacting learner motivation and engagement.
Originality/value
Recommendations from this pioneering study can be adopted by higher education (HE) ecosystem stakeholders to enhance perceived quality and value, learner motivation, engagement and learning outcomes in e-learning programs for executive education.
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Ranjan Kumar, Saikat Chaterjee, Vinayak Ranjan and Sanjoy K. Ghoshal
The present findings report a significant influence of disc profile and thickness on the order of excitation leading to critical speed condition. Certain transverse modes of…
Abstract
Purpose
The present findings report a significant influence of disc profile and thickness on the order of excitation leading to critical speed condition. Certain transverse modes of vibration of the disc have been obtained to be more susceptible to get excited while recording the lowest critical speeds.
Design/methodology/approach
Numerical simulation using finite-element method has been adopted due to the complicated geometry, complex loadings and intricate analytical formulation. A comprehensive analysis of exclusive as well as combination of thermal and centrifugal loads has been taken up to determine the intensity and characteristics of the individual/combined effects.
Findings
The typical gas turbine disc profile has been analyzed to predict the critical speed under the factual working condition of an aero-engine. FEM analysis of uniform and variable thickness discs have been carried out under stationary, rotating and rotating-thermal considerations while emphasizing the effect of disc profile and thickness. Centrifugal stresses developed due to rotational effect result in unceasing stiffening of the discs with higher stiffening for a greater number of nodal diameters. On the other hand, a role reversal of thermal effect from stiffening to softening is figured out with increasing numbers of nodal diameters. However, the discs are subjected to an overall stiffening effect on account of the combined centrifugal and thermal loading, with the effect decreasing with an increase in disc thickness. Under the combined loading, the order of excitation leading to critical speed condition is dependent on disc profile and thickness. Moreover, the vibrational modes (0,1) and (0,2) are identified as more prominent adverse modes corresponding to lowest critical speeds.
Practical implications
The present findings are expected to serve as guidelines during the design phase of gas turbine discs of aeroengine applications.
Originality/value
The present work deliberates on the simulation and analysis of gas turbine disc specific to aeroengine application. The real-life disc geometry has been analyzed with due consideration of major factual operating conditions to identify the critical speed. The identification of various critical speed using numerical analysis can help to reduce the number of experimental tests required for certification.
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Bishnu Kumar Adhikary, Ranjan Kumar Mitra and Mohammad Rajon Meah
This study aims to investigate the earnings management practices of the listed manufacturing firms in Bangladesh and assess the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on such…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the earnings management practices of the listed manufacturing firms in Bangladesh and assess the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on such earnings management behavior.
Design/methodology/approach
The study applies the real earnings management (REM) model developed by Dechow et al. (1998) and implemented by Roychowdhury (2006) and modified Jones model (1991) for the proxy of accrual-based earnings management (AEM). It uses a pooled ordinary least square regression model corrected with robust standard errors for empirical analysis.
Findings
The study finds that firms with small positive earnings per share are engaged in AEM to avoid losses. Also, firm managers craft discretionary expenses to manage real earnings. For governance factors, the institutional shareholders tend to play a significant role in limiting both REM and AEM embedded in generally accepted accounting principles or International Financial Reporting Standards. Also, factors such as foreign ownership and board size significantly restrict REM, whereas director ownership encourages the same. The paper does not reveal any significant monitoring role for other governance factors in curbing either REM or AEM practices by Bangladeshi firms.
Research limitations/implications
The paper studies the monitoring role of governance mechanisms on listed manufacturing firms’ earnings management. A study of separating the listed firms into family and non-family ones could be interesting for future research.
Practical implications
The paper unveils earning management techniques used by firms in Bangladesh and provides critical policy implications to the corporate governance mechanisms that effectively limit earnings management practice.
Social implications
The social significance is to aware constituents of financial reporting about the earnings management behavior by firms in emerging economies.
Originality/value
The study adds to evidence that the manufacturing firms in Bangladesh adopt both REM and AEM techniques to avoid losses. Simultaneously, the paper highlights some critical governance factors that can restrict misleading earnings management behavior by firms in an emerging economy to assist in policymaking.
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Kumar Rakesh Ranjan, Rupanwita Dash, Praveen Sugathan and Wen Mao
In important interpersonal service interactions with a frontline employee (FLE), consumers at times fail to carry out their share of responsibility in the execution of the…
Abstract
Purpose
In important interpersonal service interactions with a frontline employee (FLE), consumers at times fail to carry out their share of responsibility in the execution of the service, resulting in a situation of “consumer created emergency”. This might defeat the consumer's goal of availing the service (termed as consumer failure). This study explains the role of employee's hope in managing consumer failure in the situation of consumer created emergencies.
Design/methodology/approach
Hypotheses were tested in three experiments that simulated service emergency across a general printing service situation and a travel service situation.
Findings
The study shows that: (1) FLE hope has a positive effect on consumer satisfaction, and is mediated by the consumer's assumed effort by the FLE; (2) the effect of FLE hope on consumer satisfaction changes with changing levels of consumer hopefulness about the service outcome; (3) despite situation of consumer created emergency, consumer failure results in low consumer satisfaction due to attribution error and (4) external attribution by the FLE could not significantly rectify consumer's attribution error and hence could not alleviate consumer dissatisfaction.
Research limitations/implications
The study suggests relevance and pathways of managing emotions and attributions of consumers and FLEs for superior performance outcomes.
Originality/value
The study theorizes and tests the role of hope, which is an important positive emotion during emergencies because frontline service settings have heretofore predominantly focused on managing negative traits and outcomes.
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Roderick J. Brodie, Kumar Rakesh Ranjan, Martie-louise Verreynne, Yawei Jiang and Josephine Previte
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis for healthcare systems worldwide. There have been significant challenges to managing public and private health care and related services…
Abstract
Purpose
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis for healthcare systems worldwide. There have been significant challenges to managing public and private health care and related services systems’ capacity to cope with testing, treatment and containment of the virus. Drawing on the foundational research by Frow et al. (2019), the paper explores how adopting a service ecosystem perspective provides insight into the complexity of healthcare systems during times of extreme stress and uncertainty.
Design/methodology/approach
A healthcare framework based on a review of the service ecosystem literature is developed, and the COVID-19 crisis in Australia provides an illustrative case.
Findings
The study demonstrates how the service ecosystem perspective provides new insight into the dynamics and multilayered nature of a healthcare system during a pandemic. Three propositions are developed that offer directions for future research and managerial applications.
Practical implications
The research provides an understanding of the relevance of managerial flexibility, innovation, learning and knowledge sharing, which offers opportunities leading to greater resilience in the healthcare system. In particular, the research addresses how service providers in the service ecosystem learn from this pandemic to inform future practices.
Originality/value
The service ecosystem perspective for health care offers fresh thinking and an understanding of how a shared worldview, institutional practices and supportive and disruptive factors influence the systems’ overall well-being during a crisis such as COVID-19.
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Ranjan Kumar, Neerja Pande and Shamama Afreen
The purpose of this paper is to critically examine sustainability reporting (SR) practices of top 10 Indian banks, on parameters derived from a Global Reporting Initiative…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to critically examine sustainability reporting (SR) practices of top 10 Indian banks, on parameters derived from a Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)-G4-based persuasive communication framework.
Design/methodology/approach
SR metrics from GRI-G4 guidelines were mapped to persuasive communication parameters to develop a blended analytical framework. Content analysis (CA) technique was used to assess SR of top 10 banks on this framework.
Findings
The study has three key findings. First, most of the top 10 Indian banks are yet to adopt adequate disclosure and transparency practices in SR. Second, even though environmental and social goals are broadly reported, there are glaring omissions on metrics like “equal remuneration,” “occupational health and safety” and “customer privacy.” Third, stakeholder engagement focus is weak as reflected in low persuasive appeal of SR content of most banks.
Research limitations/implications
The blended framework provides a theoretical and analytical pathway for operationalizing the sustainability context principle, which has been inadequately addressed even within the GRI framework implementation.
Practical implications
The paper provides a “health check” and identifies “red flags” in SR of top 10 Indian banks, enabling them to undertake a critical review of their sustainability metrics and reporting practices.
Social implications
The paper establishes the significance of evaluating non-financial reporting practices addressing broader sustainability metrics in the banking sector, in an emerging economy context.
Originality/value
This paper develops a GRI-G4-based persuasive communication framework for SR assessment, and conducts an evaluation of top 10 Indian banks using CA technique.
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This paper aims to examine the association between earnings quality and firm-specific return volatility for a large sample of Japanese manufacturing firms.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the association between earnings quality and firm-specific return volatility for a large sample of Japanese manufacturing firms.
Design/methodology/approach
This archival research uses idiosyncratic volatility and asynchronicity as two analogous proxies for firm-specific return volatility to investigate its association with earnings quality.
Findings
Using idiosyncratic volatility and asynchronicity as two comparable proxies for firm-specific return volatility, the author finds contradictory results. The author relates this contradiction to another debate in accounting and finance literature about whether firm-specific return volatility captures firm-specific information or noise. Initially, the author obtains conflicting results because the systematic risk, one of the components of asynchronicity, is highly correlated with earnings quality. After controlling for the systematic risk, the author finds that higher earnings quality is associated with lower firm-specific return volatility. This finding is consistent with the noise-based explanation of firm-specific return volatility. The author also separates earnings quality into an innate component driven by economic fundamentals and a discretionary component driven by managerial discretionary behavior and finds that both components have significant impact on firm-specific return volatility but the innate component has significantly stronger effect than the discretionary component.
Originality/value
This is the first research study presenting evidence on the association between earnings quality and firm-specific return volatility in the Japanese setting. The findings of this paper are likely to contribute to the resolution of a well-known debate on whether firm-specific return volatility captures more firm-specific information being impounded in stock prices or noise in stock prices.
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Biswabhusan Bhuyan, Subhamitra Patra and Ranjan Kumar Bhuian
The purpose of this study is to measure the level of total factor productivity of the Indian banking sector and to identify both the bank-specific and macroeconomic determinants…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to measure the level of total factor productivity of the Indian banking sector and to identify both the bank-specific and macroeconomic determinants of the total factor productivity after the global subprime mortgage crisis.
Design/methodology/approach
The research sample consists of 61 commercial banks including 21 public sector banks, 18 private sector banks and 22 foreign banks. The annual data is collected from the website of Reserve Bank of India from 2008 to 2019. The authors employed the non-parametric DEA approach to estimate Malmquist total factor productivity index for each bank as well as across different ownership groups. The panel data estimation technique was used to identify the determinants of total factor productivity.
Findings
The results suggested that an increase in the technological shift raised the bank's productivity above the optimal frontier. Among the bank-specific determinants, the bank size and bank diversifications are significantly declining productivity, whereas credit-deposit ratio and return on asset significantly increasing productivity. Among the macro-specific determinants, inflation, growth rate and fiscal deficit ratio negatively affect productivity, whereas capital formation to the GVA ratio boosts the level of productivity.
Research limitations/implications
The authors have used intermediate method to select the inputs and outputs as per the suitability to the context. However, the disaggregate level such as state and district level analysis can be done using production and value-added approaches to explore the regional variations of the banking performance. Furthermore, the parametric methods such as stochastic frontier analysis can be used to examine banking performance, which the authors left for the future research.
Practical implications
This study suggested that banks should increase the economies of scale of their total assets and focus on the interest-earning activity. The banks need to proactively operate the business policy by following the changing path of inflation. The banks need to reduce their rate of fiscal-deficit to the GVA with the purpose to boost their level of productivity.
Originality/value
The study provides an important implication for bankers and policymakers in terms of heightening the banking performance during the period of dynamic economic events.
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Kumar Rakesh Ranjan and Stuart Read
Despite the increasing prominence of value co-creation (VCC) in extant research, the area of customer co-creation is in its infancy and many aspects are not well-understood. This…
Abstract
Purpose
Despite the increasing prominence of value co-creation (VCC) in extant research, the area of customer co-creation is in its infancy and many aspects are not well-understood. This paper aims to important work from the individual psychology literature with the concept of VCC and offers empirical evidence to untested theoretical claims regarding the role of the individual in VCC.
Design/methodology/approach
The investigation begins with reviews of the literature of individual psychology and VCC to compare the concepts they use to explain the role of the individual in co-creation. The results of the theoretical development are empirically derived using a multiple vignette-based study to examine relationships between individual characteristics and the activity of VCC.
Findings
The authors find a positive effect of a customer’s prosocial orientation, perspective taking and involvement on VCC. However, a customer’s extraversion does not affect the degree of VCC. The desire-to-participate mediates these relationships.
Research limitations/implications
This study offers a foundation for some of the central claims about VCC and encourages a precise understanding of the impact of individual customer psychology in value co-creation with firms. Implications for the service-dominant logic of marketing and core work in psychology are discussed.
Practical implications
Managers seeking to design co-creative ecosystems need to know about the individuals they are co-creating with. In this research, the authors clearly exemplify how managers can use in practice a theoretical understanding of individuals to better direct the activity of VCC.
Originality/value
This paper provides both new theoretical knowledge from the parallel literature review and exciting empirical results from the authors’ investigation into phenomenological claims regarding VCC.
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Price image studies have dominated the consumer market but have been slower to evolve in the business market. This research aims to conceptualize and validate the firms’ price…
Abstract
Purpose
Price image studies have dominated the consumer market but have been slower to evolve in the business market. This research aims to conceptualize and validate the firms’ price image (FPI) in the business market, as well as to develop a conceptual framework for exploring the importance of pricing capability (PC) in the formation of FPI and its influence on customer value (CV) and business performance (BP).
Design/methodology/approach
The study conducted field interviews with business managers and customers of Indian small and medium-sized enterprises to operationalize and validate the FPI variable using a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative multivariate analyses. Partial least square structural equation modeling technique was applied to validate a conceptual model on a sample of 286 respondents acquired from both physical and digital questionnaire survey techniques.
Findings
The findings revealed that PC is positively linked to FPI, which in turn, significantly affects CV and BP. Moreover, CV serves as a partial mediator in the FPI–BP link. The research also offers a measurement scale consisting of eight items for assessing the FPI variable from the stakeholders’ perspective.
Research limitations/implications
This research contributes to the literature on price image by refining and testing measures of FPI, and enriches the existing literature by understanding the theoretical relationships among PC, FPI, CV, and BP.
Practical implications
The research reveals that developing PC is a useful tool for SMEs to build favorable FPI, which delivers superior CV and obtains improved BP. The findings can also assist SME managers to gain a sustainable competitive advantage by maintaining a favorable FPI.
Originality/value
While a growing number of consumer market studies reveal that price image is strategically important for the retailers who own it, no study has explored the role of price image in the business market. This is the first study to explore price image at the firm level in the business market. This study further provides empirical evidence for the claim that PC influences the formation of a FPI and clarifies the relationship between FPI, CV and BP.