Search results

This paper aims to provide theoretical analysis and empirical study on the relationship between training and organizational commitment; analyze the mediating role of employability and the moderating role of expectation value in their relationship; and draw from both of these to suggest practical implications to organizations aiming to effectively train and retain employees, and for employees themselves.

First, the paper reviews the literature regarding training, employability, organizational commitment and expectation value. Second, it develops a theoretical model linking training, employability, organizational commitment and expectation value, and proposes a series of research hypotheses. Third, drawing on samples of 405 Chinese employees, it tests hypotheses based on a series of measurement and statistical analyses. Last, it discusses the analysis results and puts forward related suggestions for management practice.

The paper tests and verifies the applicability of Western training and employability scales in China from a self-perception perspective. Training is positively related to organizational commitment and employability. Further, employability partly mediates the relationship between training and organizational commitment, and expectation value moderates the relationship between employability and organizational commitment.

First, the cross-sectional design prevents the making of causal statements. Future research should adopt an experimental (quasi experimental) research method or longitudinal research to study the casual relationship between variables. Second, data are from employees’ self-report, giving rise to concern about possible common source bias. Future research should allow supervisors to rate employees’ employability or provide evaluation of employees’ expectation value to collect multi-source data.

The paper first introduces Western scales of training and employability into a Chinese context, and then tests and verifies the two scales' applicability in China. To explain the action mechanism of training to the employee – organizational commitment in a boundaryless career, the paper constructs a moderate mediation model to test the direct effect of training on organizational commitment, the mediating effect of employability and the moderating effect of expectation value. This study complements past research by investigating both the mediating and moderating mechanisms in training organizational commitment.

This paper aims to investigate business growth in post‐communist Albania using an institutional perspective.

The paper takes an institutional perspective, which emphasises the role of institutional change in enabling/constraining business growth whilst allowing for entrepreneurial objectives and motivations to be taken into account. The analysis is based on firm‐level data collected through a survey questionnaire in April‐July 2004. The paper uses principal components analysis and a regression model to explain the factors that determine the pace of business growth of small firms.

The analysis offers important insights into the nature of entrepreneurship in a post‐communist setting. The age of the firm, the age, education, qualifications and work orientation of the entrepreneur, insufficient information and corruption, explain the differential growth of firms. Older entrepreneurs grow faster suggesting unfulfilled aspirations during communism as well as their access to wider professional, social and possibly also political connections. The positive effect of corruption on business growth suggests that an ability to cope with a corrupt environment has been a necessary entrepreneurial skill during a period of chaotic change in social and formal institutions that has characterized transition in Albania.

This research can be of special interest to studies of entrepreneurship in institutional transformation contexts, and it contributes especially to the accumulation of knowledge on transition economies by looking at the little researched case of post communist Albania.

This chapter is a comprehensive description and in-depth analysis of the current COVID-19 pandemic and political crisis in Chile. It provides a structural analysis of the Chilean economy and discusses how Chileans in different social strata are coping with both COVID-19 and the social revolution. This is a historical case study of Chilean society and its experience with a simultaneous pandemic and transformative social change. As the analysis show, Chile is known as one of the most economically developed and, until recently, most politically stable countries in Latin America. It is also known for the high quality and wide coverage of its healthcare, mental health services, and preventative programs. Nevertheless, with COVID-19, it is experiencing its worst pandemic in 100 years. This nation, which has a population of about 19 million, has reported over 1.5 million cases of COVID-19 and greater than 30,000 deaths (Chuaqui & Linn, 2016/2019). It has recently ranked among the top 10 countries in the world in COVID-19 related deaths per 100,000 residents. The first case of COVID-19 was reported in March 2020 in the midst of a profound social revolution that was ongoing from October of the previous year. The rapid social, economic, and political changes that have occurred with both the social revolution (estallido) and the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in disproportionately experienced unemployment, isolation, illness, and death and have produced in many “middle” and lower class Chileans an anomic crisis that includes anxiety and depression because of the uncertainty about the future. This analysis provides insights for interpreting the outcomes of the recent national election of delegates to the upcoming Constitutional convention and the potential reforms that will be proposed for the new Constitution to address long-standing social and economic inequity in Chile.

Robert Hauptman first raised awareness about the ethical issues of reference service in 1976. Hauptman, a library school student at the time, did a study on the culpability, or lack thereof, in reference service provided by librarians. In his study, Hauptman posed as a library patron seeking potentially dangerous information. The behavior examined was how librarians respond to the request for material on how to build a bomb that would be powerful enough to blow up a house. Hauptman tried to present himself as a person of questionable character. He used six public and seven academic libraries in this study. Hauptman first made sure that he was speaking to the reference librarian. He then requested information for the construction of a small explosive, requesting specifically the chemical properties of cordite. He then asked for information on the potency of such an explosive, whether or not it could blow up a suburban house (Hauptman, Wilson Library Bulletin, 1976, p. 626).

The purpose of this paper is to explore government efforts to enhance the autonomy of community health services (CHS) in England through the creation of Foundation Trusts status. It considers why some CHS elected to become nascent Community Foundation Trusts (CFTs) while others had not and what advantages they thought increased levels of autonomy offered.

Data are drawn from the evaluation of the Department of Health’s CFT pilot programme. Participants were purposively selected from pilot sites, as well as from comparator non-pilot organisations. A total of 44 staff from 14 organisations were interviewed.

The data reveals that regardless of the different pathways that organisations were on, they all shared the same goal, a desire for greater autonomy, but specifically within the NHS. Additionally, irrespective of their organisational form most organisations were considering an almost identical set of initiatives as a means to improve service delivery and productivity.

Despite the expectations of policy makers no CFTs were established during the course of the study, so it is not possible to find out what the effect of such changes were. Nevertheless, the authors were able to investigate the attitudes of all the providers of CHS to the plans to increase their managerial autonomy, whether simply by separating from PCTs or by becoming CFTs.

As no CFTs have yet been formed, this study provides the only evidence to date about increasing autonomy for CHS in England.

In the field of business, digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of business, from generating to deliver value to customers. This concept is essential for sustainable growth of a company and its overall economy. Based on this fact, this authentic and informative research is conducted whose major aim is to examine the importance of digital transformation within a business through big data, the Internet of things and blockchain-based capabilities for overall strategic performance within the telecom sector in China.

For that aim, data quality and technology competence are considered as independent variables, strategic performance as dependent variable and big data analytics capabilities, Internet of things capabilities and blockchain capabilities routinization acted as mediators within this paper. In its data collection mechanism, an online survey was conducted in which questionnaires are randomly distributed to the telecom sector's professionals in which only 343 of them gave their valid outcomes. After collecting primary data, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM)–based statistical outcomes have been generated.

Results indicate that there is a significant relationship between data quality and strategic performance and between technological competence and strategic performance. Also, the big data analytics and Internet of Things capabilities acted as significant mediating role between both independent and dependent variables. But blockchain capabilities routinization is that variable that acts as an insignificant mediator between independent and dependent variables' relationship.

Overall, this study is an informative and attractive source for the Chinese government, its telecom industry, administrative body and related ones to understand the importance of such IT capabilities' implications within their operating activities for their strategic performance management. Also, related field scholars can utilize its reliable data in their research analysis. Its major limitations are (1) lack of qualitative/ mixed method of research and (2) lack of comparative analysis that may impact the acceptability factor of this paper, and this weakness can be overcome by upcoming scholars in their research.

Can one describe the ‘natural’ process of pregnancy as ‘harm’, even when negligently brought about? What does that harm consist of? Offering a contextual analysis of the English judiciary's characterisation of wrongful pregnancy, this paper demonstrates from a feminist perspective that the current construction of pregnancy as a ‘personal injury’ is deeply problematic. Forwarding an alternative account, this paper argues for law to embrace a richer notion of autonomy that will better resonate with women's diverse experiences of reproduction, and articulate the importance of autonomy in the reproductive domain: notably, women gaining control over their moral, relational and social lives.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the research on the relationship between developmental human resource management (HRM) practices and voluntary intention to leave among information technology (IT) professionals from the Indian IT sector by investigating the mediating role of affective commitment.

This study adopted a cross-sectional design at the individual-level of analysis. Data on the study constructs (i.e. developmental HRM practices, affective commitment, and voluntary intention to leave) were collected from 752 IT professionals from 17 Indian IT organizations from the city of Bengaluru through a web-based survey between February 2016 and March 2017. Further, this study used the confirmatory factor analysis technique to establish reliability and construct validity for the study constructs. Furthermore, this study tested the research hypotheses empirically through mediated multiple-regression analysis using the bootstrap procedure.

Empirical results of the present study suggest that espousal of robust developmental HRM interventions enhances affective commitment and significantly attenuates the voluntary intention to leave among employees. Further, the results of this study have indicated that the relationship between developmental HRM practices and voluntary intention to leave was partially mediated by affective commitment.

Past empirical studies on HRM – turnover discourse, in the IT sector, have predominantly examined the direct influence of HRM systems and/or internal labor market strategies on turnover intentions and actual turnover behavior. Rarely have the past studies in the IT domain attempted to examine the intervening role of employee attitudes in the relationship between HRM practices and employee-level outcomes. Addressing this gap, the present study enunciates the critical role of affective commitment and situates it as an important variable that mediates the relationship between developmental HRM practices and voluntary intention to leave among IT professionals in India.

For the past eight years the Centre for Corporate Strategy and Change has conducted a major stream of research looking at service change in the NHS and aspects of the implementation of the NHS reforms (Pettigrew, Ferlie and McKee, Ashburner, Ferlie and Fitzgerald, Bennett and Pettigrew, Ferlie and Bennett). This paper is based on the emerging findings from a new empirical study of the development of the process of contracting in the NHS.