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Political connections and financial performance: The moderating effect of corporate governance efficacy in Pakistan
Get PDFFirm performance has become a thriving research field. However, a review of previous studies showed that the answers to several fundamental questions remain vague and require further investigation. Thus, the purpose of this study is twofold; first, to examine the relationship between political connection and company financial performance representing return on assets, return on equity, and Tobin's Q in Pakistani non-financial listed companies. Second, to examine the association between political connection and financial performance with moderating role of director efficacy and audit committee efficacy. This study used the data of 221 companies listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange over the period 2008-2017. Based on the Panel Regression with Corrected Standard Error, the result showed that political connection has a significant negative effect on company financial performance. With the interaction effect of the director's efficacy further strengthens the relationship between political connection and return on assets. However, the director efficacy weakens the relationship of political connection with return on equity and Tobin’s Q. In addition, the interaction effect of audit committee efficacy weakens the relationship between political connection and firm performance. Thus, the impact of political influence on the corporate sector remains a concern for policymakers, regulators, investors, financial experts, auditors, and academic researchers. Further, an effective board of directors and audit committee can strengthen a company's best practices by controlling political connectedness to protect all the stakeholders’ interests, particularly investors, and restore their confidence. Overall, the findings assist stakeholders to make the right decision when a political connection exists. Finally, this study extends the political connection and corporate governance including financial performance literature by linking the political economy theory in emerging economies like Pakistan
Students' intention to use in-app advertisements in Pakistan
Get PDFWith the proliferation of smartphone apps, in-app advertisements (ads) have emerged as an important communication and financial tool. However, there are limited studies conducted in the developing countries on how app features in in-app ads influence students' intention to use in-app ads. Therefore, this research aims to examine the influence of perceived collaboration, perceived usefulness, and perceived financial benefits on students' intention to use in-app ads. The mediating roles of attitude and perceived usefulness and the moderating role of self-efficacy were also examined. The underpinning theory used in this study was the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Data were collected using the proportional stratified sampling technique among students from selected public universities in Pakistan. An online questionnaire was used for this purpose. Responses from 400 respondents were analyzed using the partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach. The results revealed that the most significant factor influencing students' intentions to use in-app ads was their attitude. Other contributing factors were perceived financial benefits, perceived collaboration, and perceived usefulness. Apart from that, attitude and perceived usefulness showed mediation effects, while self-efficacy demonstrated no moderating effect. The findings conclude that advertisers should effectively use app features and consider the target market's attitude in order to influence their intention to use in-app ads. Advertisers and in-app service providers should collaborate and provide financial benefits to customers for increased business activity. This research has extended the findings on in-app ads from a developing country's perspective. The suggestions for future research are also discussed
Improving substructure works safety performance rating using six sigma methodology
No full textthe occupational accident rate is one of the highest across all other industrial sectors. Low safety performance can possibly contribute to occupational accident. The Solaris 1 construction project site monthly safety performance ratings were below the target 70% set by the client. This research used the Six Sigma DMAIC process framework to improve the monthly safety performance and maintain the score rating of above 70% until the end of the construction project. The research indicated that safety leadership plays a significant role in enhancing workplace safety performance. This paper attempts to provide a conceptualization of safety leadership from the perspective of Malaysia’s construction sector. It was proposed that positive safety leadership leads to an increase of construction safety performance. It was proposed that positive safety leadership leads to an increase of construction safety performance. Safety leadership of two senior managements, three managers and seven supervisors at Solaris 1 construction site were examined and improved. Using Six Sigma DMAIC methodology, positive safety leadership was established and safety performance rating improved above 70% from March 2019 onwards. Safety leadership acts an important role in determining the level of workplace safety through safety coaching, safety caring, and safety controlling. Furthermore, the perception of employees towards safety-related leadership in the organizations influences their behaviour in handling their works. This suggests that the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology and analysis tool can be easily adopted to improve safety performance at construction site
Factors influence consumers’ acceptance of digital banking services at Islamic banks.
No full textAs the world moves forward to the Fourth Industry Revolution, countries have intensely pursued the development of new technology in all sectors, financial sectors included. The Covid-19 outbreak has forced consumers to shift to digital banking services which has led to rapid growth in digital banking usage in the past few years. Bank Negara Malaysia hastened its digitization planning by announcing a new digital bank license to the five successful applicants signifies the readiness of Malaysia's economy to enter a
new digital era. The entrance of these new players may consider the most significant disruption to the financial market, especially for traditional banks. The existence of new entrants undoubtedly will impose a potential threat to the traditional Islamic banks which may force them to speed up their digitalization plan to cater the consumer demand. The critical element for the success of the digitalization plan depends on the consumer's acceptance of digital banking services. This research intends to explore the factors that affect consumers' acceptance of digital banking services at Islamic banks. The factors observed for this study are perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, security and privacy, and knowledge that has been adapted from previous studies. Online questionnaire was distributed to the 1370 employees of Majlis Amanah Rakyat (MARA), however only 300 responses were
returned for this study. The findings indicate that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, security, and privacy have significantly influenced consumers’ acceptance of using digital banking services while knowledge has no influence on consumers’ acceptance of digital banking services at Islamic Banks. These findings will provide crucial insight into consumers' perception of current digital banking services particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic, which will support the Islamic banks to enhance the quality of their services according to consumers' demands
The impact of product innovation on electrical and electronic product acceptance
No full textConsumer product acceptance of electrical and electronic products is more likely to increase if the determinant contribution to product acceptance is taken into account. In order to increase the attention and understanding of the determinant contribution to product acceptance, the present study investigates the relationship between the determinants' contribution (product innovation, product technological capability, product ease of use and product performance) and product acceptance as well as the moderating effect of attitude between the determinants contributions and product acceptance in electrical and electronics products in Malaysia. This study applies the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). This study used quantitative data analysis techniques as the method for data analysis. 488 Malaysian electrical and electronics customers were selected using the quota sampling technique. The data collection was obtained from the questionnaire surveys. The data collected was analyzed using both Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and SmartPLS 3. The results obtained from SmartPLS 3 indicated a positive relationship between all four determinants' contributions (product innovation, product technological capability, product ease of use and product performance) and product acceptance. A positive attitude towards the product results in a higher product acceptance among customers. The results also revealed that product performance mostly affects product acceptance, followed by product innovation, product technological capability and product ease of use. The study has implications for consumers, academicians, companies and researchers. This study is also expected to improve Malaysia's development and acceptance of electrical and electronics products
Analyzing the relationship between organizational resources and organizational performance moderated by organizational culture in the Malaysian electrical and electronics industry
No full textEconomists concur that the three elements driving the country’s economic development are the employment rate, productivity, and inflation rate. Since the manufacturing sector makes notable contributions toward a country’s economic development, it has been the focus of many researchers. In recent decades, the manufacturing sector has experienced rapid evolution. Start from mass production using an intensive labour force in production lines to using robotics to increase efficiency, the manufacturing industry is constantly expanding with new automation elements. Today, the next phase of evolution, known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0, has witnessed an improvement in the manufacturing industry toward producing technologically complex products. However, specific cultures may not hold relevance in the current business environment. Thus, this research aimed to examine the relationship between organizational resources with organizational performance, including the organizational culture functioning as the moderator of the link between organizational resources and performance. The survey method was applied in this study, where data were tested using 287 Electrical and Electronics Industry respondents listed in the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers and Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation. Using Partial Least Square (PLS) as a tool to analyse the relationship, it was found that a positive and significant relationship was present between organizational resources (entrepreneurial orientation, innovation capability, intellectual capital, and technology orientation) and organizational performance. The role of organizational culture as a moderating variable was then established, leading to the finding of the importance of organizational culture on the relationship between organizational resources (innovation capability, entrepreneurial orientation, intellectual capital, and technology orientation) and organizational performance. The study has implications for E&E organizations, academicians and researchers. This study is also expected to increase organizational performance by creating a benchmark for all Malaysian E&E organizations to improve their innovation, knowledge, technology and competence
An enhanced binary bat and Markov clustering algorithms to improve event detection for heterogeneous news text documents
Get PDFEvent Detection (ED) works on identifying events from various types of data. Building an ED model for news text documents greatly helps decision-makers in various disciplines in improving their strategies. However, identifying and summarizing events from such data is a non-trivial task due to the large volume of published heterogeneous news text documents. Such documents create a high-dimensional feature space that influences the overall performance of the baseline methods in ED model. To address such a problem, this research presents an enhanced ED model that includes improved methods for the crucial phases of the ED model such as Feature Selection (FS), ED, and summarization. This work focuses on the FS problem by automatically detecting events through a novel wrapper FS method based on Adapted Binary Bat Algorithm (ABBA) and Adapted Markov Clustering Algorithm (AMCL), termed ABBA-AMCL. These adaptive techniques were developed to overcome the premature convergence in BBA and fast convergence rate in MCL. Furthermore, this study proposes four summarizing methods to generate informative summaries. The enhanced ED model was tested on 10 benchmark datasets and 2 Facebook news datasets. The effectiveness of ABBA-AMCL was compared to 8 FS methods based on meta-heuristic algorithms and 6 graph-based ED methods. The empirical and statistical results proved that ABBAAMCL surpassed other methods on most datasets. The key representative features demonstrated that ABBA-AMCL method successfully detects real-world events from Facebook news datasets with 0.96 Precision and 1 Recall for dataset 11, while for dataset 12, the Precision is 1 and Recall is 0.76. To conclude, the novel ABBA-AMCL presented in this research has successfully bridged the research gap and resolved the curse of high dimensionality feature space for heterogeneous news text documents. Hence, the enhanced ED model can organize news documents into distinct events and provide policymakers with valuable information for decision making
Factors influencing the readiness to adopt electric vehicles: A study on Pulau Langkawi as a potential low-carbon island
No full textThe government of Malaysia intends to transform Langkawi into Malaysia’s first low-carbon island by 2030 should to be proud of. However, every minute of the amounts of global greenhouse gas emissions and energy use can have an impact on a low-carbon island all around the world. By introducing electric transportation through the use of electric vehicles has an excellent potential to reduce global warming and increase air quality on a low-carbon island worldwide. Nevertheless, there is currently no research on the adoption of EVs for a low-carbon island that focuses on Malaysia. By using qualitative interviews with expert panels, this study attempts to evaluate the key factors impacting the adoption of EVs on the low-carbon island of Langkawi, Malaysia. Government, Advertising and Marketing, Consumers, Infrastructure, and Technology are the five factors highlighted through this study. By integrating the Theory of Change (ToC) to the low carbon readiness concept, the factors are ranked and prioritised using a quantitative AHP method. The result shown that Government is first ranked in importance factor, followed by Consumers, Advertising and Marketing, Technology, and Infrastructure. For the readiness progress, experts determined that the level of readiness by the Government is 35%, Infrastructure is 30%, Consumers is 12.5%, Advertising and Marketing, and the Technology factors are 10%. This priority and readiness progress are intended to benefit policymakers by demonstrating that the elements are sequential or not at the same level, and policymakers' actions can be preceded first by the higher factors indicated. Finally, this research resulted in the development of an EVs adoption readiness evaluation model for low carbon island, Langkawi
Help-seeking behaviour in the context of mental health among healthcare workers
Get PDFMany studies have been conducted to understand the causes of mental health issues. However, understanding the causes of mental health problems per se would not be enough to address the issue. The organization might have taken various initiatives to reduce the mental health issues in the workplace, but if the employees themselves reluctant to seek professional helps, the issues cannot be addressed completely. Therefore, this study is conducted with the intention to capture factors that might influence help-seeking behaviour among healthcare workers. The study examines the
direct relationship between mental health literacy, self-stigma, perceived behavioural control and help-seeking behaviour. A total of 370 questionnaire were distributed online through google form format to respondents at General Hospital of Kuala Lumpur and Hospital Sultanah Nur Zahirah after permission was granted by the
hospital’s management. Out of 370 questionnaire distributed, only 232 questionnaire were returned and usable for further analysis, yielding a response rate of 62.7%. Hypotheses for direct effect were tested using multiple regression analyses. Results showed that
self-stigma was significantly positively related to help-seeking behavior. The findings indicate that self-stigma does influence a person whether to go and seek help or not when facing with mental health issues. The study also found that perceived behavioural control was significantly negatively related to help-seeking behaviour. The findings indicate that perceived behavioural control was not a major determinant of intention to engage in a health behaviour and/or as a determinant of actually engaging in the behaviour. It is depended on people's perceptions of how simple or
difficult a behaviour is going to be executed. Therefore, the management need to provide support in encouraging healthcare workers go and seek help. Potential limitations and directions for future research are also discussed
Kesan penyederhanaan kepemimpinan transformasional dan budaya masyarakat terhadap hubungan antara budaya organisasi dengan perubahan : Kajian institut pengajian tinggi swasta di Jakarta
Get PDFThe purpose of this study was to determine how much influence organizational culture (X1) has on organizational change (Y) with transformational leadership (X2) and community culture (X3) as moderating factors. Using a descriptive quantitative methodology with SmartPLS 3.0 data analysis, a population of 315 higher education institution leaders in Jakarta with a sample of 181 higher education institutions were selected. The research question wants to know whether there is a) the influence of organizational culture on organizational change, b) the influence of transformational leadership on organizational change, c) the influence of community culture on organizational change, d) the extent of the influence of transformational leadership moderation on the relationship of organizational culture and organizational change, and e) the extent to which the influence of community culture moderation on the relationship of organizational culture and organizational change. Based on the data description, respondents' answers to the questionnaire, reliability test, composite reliability, validity test, convergent validity, discriminant validity and analysis of the best PLS model, it was found that: 1) organizational culture variable has a positive and significant influence on organizational change by 7, 1%, relatively small, 2) transformational leadership variable has a positive and significant influence on organizational change of 88.89%, relatively hight, 3) community cultural variable has a positive and significant influence on organizational change of 5.3%, relatively small, 4) the moderation influence of transformational leadership does not moderate the relationship between organizational culture and organizational large, and 5) the moderation influence of community culture does not moderate the relationship between organizational culture and organizational change. Thus these two moderation variables do not strengthen or weaken. Both can independently have a direct influence on organizational change and do not require moderation to organizational culture for the purpose of organizational change. Finally, this study found empirically and scientifically that transformational leadership variables has the largest and strongest influence on organizational change of private higher education institutions in Jakarta. The suggestion to higher education institution leaders is to strengthen the formation of a dominant organizational culture by conducting real and low-cost activities such as outbound and joint sports. In a rapidly changing situation like today, a transformative leader is needed who is also able to anticipate the dynamic cultural changes of society