International Journal of Research in Business and Technology (TechMind Research)
Not a member yet
89 research outputs found
Sort by
Antecedent Conditions for Leveraging Intellectual Capital: A Contingency Perspective
Get PDFIn the new global economy, leveraging intellectual capital (IC), in a manner in which such competitive advantage would gained and sustained, has become a central issue. Drawing primarily on contingency theory, this paper aims to empirically explore the antecedent conditions necessary for an effective development of intellectual capital (IC). In this respect, some contextual factors, namely organizational culture, industry type, and firm size were investigated for their potential impact on IC. The paper reports the results of a study carried out in Iran through a questionnaire survey of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) in 128 companies within Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). Partial least squares (PLS) was employed for confirmatory factor analysis as well as hypothesis testing. The results of the survey reveal that organizational culture and size could provide some impacts on IC within Iranian public listed companies. While the influence of knowledge-related resources on measurable performances has been considerably examined in the IC literature, little is known concerning the antecedent conditions necessary to leverage IC more effectively. Hence, this paper extends the current IC literature and contributes to the field through scrutinizing the influence of a series of contextual factors on IC. From practical angle, addressing the antecedent conditions necessary for IC may highlight the importance of firm-specific variables and traits which must be taken into consideration by managers and organizations for a sustainable IC development. Such insight could support organizations to remedy the deficiency in managing and leveraging their knowledge-based assets as their most critical and strategic resources
Towards open data based business: Survey on usage of open data in digital services
Get PDFNow-a-days open data is in high demand worldwide due to the possibility of creating innovative digital services and applications around open data. This paper discusses the open data from the business perspective; about the status of information usage in companies and motivation, opportunities and obstacles that relate to the open data based business. We carried out 11 interviews with company representatives to receive up-to-date information directly from the industry and to study the status of the information usage in industry to estimate how far the current business is from the open data based business. It seems that open data enables new business opportunities for actors providing data and for actors consuming data but also requires a new kind of business ecosystem that enables a win-win situation for all the actors in the open data ecosystem. The interviewed companies were highly interested in utilising open data in their own business but were afraid of opening their own data. In addition, the open data is often understood to be data that the actors of a public sector provide to the actors of a private sector. Thus, though there is high interest in open data, a lot of work must still be done to enable open data based business. In the end of the paper there are assembled research topics to which the attention should be paid in the future
Cultural Environmental Influence on Employees’ Perception of Motivation in the Nigerian Polytechnic Education Sector
Get PDFMost HR practitioners today face issues such as low level of motivation resulting in low morale, which bears an impact on performance. Therefore, the Nigerian Polytechnic Education Sector has been considered to see the impact that work culture has on employees’ and managerial motivation and performance. Work culture is essential for maximising the value of human capital, and culture management should therefore become a critical management competence as this has become an important challenge for managers is to determine the most effective culture for their organisation. Therefore, one of the major challenges of corporate organisation and institutions is their adaptation to different socio-economic and cultural contexts of their various available markets, audience and employees. In the light of the above, this paper is poised to look at and address the issues of cultural diversity and their management in the Nigerian Polytechnic Education Sector (NPES) as it affects employees’ motivation and performance and overall organisational behaviour. Utilising a semi-structure interview and focus group discussion with 86 respondents purposively selected from 6 Polytechnics in south-west Nigeria, the study exposed the most dominant cultural factors in employees’ motivation and suggested ideas on how present days managers and practitioners in the NPES can maximise the usage of this socio cultural diversity in enhancing employees’ performance and organisational behaviour. Suggestions were equally made for further studies in this regards
The Relationships between Technological Support, Incentives, Knowledge Sharing and Product Innovation in the Iraqi Textile Industry
Get PDFThis study addresses the lack of evidence from previous studies on the relationships between technological support, incentives, and product innovation, and whether knowledge sharing has a mediating effect on these relationships particularly in the Iraqi textile industry. Based on the survey among 351 employees in the Iraqi textile industry, the present study empirically tested the hypotheses using structural equation modelling. The results show that technological support and incentives positively and significantly influence knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing was also found to be an important mediator between technological support and incentives with product innovation. The findings bear implications to the Iraqi government’s call for innovation in the Iraqi textile industry
Students’ Feedback on Teachers’ Classroom Delivery vis-a-vis Quality of Teaching and Internal Evaluation System
Get PDFIn normative sense, feedback of students improves teachers’ skills. In fact, qualified teachers won’t take in students’ comments as critical, but as useful propositions on how to better dole out their requirements. Using students as an avenue for professional development is a swift and unproblematic way to craft adjustments in teaching on daily basis. However, the pre-requisites for the realization of this sense of students’ feedback, i.e., professionalism in both the parties with high level of honesty in giving and taking, have been turned to be the points of concern leading to distortions in quality of teaching and evaluation system. Alternatively, negative interpretation of students’ feedback has been proved to be fatal in many cases diluting the very objective of the concept, i.e., quality teaching and due recognition to merit. On the backdrop of the negative interpretation of students’ feedback, this paper tries to uncover the brutal consequences that have been experienced or likely to be experienced in our periphery damaging the sanctity of higher education system, particularly in Programmes of Management Education in India.
 
Investigating Factors Influencing the Adoption and Use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Tanzanian Higher Learning Institutions: Towards an Individual-Technology-Organizational-Environmental (ITOE) Framework
Get PDFThis paper is located within the global debates about adoption and use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in developing countries. From the Tanzanian Higher learning Institutions (HLIs), this paper investigates factors influencing the adoption and use of the FOSS. The rationale for the investigation stems from the notion that Tanzanian HLIs is yet to fully adopt and use FOSS, despite huge investments and efforts being made on ground. This is facilitated by the lack of clear FOSS adoption and use framework. The source of this data was a questionnaire which comprised of structured questions, using a five-point Likert Scale. The population sample for the study was all HLIs stakeholders in Tanzania. Participants included both public and private HLIs. The positive factors includes autonomy for code modifications, IT staffs and decision makers, organization awareness, trustworthiness of FOSS, licensing and scalability, collaboration and knowledge sharing, collaboration on international ICT, organization policy and good social economic policy. The negative influences that emerged included, Lack of proper plan, low confidence, lack of expertise, unfit for purpose, difficult to implement, lack of supporting software. Furthermore, this paper motivates other researchers to analyze why the adoption and use of Free and Open source software is still low to higher learning Institutions in East Africa even though there potential benefits that have been advocated in many previous studies. Finally the paper has proposed Individual-Technological-Organizational- Environmental (ITOE) framework for adoption and use of FOSS. 
Authentic Leadership Structural Validity: Higher Education Staff Notion on Authentic Leadership
Get PDFContemporary leadership theory and practice describes authentic leadership (AL) in relation to self-awareness, relational transparency, internalized moral perspective, and balance processing of information (Walumbwa et al., 2008). A total of 580 academic, management and professional staffs were asked to rate the AL behaviours of their administrative heads using the rater version of authentic leadership questionnaire (Walumbwa et al., 2008). The present paper examines, if there are distinction among the measures of AL, if the latentvariables correlate with each other and then confirm the factor structure. Findings from Principal component Analysis (PCA) revealed the presence of three dimensions of AL -self-awareness, internalized moral perspective and relational transparency. The result also provides evidence that supports discriminant and convergent validity. We also present finding from the confirmatory factor analyses (CFA’s) which supports the adequacy of AL. The CFA’s Goodness of Fit Indices results reached acceptable level for some tested models. Based on the prior findings and the current findings we concluded that Walumbwa’s AL scales is an appropriate tool for assessing AL at a general level, though the extent of replication across population will be influenced by sampling characterization as espoused in this study
Logistic innovation management: an overview at the technology innovation management literature
Get PDFOwing to the combination of the strategic importance of logistics for the organization, it is necessary to identify who and what has been studied regarding the innovation management applied to logistic. To identify some of these fields, a systematic literature review among the top 10 technology innovation management journals was carried out. The results were presented according to the main characteristics of the studies, authors’ affiliations and the top 50 journals referenced by these studies. This study can be used as a reference for new concepts and studies combining management of innovation with the issue of logistics.
 
Towards a Dynamic Software Product Line: Analysis of the Background and State of the Art
Get PDFDynamic software adaptability is one of the central features leveraged by autonomic computing. However, developing software that changes its behavior at run time in response to dynamically varying user needs and resource constraints is a challenging task. With the emergence of mobile and service oriented computing, such variation is becoming increasingly common, and the need for adaptivity is increasing accordingly. Software product line engineering has proved itself as an efficient way to deal with varying user needs and resource constraints. In this paper, we present a study of different approaches for design and runtime adaptation that can be used in the context of Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs). We propose a classification and a comparison of existing work. Afterwards, we refine our proposal by concretizing the research goals that fulfill the gaps current approaches present
Roles and Practices in Accounting: Did Fair-Value Cause the Global Financial Crisis?
Get PDFThis paper debates how did fair-value accounting (FVA) that were deeply affected by the global financial crisis (GFC). The GFC that started in advanced economies spreading to emerging markets and low-income countries, which has been affected in the middle of 2007 and into 2009, as have various empirical studies which have examined the role of FVA in the GFC. In this paper, using the quantitative methodology where value-relevance of fair value estimates of assets and liabilities reported under FVA provided by FAS 157, in terms of a simple theoretical and empirical analysis literature framework. This empirical study proposed that this is not a normal cyclical crisis of capitalism but a global crisis, which requires a change in the management policy to be tackled with new regulatory frameworks for financial institutions in order to stimulate economic activities. In other words, FVA may have amplified the crisis. These findings could be fruitful and helpful for outside users of accounting reports and also for regulators and legislators in their attempts to constrain the incidence of earnings accounting practises and to enhance the quality of accounting information. Future research is needed to meet up-to-date information regarding the nature of capital markets and financial institutions. This requires a new theory of economics; for instance, a change from equilibrium theory to reflexivity theory which requires a change in the underlying model of the economic activity framework and valuation challenges that arise from the use of FVA in financial reporting