1,720,954 research outputs found
In search of high-performance workplace factors among SMEs
Full text linkPurpose. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are essential contributors to employment creation and global economic growth. For long-term survival in the market, SMEs need the capabilities to organise their resources in a way that leads to high performance and competitive advantage. Based on the conceptual framework of entrepreneurial orientation and the resourcebased view of the firm, performance-influencing organisational factors among SMEs providing manufacturing services are analysed.
Methodology. In this study, the financial performance of 47 SMEs was analysed, and a survey of 499 employees was conducted. Financial performance was evaluated by ROA and ROS, and productivity was measured by turnover and net profit per employee to identify high-performance SMEs. Competitive aggressiveness was measured by changes in the market share to verify whether the high-performance group of SMEs corresponds to the entrepreneurial orientation construct. A questionnaire with a six-point Likert scale and the Mann–Whitney U test were used to test the hypotheses.
Findings. The managerial capabilities to create strong workplace performance exist where: (a) management has a respectful attitude toward employees, (b) management supports the development of employees’ professional skills, (c) employees are provided with everything they need to achieve high job results, (d) employees want to work for the company in the long term, (e) remuneration to employees is fully in line with their level of professional skills, (f) co-workers perform their work effectively, (g) employees work shorter job shifts. These elements constitute the knowledge-based resources of high-performance SMEs, giving them, at a minimum, a temporary competitive advantage.
Value. The findings of this article contribute to the literature on entrepreneurial orientation, supplementing the construct of organisational factors with the characteristics of managerial capabilities leading to high performance and competitive advantage
An analysis of factors affecting the performance of supplier SMEs
Full text linkPurpose. While the performance of each company is still an important factor in gaining a competitive advantage, in an open economy, the performance of an entire supply chain becomes a crucial factor in the competitiveness of many interconnected companies. In this study, factors that might influence the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that provide production services for the contracting company are analysed. Methodology. In this study, the performance data of harvesting (n=46), timber transportation (n=23), and chipping (n=3) service suppliers in the supply chain of JSC Latvia’s State Forests (LVM) are analysed. Based on the supplier’s performance data, a group of experts, including two executive directors and five process managers, defined the problems and their root causes. The Ishikawa diagram and 5Why method were used. The root causes were redefined as hypotheses and regrouped into three groups: 1) workforce factors; 2) managerial factors; 3) contract-term factors. Hypotheses were verified by conducting a survey of suppliers’ employees (n=594) and executives (n=59). Findings. It was found that employees’ dissatisfaction with shift work and salaries which do not correspond to work responsibilities, along with suppliers’ disregard of the evaluation of employees’ skills, complicated work requirements, the lack of training for employees, and the direct manager’s insufficient knowledge about the skills needed for employees are the factors that significantly influence voluntary labour turnover and might lead to the leakage of skilled employees from suppliers, causing a performance decline. Meanwhile, there is no significant difference between high and low-performing supplier groups in terms of managerial knowledge, while a limited contract duration does not undermine low-performance suppliers’ efforts to improve performance. Value. In this study, factors that might cause performance problems for supplier SMEs are analysed. In the existing literature, it has been found that voluntary labour turnover might negatively influence the performance of a company (McElroy and Morrow, 2001; Brown et al., 2009; Eady and Nicholls, 2011). This study attempted to assess factors causing voluntary labour turnover among other factors. The main contribution of this study is to the literature regarding voluntary labour turnover, supplementing the factors that might cause it.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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