1,720,954 research outputs found
Environmental Factors, Employee-Resourcing Strategies And Performance Of Small Restaurant Businesses In South Africa: A Structural Equation Modelling Approach
Full text linkSmall restaurant business sector is applauded for promoting economic growth and employment creation in developing economies. Despite the spirited efforts by developing nations to capacitate the sector to sustainably contribute to economic growth, it is often marred by a disturbing high failure rate, especially in South Africa. The failure rates have been attributed, among many other factors, to the inability of the small restaurant businesses to respond to the environmental uncertainty for increased performance. In addition, small restaurant businesses in developing economies have been found to share common characteristics with small businesses in other sectors, in terms of using ad hoc approaches to employee – resourcing. Yet, the adoption of proper employee-resourcing strategies such as doing workforce planning, formalising recruitment and staff retention are regarded as best human resource practices for optimum business performance. In addition, the contribution of environmental factors such as manager‘s expertise and experience, economic growth, and political stability in leveraging the adoption of effective employee-resourcing strategies and heightening business performance has been reported. There is however a dearth of research that explores the interplay of environmental influences, employee-resourcing strategies and performance of small businesses in a developing context. There is also a paucity of literature that explores whether a convivial relationship exists among environmental factors, employee-resourcing strategies and business performance among in South Africa. Furthermore, empirical evidence on the influence of employee-resourcing strategies on small business performance in the hospitality industry among emerging economies is disappointingly low.
It is against this background that this research used the Resource Based View (RBV), the Human Capital Theory, the Flexible Firm Model, Contingency theory and reviewed literature to gain an understanding on whether the internal and external environmental factors inform the adoption of employee-resourcing strategies, culminating in increased business performance. Using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), the research proposes that the pathway to improved business performance demands small restaurant business owner-managers to adopt systemic and holistic approaches to employee-resourcing strategies that are attuned to the internal and external environmental factors to guarantee increased business performance.
The research was informed by the positivist paradigm and a quantitative research approach was adopted to test the proposed conceptual model. A structured questionnaire was administered to 221 owners/managers of small restaurant businesses in Free State Province, South Africa. Convenience sampling was employed to select the respondents. SEM was used to empirically test the hypothesised relationships in the conceptual model. The results showed that the structural model fitted the data satisfactorily and provided reasonable explanations on the nature of relationships among internal and external environmental factors, employee-resourcing strategies and small business performance in South African restaurants. The results established a positive and significant effect of the internal environmental factors on employee-resourcing strategies. Furthermore, the results also revealed a positive and significant effect of the external environment on employee-resourcing strategies. However, contrary to predictions, there were no relationships between internal and external environmental factors, employee-resourcing strategies and small restaurant performanc
Environmental Influences, Employee Resourcing Strategies and Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Performance: Case of South African Small Restaurants
Full text linkPublished ArticleOrientation: Small businesses’ contribution to economic growth and employment creation
cannot be disputed in South Africa, amid operating in an environment that is highly competitive
and reports of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) high failure rates, in general. In view
of this, and to our knowledge, no known theoretical study has been conducted in South Africa
examining how certain environmental factors might influence the use of appropriate resourcing
strategies for improved small businesses’ performance.
Research purpose: This theoretical article investigates the relationships between environmental
influences, employee resourcing strategies and business performance among South African
small restaurants.
Motivation for the study: There is a paucity of literature that has explored whether a
relationship exists between the three variables among small restaurant businesses in South
Africa, justifying the need for such an investigation.
Research approach/design and method: This article, which is conceptual in nature, adopted a
systematic literature review which entails combining all existing research literature related to
the three variables so as to arrive at logical inferences.
Main findings: The research contends that a relationship exists between the three variables.
Practical/managerial implications: Small businesses need to be aware of the environmental
influences that may contribute to business failure so that they attune employee resourcing
strategies to the environment to achieve high performance.
Contribution/value add: The article contributes to extant literature on the interplay between
environmental factors, resourcing strategies and firm performance in small restaurant
businesses of emerging economies
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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