From design to operations: a process management life-cycle performance measurement system for Public-Private Partnerships

Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) have become a critical vehicle for delivering infrastructure worldwide. Yet, the use of such a procurement strategy has received considerable criticism, as they have been prone to experiencing time/cost overruns and during their operation poorly managed. A key issue contributing to the poor performance of PPPs is the paucity of an effective and comprehensive performance measurement system. There has been a tendency for the performance of PPPs to be measured based on their ex-post criteria of time, cost and quality. Such criteria do not accommodate the complexities and lifecycle of an asset. In addressing this problem, the methodology of sequential triangulation is used to develop and examine the effectiveness of a ‘Process Management Life Cycle Performance Measurement System’. The research provides public authorities and private-sector entities embarking on PPPs with a robust mechanism to effectively measure, control and manage their projects’ life cycle performances, ensuring the assets are ‘future proofed’.     

Examining Facilitative Configurations of Entrepreneurially Oriented Growth: An Information Processing Perspective

This study examines how the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and firm growth is shaped by learning orientation in technologically sophisticated environments. We draw upon an information processing perspective that emphasizes alignment between information processing demands and support mechanisms. Using data from 116 small to medium‐sized enterprises in the Netherlands, we observe that the ability of entrepreneurial orientation to drive firm growth greatly depends on the joint consideration of technological sophistication and learning orientation. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of how configurations of strategic orientations and environmental considerations work in concert to influence the efficacy of organizational entrepreneurial efforts dramatically.     

Constructing Trustworthy Historical Narratives: Criteria,Principles and Techniques

Organizational scholars increasingly recognize the value of employing historical research. Yet the fields of history and organization studies struggle to reconcile. In this paper, the authors contend that a closer connection between these two fields is possible if organizational historians bring their role in the construction of historical narratives to the fore and open up their research decisions for discussion. They provide guidelines to support this endeavor, drawing on four criteria that are prevalent within interpretive organization studies for developing the trustworthiness of research: credibility; confirmability; dependability; and transferability. In contrast to the traditional use of trustworthiness criteria to evaluate the quality of research, the authors advance the criteria to encourage historians to generate more transparent narratives. Such transparency allows others to comprehend and comment on the construction of narratives, thereby building trust and understanding. Each criterion is converted into a set of guiding principles to enhance the trustworthiness of historical research, pairing each principle with a practical technique gleaned from a range of disciplines within the social sciences to provide practical guidance.     

How leader role identity influences the process of leader emergence: A social network analysis

Contemporary theories on leadership development emphasize the importance of having a leader identity in building leadership skills and functioning effectively as leaders. We build on this approach by unpacking the role leader identity plays in the leader emergence process. Taking the perspective that leadership is a dynamic social process between group members, we propose a social network-based process model whereby leader role identity predicts network centrality (i.e., betweenness and indegree), which then contributes to leader emergence. We test our model using a sample of 88 cadets participating in a leadership development training course. In support of our model, cadets who possess a stronger leader role identity at the beginning of the course were more likely to emerge as leaders. However this relationship was only mediated by one form of network centrality, indegree centrality, reflecting one's ability to build relationships within one's group. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Benevolence-dominant,authoritarianism-dominant,and classical paternalistic leadership: Testing their relationships with subordinate performance

We propose a new typology of paternalistic leadership styles based on how leaders demonstrate authoritarianism and benevolence, the two essential components of this type of leadership. Benevolence-dominant paternalistic leadership refers to leaders' sole dependence on the use of benevolence without their strong assertion of authority, whereas authoritarianism-dominant paternalistic leadership is based mainly on authoritarianism itself; classical paternalistic leadership, which best fits early observations of paternalistic leaders, refers to the salient combination of both leadership components. We used two distinct samples and methods to test this typology and the association with subordinate performance. Across the two studies, a field investigation with Taiwanese military supervisor-subordinate dyads and a hypothetical scenario experiment with U.S. working adults, we found a positive relationship between classical paternalistic leadership and subordinate performance as strong as that between benevolence-dominant paternalistic leadership and performance. Our findings echo the phenomenon that paternalistic leaders tend to combine benevolence with authoritarianism to affect subordinate performance.     

A feasibility approach for constructing combinatorial designs of circulant type

In this work, we propose an optimization approach for constructing various classes of circulant combinatorial designs that can be defined in terms of autocorrelation. The problem is formulated as a so-called feasibility problem having three sets, to which the Douglas–Rachford projection algorithm is applied. The approach is illustrated on three different classes of circulant combinatorial designs: circulant weighing matrices, D-optimal matrices of circulant type, and Hadamard matrices with two circulant cores. Furthermore, we explicitly construct two new circulant weighing matrices, a CW(126, 64) and a CW(198, 100), whose existence was previously marked as unresolved in the most recent version of Strassler’s table.     

Contract design and insurance fraud: an experimental investigation

This paper experimentally examines the impact of contract design on insurance fraud. We test how fraud behavior varies for insurance contracts with full coverage, a straight deductible or claim-dependent premiums (bonus-malus contracts), in a setup where rational and selfish individuals have an incentive to always claim the maximum possible indemnity. We find a substantial impact of contractual arrangements: Deductible contracts lead to a greater extent to claim build-up than full coverage contracts. In contrast, bonus-malus contracts that entail the same net gains from fraud as deductible contracts do not increase claim build-up. Thus, our results indicate that bonus-malus contracts may be superior to deductible contracts for behavioral reasons.     

Enabling a Powerful Marine and Offshore Decision-Support Solution Through Bayesian Network Technique

A powerful practical solution is by far the most desired output when making decisions under the realm of uncertainty on any safety-critical marine or offshore units and their systems. With data and information typically being obtained incrementally, adopting Bayesian network (BN) is shown to realistically deal with the random uncertainties while at the same time making risk assessments easier to build and to check. A well-matched methodology is proposed to formalize the reasoning in which the focal mechanism of inference processing relies on the sound Bayes's rule/theorem that permits the logic. Expanding one or more influencing nodal parameters with decision and utility node(s) also yields an influence diagram (ID). BN and ID feasibility is shown in a marine evacuation scenario and that of authorized vessels to floating, production, storage, and offloading collision, developed via a commercial computer tool. Sensitivity analysis and validation of the produced results are also presented.     

Toward Improving Food Safety in the Domestic Environment: A Multi-Item Rasch Scale for the Measurement of the Safety Efficacy of Domestic Food-Handling Practices

To reduce consumer health risks from foodborne diseases that result from improper domestic food handling, consumers need to know how to safely handle food. To realize improvements in public health, it is necessary to develop interventions that match the needs of individual consumers. Successful intervention strategies are therefore contingent on identifying not only the practices that are important for consumer protection, but also barriers that prevent consumers from responding to these interventions. A measure of food safety behavior is needed to assess the effectiveness of different intervention strategies across different groups of consumers. A nationally representative survey was conducted in the Netherlands to determine which practices are likely conducted by which consumers. Participants reported their behaviors with respect to 55 different food-handling practices. The Rasch modeling technique was used to determine a general measure for the likelihood of an average consumer performing each food-handling behavior. Simultaneously, an average performance measure was estimated for each consumer. These two measures can be combined to predict the likelihood that an individual consumer engages in a specific food-handling behavior. A single "food safety" dimension was shown to underlie all items. Some potentially safe practices (e.g., use of meat thermometers) were reported as very difficult, while other safe practices were conducted by respondents more frequently (e.g., washing of fresh fruit and vegetables). A cluster analysis was applied to the resulting data set, and five segments of consumers were identified. Different behaviors may have different effects on microbial growth in food, and thus have different consequences for human health. Once the microbial relevance of the different consumer behaviors has been confirmed by experiments and modeling, the scale developed in the research reported here can be used to develop risk communication targeted to the needs of different consumer groups, as well as to measure the efficacy of different interventions.