The governance self‐assessment checklist: An instrument for assessing board effectiveness

This article describes the development and validation of the Governance Self‐Assessment Checklist (GSAC). The GSAC was designed to assist boards of directors of nonprofit and public sector organizations to identify strengths and weaknesses in the governance of their organizations, educate board members about the essentials of good governance, and improve their governance practices. The instrument comprises 144 items organized into twelve subscales. The results of the study indicated that the subscales have excellent internal consistency reliability, exhibit good criterion‐related validity, and are able to discriminate between stronger and weaker aspects of board functioning. The relative strengths and weaknesses in board effectiveness were identified, and the implications of the findings for the assessment of board effectiveness and field applications of the GSAC were discussed.     

Note on inventory models with Weibull distribution deterioration

This article explores the inventory model with a general demand rate function in which both the Weibull distributed deterioration and partial backlogging are considered. The inventory model discussed here is based on the important finding by Wu [Wu, K.S., 2001. An EOQ inventory model for items with Weibull distribution deterioration, ramp type demand rate and partial backlogging. Production Planning and Control, 12, 787–793]. There are four parts in our research. First, we derive the analytical framework of the inventory model for a general demand rate function1 1.?Based on detailed suggestions of Professor Wafik H. Iskander, Email: whiskander@mail.wvu.edu . Second, for the ramp type demand, we improve Wu's model to find the criterion to guarantee the existence and uniqueness of the optimal solution. Third, we develop a new model to compensate for the missing case in Wu's article. Fourth, we combine our results to show that our findings are applicable to the ramp type demand inventory model, so that the optimal solution is independent of the demand function. Finally, some numerical examples and graphs are provided to illustrate our discovery and demonstrate the application of our analytical framework.     

Measuring and analysing supply chain schedule stability: A case study in the automotive industry

Final assembly plants send material schedules to first-tier suppliers who in turn send schedules to second-tier suppliers and so on through the multiple tiers of the supply chain. A key cost driver for the supply chain is a schedule characteristic termed stability. The Total Quality Management approach is applied to improve schedule stability in the supply chain of a large vertically integrated automotive manufacturer. A measurement described, actual stability results are provided, the causes of instability are listed, and some corrective actions are specified. Results indicate that schedule stability can be improved without damaging the performance of other measures such as inventory and customer responsiveness. and analysis process is     

Behavioural criteria of managerial and leadership effectiveness within Egyptian and British public sector hospitals: an empirical case study and multi-case/cross-nation comparative analysis

This paper reports the results of a study of managerial and leadership effectiveness carried out within an Egyptian public sector hospital in which concrete examples of ‘effective’ and ‘least effective/ineffective’ manager and managerial leader behaviour, as observed by superiors, peers and subordinates, were collected using the critical incident technique. These critical incidents were then content analyzed to identify a smaller number of discrete behavioural statements and criteria of effectiveness. The paper also reports the results of a subsequent comparative analysis of these Egyptian findings against equivalent behavioural criteria that emerged from studies in two different British NHS Trust hospitals. This latter multi-case/cross-nation study revealed high degrees of overlap, commonality, and relative generalization across all three organizations. The results lend strong empirical support to those who believe in ‘generic’ and ‘universalistic’ explanations of the nature of managerial and leadership effectiveness.     

Going global: professional mobility and concerns for LGBT workers

The world of work has regularized the practice of people moving from one country to another to accept job assignments. Travel and relocation are stress-laden endeavours. For LGBT people, the risks can be more complicated than they are for heterosexuals. This article explores particular challenges that LGBT people face when they travel and relocate for business, both domestically and internationally. The article is contextualized with a literature review on sexual minorities and workplace issues, and uses auto-ethnographic stories of three of the authors’ lived experiences as sexual minorities relocating for professional reasons in order to examine issues related to LGBT relocation. These issues include legal, social, cultural and familial considerations. Implications and suggestions for human resource developers are presented, which include acquiring awareness around the psychological and physiological reactions to new and diverse ecologies, or ‘eco-shocks’.     

The impact of international experience on cultural intelligence: an application of contact theory in a structured short-term programme

The objective of this study is to examine the impact of a short-term international experience, which is designed to address the conditions outlined in Allport’s (Allport, G.W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Perseus Book Group) contact hypothesis, on each of the four factors which make up cultural intelligence (CQ). A sample of 135 university students was broken up into test and control groups. The results for the test group suggest that the short-term experience ranging from 7 to 12 days within a structured study abroad service programme, including modest pre-trip preparation, found a significant increase in each of the four factors of CQ. At the same time, there was no significant change in the control group. Implications for human research development research and practice as well as limitations and suggested areas for future research are discussed.     

Situational leadership theory: A test of three versions

Three versions of the leadership dynamics derived from Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership Theory were identified: (1) the original, 1972, statement of the theory; (2) the revised, 2007, theory; and (3) an alternative statement of the theory's essential principle of differential follower response to “autonomy afforded by the leader” in conjunction with “follower developmental level” (as indexed by employee job experience). Survey data collected from 357 banking employees and 80 supervisors, sampled from 10 Norwegian financial institutions, were analyzed for predicted interactions. Results indicated that the 2007 revised theory was a poorer predictor of subordinate performance and attitudes than the original version. The third, alternative, version (which predicted an autonomy × job experience interaction) offered promise for further exploration of the theory's essential principle that employee outcomes are associated with prescribed leader behaviors in combination with follower developmental level, although this version also did not add substantially to accounting for criterion variance.     

Electronic Data Interchange: Research Review and Future Directions*

For nearly two decades, electronic data interchange (EDI) has been widely viewed as a technology pivotal to supply chain management that has also provided benefits to firms on multiple levels. Despite a substantial body of literature, there are a number of conflicting and inconclusive research results in this field. In this study, we synthesize the diverse body of research in EDI by organizing the literature into an initial theoretical framework. Based on a meta‐analysis of results from the empirical literature, we seek to clarify conflicting results from the literature in order to develop a more unified theoretical framework of contextual variables associated with EDI adoption factors and outcomes. From a managerial standpoint, our literature‐based framework offers a set of guidelines for making successful EDI adoption and implementation decisions.     

Information Independence and Common Knowledge

In Bayesian environments with private information, as described by the types of Harsanyi, how can types of agents be (statistically) disassociated from each other and how are such disassociations reflected in the agents' knowledge structure? Conditions studied are (i) subjective independence (the opponents' types are independent conditional on one's own) and (ii) type disassociation under common knowledge (the agents' types are independent, conditional on some common‐knowledge variable). Subjective independence is motivated by its implications in Bayesian games and in studies of equilibrium concepts. We find that a variable that disassociates types is more informative than any common‐knowledge variable. With three or more agents, conditions (i) and (ii) are equivalent. They also imply that any variable which is common knowledge to two agents is common knowledge to all, and imply the existence of a unique common‐knowledge variable that disassociates types, which is the one defined by Aumann.