Testing inter-group ranking heterogeneity: do patient characteristics matter for prioritization of quality improvements in healthcare service?

In many research contexts, such as social science, marketing, education, psychology and medicine, it is frequently of interest to compare two or more groups of subjects (e.g. people of different gender, age or nationality), who are asked to rank a set of alternatives according to their personal liking or opinion, for investigating the presence of group effect. The common investigation aim is to detect customers with homogeneous preferences (or priorities) in order to serve each group as properly as possible. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature for testing ranking heterogeneity among groups of subjects. This paper focuses on an approach considering diversity as a generalization of the notion of variation and investigates the performance of a testing procedure for ranking heterogeneity based on the index of segregation power. The performance of the testing procedure has been investigated via a Monte Carlo simulation study under several scenarios, differing for group size, number of ranked alternatives and system of hypothesis. Furthermore, using a real data set, the testing procedure is exploited for investigating whether patient age and gender matter for patient prioritization of quality improvement in healthcare service.     

Evolution of the practices of human resource management in France towards a strategic model: rhetoric or reality?

This article analyses the evolution of the human resources management in France. The study attempts to understand the transformation of administrative practices of HRM towards strategic practices of HRM (SHRM) in the French context. It also shows the factors responsible for this change. The results of this study support the development in France of SHRM and the regression of administrative practices of HRM, although a third hybrid model of HRM seems to appear between both practices. This tendency towards SHRM is accentuated in large firms, quoted on the stock exchange, in services and finance sectors with international activities. This study confirms that the SHRM in France is reality rather than rhetoric.     

On the linearity of the wage–profit relation in a Sraffa’s model: a mathematical summing-up

This paper sums up in a common analytical structure the main results, scattered in economic literature, concerning the linearity between rate of profit and real wage in a simple Sraffa’s model. The paper is mainly based on previous results of one of the two authors and on results of Miyao (Int Econ Rev 18:151–162, 1977) and Schefold (Zeitschrift für angewandte Mathematik und Physik 27:873–875, 1976a; Zeitschrift für National?konomie 36:21–48, 1976b).     

Examining the relationship between strategic HRM and hospital employees’ work attitudes: an analysis across occupational groups in public and private hospitals

Abstract

As human resource challenges have increased, strategic human resource management (SHRM) in hospitals has evolved into an important management task. Accompanying its growing relevance, there is an evolving research stream on the impact of SHRM on organizational and individual-level outcomes in the hospital context. We aim to address two remaining research gaps by investigating variations in the use of SHRM across organizations (public vs. private ownership types) and differences in the relationship between SHRM and employee attitudes within organizations (for the occupational groups of nurses and physicians). This study is based on a sample of 179 German acute care hospitals. We employ ANOVA and logistic regression analyses, and our results corroborate previous research findings showing that SHRM has positive effects on employee attitudes. However, the effects vary in significance and magnitude, depending on whether nurses or physicians are targets. Further, we reveal significant SHRM differences in public- vs. private-sector organizations.     

The role of villages in households’ poverty exit: evidence from a multilevel model for rural Vietnam

Vietnam experienced a dramatic drop in overall poverty during the 90s. However, the poverty reduction showed substantial variation across households, villages and regions. Using a multilevel model on panel data from the rural sample of the Vietnam Living Standard Measurement Survey we demonstrate the important role of villages in household poverty exit dynamics. We also show how an analysis of village-level random effects predictions can help targeting of policies to reduce poverty.     

Under pressure: community water systems in the United States—a production model with water quality and organization type effects

This paper examines the interaction of productive efficiency, water quality and organizational type. A water quality index is constructed employing various contaminants which are then treated together with variables including organizational type as endogenous in an input distance function model. The cost of drinking water quality and inefficiency are derived and hypothesis tests estimated concerning their variation by location, organization type and water quality. The key findings are that more technically efficient water utilities deliver higher quality drinking water and that private firms distribute higher quality water at a higher price and at a higher implicit cost than public utilities despite no overall inefficiency differences between the two organizational types.     

Robust stochastic frontier analysis: a Student’s t-half normal model with application to highway maintenance costs in England

The presence of outliers in the data has implications for stochastic frontier analysis, and indeed any performance analysis methodology, because they may lead to imprecise parameter estimates and, crucially, lead to an exaggerated spread of efficiency predictions. In this paper we replace the normal distribution for the noise term in the standard stochastic frontier model with a Student’s t distribution, which generalises the normal distribution by adding a shape parameter governing the degree of kurtosis. This has the advantages of introducing flexibility in the heaviness of the tails, which can be determined by the data, as well as containing the normal distribution as a limiting case, and we outline how to test against the standard model. Monte Carlo simulation results for the maximum simulated likelihood estimator confirm that the model recovers appropriate frontier and distributional parameter estimates under various values of the true shape parameter. The simulation results also indicate the influence of a phenomenon we term ‘wrong kurtosis’ in the case of small samples, which is analogous to the issue of ‘wrong skewness’ previously identified in the literature. We apply a Student’s t-half normal cost frontier to data for highways authorities in England, and this formulation is found to be preferred by statistical testing to the comparator normal-half normal cost frontier model. The model yields a significantly narrower range of efficiency predictions, which are non-monotonic at the tails of the residual distribution.

     

The role of wasta in repatriates’ perceptions of a breach to the psychological contract: a Saudi Arabian case study

This study examines the influence of a national cultural dimension, specifically a strong orientation towards collectivism/reliance on network relationships, referred to as ‘wasta’, on the way in which psychological contracts form and change in a Saudi organisation. Specifically, it focuses upon how the psychological contract is perceived to have been breached by repatriates because of the role that wasta plays in shaping formal and informal HR practices pre- and post-assignment. The analysis demonstrates that prior to international assignment, wasta was taken for granted and only implicitly acknowledged as influencing selection criteria for assignments and individuals’ expectations and obligations associated with their psychological contract. Once repatriated, wasta was foregrounded and perceived as highly problematic in terms of career advancement. This shaped repatriates’ perceptions that their psychological contract had been breached, influencing their intentions to leave. These findings suggest that the psychological contract can be viewed as highly context-specific, as well as a person-centred phenomenon. We consider the implications of our research in terms of the influence of national cultural characteristics on individual’s perceptions of breaches to the psychological contract and highlight the possible implications generally for Saudi Arabia, which is aiming to be less reliant on foreign labour.     

Government secondary school finances in New South Wales: accounting for students’ prior achievements in a two-stage DEA at the school level

This study measures the efficiency of government secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia, using a two-stage semi-parametric production frontier approach to schooling. In contrast to previous research comparing school performance with two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA), we control for prior academic achievement of students by using a rich data set from 2008 to 2010. We employ detailed financial data for deriving the envelope for the efficient production frontier of the schools. Using Simar and Wilson’s (J Econ 136:31-64, 2007, J Prod Anal 36:205-218, 2011a) double bootstrap procedure for two-stage DEA, the study finds that schools with lower total student numbers, a higher average of years of service of teachers, a higher ratio of special education students that attracts extra government funding, and girls only do better than other schools. On the other hand, a negative influence comes from a school’s location in provincial and outer metropolitan areas. An important result is that the socio-economic background of students attending a school has no significant effect on their academic performance, whereas higher prior academic achievements have a positive and statistically significant impact on student achievement. These results are relevant to decision makers for the school sector, in particular for funding criteria contained in the Gonski (Review of funding for schooling - Final report (December). Canberra: Commonwealth Government of Australia, 2011) review report.     

Contractual networks: an organizational model to reduce the competitive disadvantage of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Europe’s less developed regions. A survey in southern Italy

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Limitations faced by southern Italy’s small enterprises due to their dimensions may be overcome by cooperation strategies and network...     

‘Change or hold: reexamining HRM to meet new challenges and demands’: the future of people at work: a reflection on diverging human resource management policies and practices in Dutch organizations

As a consequence of continual change pressures on everyday organizations, a gradual but noticeable shift is taking place in the way managers and employees view the employment relationship. Expectation patterns between both parties are starting to diverge into what seems to be new forms of managing people, based on different assumptions regarding their importance in the (knowledge based) economy. Traditional differences in employment expectations between superiors and their subordinates, between higher and lesser educated and between intrinsically and extrinsically motivated employees, are currently making place for differences between younger and older knowledge workers and for diversity and professionalism. In this article, HRM is contrasted against two emerging approaches towards the management of people, which are currently subsets of HRM, but gaining momentum as potential replacements for HRM. First, we identify ‘Transaction-based Management of People (TM)’ in which the employment relationship mirrors that of a financially driven exchange relationship, similar to transaction economics. We refer to the second approach as ‘Professional-based Management of People (PM)’ in which the nature of the employment relationship reflects the recognition of people in organizations as ‘true’ professionals who know best what constitutes superior business performance. These approaches have been empirically examined by means of a representative survey among Dutch directors and managers.