ROI planning and control

Defects in the application of the ROI method of planning and control have been disclosed by its originator, du Pont, and by a study of firms that adopted the method relatively late. None of the errors, the author observes, is inherent in the ROI method; the central error is the confusion of goals and processes. Both businessmen and theorists have treated the firm's objectives as ends in themselves. ROI systems or other systems have been installed, and targets and standards used bureaucratically. Targets and standards should be viewed as instruments for engendering healthy adaptive learning processes in organizations. The ROI system can provide information on every element of the balance sheet, income statement, and other comprehensive performance statements, serving as a vehicle for dynamic communication, feedback, and adjustment.     

Learning to perform? A comparison of learning practices and organizational performance in profit‐ and non‐profit‐making sectors in the UK

To date, much of the research on employee development activities and organizational performance has been conducted in private sector organizations, with the largely untested assumption that the same findings will apply to other sectors. This paper addresses the deficit by describing a study comparing differences in the use of employee learning practices between profit‐making and non‐profit‐making organizations, and examining the relationship between these learning practices and multiple dimensions of organizational performance. The study data was gathered through conducting structured telephone interviews with senior training and development managers in 368 UK organizations from a range of sectors. It was found that non‐profit‐making organizations had greater engagement in individual employee learning practices than profit‐making organizations, but no differences were found in terms of team learning practices or engagement in strategic needs analysis and evaluation activities. The analyses also indicated that individual learning practices showed a stronger relationship with performance in the non‐profit‐making organizations, whereas team learning practices were more significant for the profit‐making companies. The learning practices collectively accounted for greater variance in organizational performance in the non‐profit‐making organizations. The study implies that the functional aims of organizations need to be taken into account when examining the learning practice–organizational performance relationship.     

Digital innovation: An essence for Industry 4.0

The goal of this paper is to explain why digital innovation is so important in business organizations in order to survive in Industry 4.0. The study helps to understand the new era of Industry 4.0 and the importance of introducing digital innovation into organizations. A systematic review of the literature and studies on Industry 4.0 and digital innovation were synthesized to find answers to the research questions. To improve their manufacturing industry, organizations have implemented digital technologies such as augmented reality, robotic sensing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cyber physical systems, and remote sensing technologies. These technologies focused on automating logistics and supply chain systems, improving manufacturing system performance, and simplifying automated production systems. Because digital innovations save time and energy, employees can devote more time and energy to creative and innovative activities. Organizations should plan to implement digital technology in order to keep the environment healthy and sustainable while meeting the demands of customers, consumers, and the Industry 4.0 dimension.     

A Next Generation Multimedia Call Center for Internet Commerce: IMC

Human assistance, as well as automated service, is necessary for providing more convenient services to customers on the Internet-based commerce system. Call centers have been typically human-based service systems. However, the services of existing public switched telephone network-based call centers are not enough to meet the needs of customers on the Internet. Most of them have been designed without considering the interaction involved in shopping on the Internet. In our research, we design a call center named IMC (Internet-based multimedia call center) that can be integrated with an Internet shopping mall. It contains 2 parts: an Internet multimedia dialogue system and a human agent assisting system. The Internet multimedia dialogue system is an Internet and multimedia version of the interactive voice response service of computer telephony integration-based call centers because it provides access to the multimedia Web page along with the recorded voice explanation through the Internet. The human agent assisting system aims to select the most appropriate human agents in the call center and support them in providing high-quality individualized information for each customer. IMC is a real-time, human-embedded system that can provide high-quality services cost-effectively for Internet commerce.     

Social Entrepreneurship in Nonprofit Organizations: An Empirical Investigation of the Synergy Between Social and Business Objectives

Social entrepreneurship in nonprofit organizations has emerged as an increasingly important domain, both in academic research and in practice. This article attempts to further enhance our understanding of the management of nonprofit organizations by investigating the way they balance social and business objectives. Over 200 senior managers of nonprofit organizations participated in our structured telephone interview. The data revealed that many organizations worried about the potential for reduced or lost funding, especially during economic hard times. Issues of sustainability usually headed their list of concerns. Many of these organizations sought to establish revenue generating business streams to offset expected funding shortfalls. The data suggested that over 70% of the nonprofit organizations we interviewed resided in the social entrepreneurship zone. Our results also showed that maintaining a social objective and managing a viable business can be complementary and mutually beneficial activities.     

Getting results from your MRP system

The many installed MRP systems have not been universally successful. A study of companies using MRP reveals just how the system should be implemented to achieve its full potential.     

Strategic Leadership of Corporate Sustainability

Strategic leadership and corporate sustainability have recently come together in conspicuously explicit fashion through the emergence of top management team (TMT) positions with dedicated corporate sustainability responsibilities. These TMT positions, commonly referred to as “Chief Sustainability Officers,” have found their way into the upper echelons of many of the world’s largest corporations alongside more traditional TMT positions including the CEO and CFO. We explore this phenomenon and consider the following two questions: Why are corporate sustainability positions being installed to the TMT? What effects do corporate sustainability TMT positions have at their organizations? We consider these questions through strategic leadership and neoinstitutional theoretical frameworks. Through the latter, we also engage with Weberian considerations of bureaucracy. We find that the reasons why corporate sustainability TMT positions are installed can be in response to a crisis at the corporation for which its legitimacy is challenged. We also find the corporate sustainability TMT position can be installed proactively in an effort to realize external opportunities that may have otherwise gone unrealized without concerted attention and coordination afforded by a strategic level position. Regarding effects, we determine the position can relate to the establishment of bureaucratic structures dedicated to corporate sustainability within the corporation through which formalized processes and key performance indicators to drive corporate sustainability performances are established. In the face of our finding that many corporate sustainability TMT positions are being removed despite having only relatively recently been introduced to their respective TMTs, we find that the successful implementation of bureaucratic machinery can help considerations to sustainability extend beyond the tenure of a corporate sustainability position within the TMT.     

Adaptive selling in a call center environment: A qualitative investigation

Technological changes and innovations have created the means by which organizations can centralize the selling function into a call-center environment. While there are numerous benefits to this centralization, the fact that potential customers are drawn to a call center via telephone or Web-based communication media from a wide geographic area heightens the need for sales representatives to perform adaptive-selling behaviors. In this study we found evidence to confirm this belief, suggesting that a premium is placed on sales representatives who can accurately assess each situation using limited information (e.g., through tone of voice) and then to correctly adapt their behavior to fit the situation. The results also offer implications for Web-based call centers that link sales representatives with potential customers through text-based communication.     

Artificial Intelligence and Marketing: Pitfalls and Opportunities

This article discusses the pitfalls and opportunities of AI in marketing through the lenses of knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. First, we discuss the notion of “higher-order learning” that distinguishes AI applications from traditional modeling approaches, and while focusing on recent advances in deep neural networks, we cover its underlying methodologies (multilayer perceptron, convolutional, and recurrent neural networks) and learning paradigms (supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning). Second, we discuss the technological pitfalls and dangers marketing managers need to be aware of when implementing AI in their organizations, including the concepts of badly defined objective functions, unsafe or unrealistic learning environments, biased AI, explainable AI, and controllable AI. Third, AI will have a deep impact on predictive tasks that can be automated and require little explainability, we predict that AI will fall short of its promises in many marketing domains if we do not solve the challenges of tacit knowledge transfer between AI models and marketing organizations.     

Consumer Perceptions of Privacy and Security Risks for Online Shopping

Government and industry organizations have declared information privacy and security to be major obstacles in the development of consumer‐related e‐commerce. Risk perceptions regarding Internet privacy and security have been identified as issues for both new and experienced users of Internet technology. This paper explores risk perceptions among consumers of varying levels of Internet experience and how these perceptions relate to online shopping activity. Findings provide evidence of hypothesized relationships among consumers’ levels of Internet experience, the use of alternate remote purchasing methods (such as telephone and mail‐order shopping), the perceived risks of online shopping, and online purchasing activity. Implications for online commerce and consumer welfare are discussed.     

Interactivity in Web Sites of Medical Support Organizations in Finland

Abstract

Traditionally, the activities of medical support organizations are largely based on face-to-face meetings and events as well as telephone services. The Internet has brought new possibilities for communicating both with members and between members. This study analyzes the web pages of seventeen support organizations and examines the views of the communicators of the organizations on the philosophy of constructing web sites. The web pages provide a wealth of information as well as many kinds of interactive services. There are two levels of interaction, one quasi-interactive and the other truly interactive. The communicators emphasize collaboration in the construction of web sites. They are aware of segmentation in their members (e.g., young and old) and of the challenges in using computer-based means of communication.     

Corporate Relations with Environmental Organizations Represented by Hyperlinks on the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Fortune</Emphasis> Global 500 Companies’ Websites

This study investigates corporate relationships with environmental organizations by examining hyperlinks in the corporate environmental responsibility (CER) sections of the Fortune 2008 Global 500 corporate websites. It is assumed that hyperlinked organizations either represent their current inter-organizational relationship or create symbolic relationships among organizations. Results show that Asian companies have fewer hyperlink relations with other organizations compared with those in North America and Western Europe. Network analysis also confirms that U.S. companies are explicitly connected with stakeholders for CER practices, and governmental organizations have a relatively central role in the global CER system. Nonprofit organizations are the most frequently hyperlinked with Fortune Global 500 corporations.     

HRM Role in EEO: Sheep in Shepherd’s Clothing?

Despite a plethora of laws prohibiting discrimination in employment, supporting and enforcing equal employment opportunity (EEO) principles has proven to be an enormous challenge for those charged with this responsibility. The question often asked is who should exercise this role in organizations. Not surprisingly, there has been a call for HRM to become the guardian of EEO in organizations but should human resource managers be male or female, and/or would line managers be better positioned to assume this responsibility? This paper overviews the literature and then summarizes an empirical study that attempted to address the possible impact of these options as they exist in organizations. One hundred and eighty respondents who met the criterion of having interviewed one or more job applicants in the previous 6 months were systematically selected from business telephone listings. Based on self-reported behaviors, no significant difference was found between the expected and actual distributions of HR and line managers in respect to whether decisions were made on unlawful grounds. The percentage of each respondent category that asked unlawful questions varied from 1% to 36% depending upon the attribute (unlawful ground of discrimination) under consideration. This begs the question as to what value HR managers contribute to EEO in the selection process. The second finding was that significantly less female managers admit to making decisions on the basis of unlawful questions than male managers. Thus, support was found for female line managers as guardians of EEO but no clear justification for HRM in this role.     

基于即有供应链物流系统的应急合作分析

由于大规模自然灾害的频发,给以应急物流为基础的救援活动带来了巨大困难。如何提高救援的效率和覆盖范围成为应急物流研究的重要内容。随着救援组织内涵的扩大,在救援组织之间及救援组织与商业组织之间形成合作关系,以提高救援效率及最大限度地降低由自然灾害带来的损失,便成为应急物流研究的一个新视角。     

Interpersonal Influence Goals and Computer-Mediated Communication

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems have become ubiquitous in organizations worldwide. However, much remains to be learned about actual use of these systems and of how the CMC channel might affect a variety of factors important to communication. Interpersonal influence goals are one set of factors that have been reported in the general communication literature to be important predictors of the content and characteristics of messages. Our study applied an influence goals model to study how system features are used in CMC. We found the model to be robust within the CMC context and that several goal types within the model are significant determinants of CMC system feature usage.     

Disparate satisfaction scores? Consider your customer’s country-of-origin: a case study

Although post-transaction surveys (i.e. trailer calls) allow service organizations to better understand their customers, these surveys inherently assume that all customers have the same service expectations of the organization’s service quality. This research reveals that telecommunications customers from different countries of origin have different service expectations; thus, post-transaction surveys based on this assumption can be flawed. We conduct in-depth interviews with recent immigrants in Israel, as well as local customers, to evaluate their expectations of their remote (i.e. telephone) service recovery encounters. Interviews included customers from each of the three primary regions from which they originated: Israel (home), former Soviet Union, and Ethiopia. The data show that the organization’s customers have vastly different expectations of how the firm should handle a called-in service failure, which influenced their post-transaction survey scores. Organizations must realize that their customers have varying service expectations due to cultural influences, which in turn affect their post-transaction survey scores.     

Organizational Politics:Tactics, Channels, andHierarchical Roles

This research examines the relationships among the types of self-serving political messages sent in organizations, the channels through which they are sent, and the targets to whom they are sent. Two theoretical streams converge in this study: Communication as Political Behavior and Media Usage Theory. A review and synthesis of these two bodies of literature yielded three hypotheses, each of which received strong statistical support. The data suggest that the process of encoding and transmitting self-serving messages is strongly related to the specific target to whom they are sent (boss, subordinate, or peer) and the channel through which they are sent (face-to-face, telephone, memo, or e-mail).     

The Assessment of Information Technology Maturity in Emergency Response Organizations

In emergency response organizations, information technologies are not adequately explored. Sometimes, the mere adoption of new information technologies is not productive, as their efficient use depends on other interrelated technologies and the environment where they are installed. This work describes a model to help organizations understand their capability in respect to the adoption of these technologies. The model also helps the performing of the evaluation from different perspectives, making it suitable to collaborative evaluation. Using the proposed model, an organization can measure its maturity level in different aspects of the evaluation and guide the investment on its capabilities. Part of the model has been developed for emergency response organizations and the information technology dimension of the model has been applied to two fire department installations.     

A comparison of business ethics commitment in private and public sector organizations in Sweden

This paper reports the results of a study of the top 500 private sector organizations and the top 100 public sector organizations in Sweden. It is a replication of the study by Svensson et al. (2004) . The aim of the study was to describe and compare the business ethics commitment of organizations across the two sectors. The empirical findings indicate that the processes involved in business ethics commitment have begun to be recognized and acted upon at an organizational level in Sweden. Some support is provided to show that codes of ethics are developing in some of Sweden's largest private and public sector organizations – although this is happening to a lesser extent in the public sector. It is noted that an effect of a code of ethics on the bottom line of the business was acknowledged by respondents in both private and public sector organizations. We believe that the supporting measures of business ethics commitment appear to be underutilized in both private and public sector organizations in Sweden (among those that possess codes of ethics), thus indicating that the commitment to business ethics in Swedish organizations has potential for future development.     

中外农村合作金融组织比较研究

建国以来,我国农村金融组织经历了曲折复杂的发展过程,目前仍在深化改革之中。与发达国家、特别是与德国相比,我国农村金融组织无论是在发展模式、组织体系、监管框架、兼业状况、制度建设以及政府扶持政策等方面,都应该全面加以调整。尤其要强化合作金融的法制化和规范化建设;要通过强化制度建设保证对农村金融组织的政策扶持;金融组织自身要立足三农、明晰产权关系、完善治理结构,因地制宜、发展多样性的合作金融模式,构建自下而上、自成体系的合作金融组织体系;要完善监管体系和建立行业自律协会组织,从而促进农村经济的发展。