Team Climate,Team Cognition,Team Intuition,and Software Quality: The Moderating Role of Project Complexity

Teams represent a prevailing approach to getting work done in today’s hypercompetitive business environment. Although there is a widely held assumption that team-related capabilities determine the success of new product development projects, empirical research on team capabilities is scant. Based on the resource-based view of the firm, organizational learning theory, and situated learning theory, this study investigates the interrelationships among team climate, two information-processing capabilities (i.e., team cognition and team intuition), and software quality. As well, this study explores the moderating effect of project complexity between the information-processing capabilities and the quality of the software. In studying the data from 139 software development projects using the partial least squares structural equation modeling methods, we found that team climate has a direct influence on team cognition. Moreover, the findings showed that team cognition was positively related to the quality of the software product in general; in particular, this relationship was found to be far more significant when project complexity was used as a moderator. This finding indicates that the software development team’s ability to process information logically in order to interpret situations effectively allows the team to launch superior software products when unexpected and undesirable events make a project complicated and challenging to perform. In particular, managers should encourage teams to benefit from new ideas and make collective efforts for reaching goals. Managers should also enable teams to specialize in their tasks and improve their collective information-processing capabilities.     

Consumers' awareness,acceptance and attitudes towards functional foods in Turkey

The aim of the present study was to investigate consumers' awareness, acceptance and attitudes towards functional foods in Turkey. Eight hundred and eight people participated in this study: aged between 20 and 80 years, 38.5% were male and 61.5% were female. Participants were given a questionnaire and were asked to fill it in by themselves to minimize the influence of the interviewer. Results indicated that socio‐demographic characteristics such as age, education level and income level are important indicators of consumers' awareness and consumption of functional food. The results show that the female respondents were 2.987 times more aware of functional food than the male respondents. Similarly, the likelihood of respondents having awareness of functional food was 1.431 times greater among those who had a higher educational level than among those with a lower educational level. Consumers who used vitamin supplements were 1.228 times more aware of functional food than other consumers. The results show that older respondents were 3.395 times more aware of functional food than younger respondents. Respondents with a history of familial diseases were more likely than others to have consumed margarine with plant sterol, fruit juices fortified with vitamin C, and breakfast cereals fortified with vitamins and minerals. Those with a diet‐related problem were more likely to have consumed cholesterol‐lowering products than those without a problem. As a conclusion, this study has shown that socio‐demographic characteristics such as age, education and income levels, and prices are important indicators that influence consumers' awareness and consumption of functional food. These results suggest that this type of knowledge could affect consumers' interest in functional foods, and therefore educational strategies might be necessary to encourage the consumption of functional foods.     

Why do not you read the label? – an integrated framework of consumer label information search

This article facilitates deeper insight into label‐related consumer information acquisition behaviour. An integrated framework of label information search (LIS) has been developed based on a synthesis of related literature and explorative research conducted by analysing online discussions among customers (netnography). The framework focuses on three main groups of personal factors that serve as antecedents of LIS: general personal factors (e.g. health consciousness and socio‐demographics), label‐related personal factors (e.g. label‐related self‐efficacy, trust in labels and the perceived usefulness of labels) and product category‐related personal factors (trust in food products, enduring involvement, experience and perceived quality differences). Important characteristics of the framework are its process‐oriented nature and the dynamically changing relationships among its concepts. LIS is an antecedent to and a consequence of influencing factors. This article offers managerial implications and serves to incite future inquiry in this field.     

Turbulence in growing and declining industries

Turbulence over the industry life cycle is examined for the case of Portugal using the lowest possible level of industry aggregation, thus allowing for the use of panel data to study the evolution of product markets. Replacement of exiting firms by subsequent entrants plays a primary role in generating turbulence in high growth markets, while displacement of incumbents by recent entrants is the main selection force in declining markets. As the industry life cycle progresses, trial-and-error entry and entry mistakes decrease, and turbulence subsides.     

Die reale Zahlungsbereitschaft für Klimaschutz

Der Klimawandel und das globale ?ffentliche Gut Klimaschutz genie?en gro?e Aufmerksamkeit in der ?ffentlichen Debatte. Klimaschutz verursacht jedoch Kosten und es stellt sich die Frage, was die Menschen in Deutschland tats?chlich für Klimaschutz bereit sind zu zahlen. Dieser Beitrag stellt eine neue Studie zur Ermittlung der realen Zahlungsbereitschaft für Klimaschutz vor und diskutiert die Ergebnisse aus der Perspektive der Klimapolitik.     

The road to a market economy

The ongoing conversion of the economies of former socialist countries into market economies has so far suffered from the lack of a theory of system transformation (policy) which indicates the means of achieving the desired objectives and makes it possible to evaluate the transformation policies of individual countries. The following article outlines the essential aspects of such a theory.