Service-leadership competencies for hospitality and tourism management

Competency models have become useful tools for management development in hospitality and tourism organizations. At the same time, these models provide limited focus on leadership behaviors that facilitate employee service performance and customer satisfaction. The present study seeks to address this issue by developing a “service-leadership” competency model for use in the hospitality and tourism context. The following study reports on the results of interviews with 110 industry managers, which yielded a model of some 100 behaviors in 20 competency areas. These competencies cluster into 3 high order categories, namely business savvy, people savvy and self savvy. The results of the study are discussed in the context of extant research.     

Innovation,quality and exports: The case of Italian SMEs

We test the hypothesis that innovating and targeting the upper-quality segment of markets increases Italian small and medium enterprises probability to export, providing empirical evidence that supports it. We observed a positive-quality effect and a strong impact of non-technological innovations over future exports. We also observed that larger and older firms operating in traditional sectors are more likely to export. The most interesting results came from the introduction of interaction terms. We found evidence of a ‘super-additive effects’, which delineate synergic linkages between product innovation activities and quality strategy.     

Why Do Small States Receive More Federal Money? U.S. Senate Representation and the Allocation of Federal Budget

Empirical research on the geographic distribution of U.S. federal spending shows that small states receive disproportionately more dollars per capita. This evidence, often regarded as the consequence of Senate malapportionment, in reality conflates the effects of state population size with that of state population growth. Analyzing outlays for the period 1978–2002, this study shows that properly controlling for population dynamics provides more reasonable estimates of small‐state advantage and solves a number of puzzling peculiarities of previous research. We also show that states with fast‐growing population loose federal spending to the advantage of slow‐growing ones independently of whether they are large or small. The two population effects vary substantially across spending programs. Small states enjoy some advantage in defense spending, whereas fast‐growing ones are penalized in the allocation of federal grants, particularly those administered by formulas limiting budgetary adjustments. Hence, a large part of the inverse relationship between spending and population appears to be driven by mechanisms of budgetary inertia, which are compatible with incrementalist theories of budget allocation.     

Cyclical asymmetry in fiscal variables in the EU

In this paper we present a stylised framework of fiscal policy determination that considers both structural targets and cyclical factors. We find significant cyclical asymmetry in the behaviour of fiscal variables in a sample of fourteen EU countries over 1970–2007, with budgetary balances (both overall and primary) deteriorating in contractions without correspondingly improving in expansions. Analysis of budget components reveals that cyclical asymmetry comes from expenditure. We find no evidence that fiscal rules introduced in 1992 with the Treaty of Maastricht affected the cyclical behaviour of fiscal variables. Numerical simulations show that cyclical asymmetry inflated average deficit levels, contributing significantly to debt accumulation.     

Reevaluating waste as a resource under a circular economy approach from a system perspective: Findings from a case study

The circular economy (CE), definable as a system focused on the reorganization of material, information, and energy flows to achieve greater resource efficiency through the reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling of materials, is a concept widely discussed by practitioners and scientists of many disciplines. Waste recycling is integral to the CE, but there are still few articles focused on waste, and only few studies shed light on CE implementation at the company level. This paper focuses on a particular type of waste, that is, absorbent hygiene products (AHPs), which represents a nonnegligible fraction of municipal solid waste, considered an increasingly serious global challenge. We conducted our analysis on FaterSMART, an Italian firm that developed a unique worldwide technology able to totally convert AHP raw material wastes into recyclable materials, under a CE approach. The case study findings are based upon semi-structured interviews, direct observations, and analysis of FaterSMART's archival documents and are analyzed according to a framework developed for the research and focused on the place of waste from a linear economy, in which waste is considered a burden to CE, in which waste is considered a resource. The latter case is what we found that happens at FaterSMART. FaterSMART's findings could contribute to open up new management scenarios and stimulate further research into how this and similar types of technology will help societies to change from the “use-it-once-and-throw-it away” mentality of linear business models to the sustainable CE model that fully conceptualize waste as a resource for the system.     

The firm,the platform and the customer: A “double mangle” interpretation of social media for innovation

The aim of this article was to explore the relationship between human actors and technology in the context of a social media platform, developed by a leading Italian firm in the food industry, and created to keep in contact with its customers, while gathering innovative ideas from them.In order to address these issues, we adopt a theoretical approach that is deeply rooted in Pickering's “mangle” theory, and Jones' subsequent metaphor of “double dance of agency” i.e. human and material agencies. A longitudinal case study has been developed with two rounds of interviews with marketing and R&D managers. A total of 8 recorded interviews, for 22 h overall.We examined conditions in the ongoing functioning of the platform, and considered how the website's dynamic materiality configures and reconfigures the practices and possibilities of different modes of engagement by multiple users (i.e. firm employees and customers) and vice versa. Specifically, dealing with the case of a social media platform developed by a firm to gain clearly defined organizational ends, the entanglement is considered to be double. One entanglement is between the human agency of customers and the material agency of the social media platform. The other is between the human agency of the firm and the material agency of the social media platform, including all actions that human agents (i.e. firm employees) undertake in seeking to channel material agency and shape actions of other human agents, i.e. customers.     

A deeper look at national culture and leadership in the hospitality industry

Increased internationalization and demographic shifts have made multicultural management a prime concern for hospitality leaders. Past research suggests that cultural similarity between managers and subordinates impacts employees’ appraisal of their leaders and work-related attitudes. Extending this line of research, the purpose of this paper is to examine more closely how employees evaluate leaders with varying national cultures and identify any subsequent employee responses. First, the results of an open-ended questionnaire on cultural influences, perceived leadership and work-related outcomes administered to 112 hospitality managers and staff members in a highly multicultural environment are discussed. Next, perspectives drawn from in-depth interviews with 12 hospitality stakeholders help to synthesize the findings. The results suggest that this is a highly complex issue, which can have a significant impact on employee reactions their leaders and the service received by guests. Implications for hospitality leaders are discussed.     

Home production,market production and the gender wage gap: Incentives and expectations

We study the joint determination of gender differences in labor earnings and time devoted to home production in an economy where informational frictions give rise to incentive problems in the labor market. Our model generates novel predictions on the relation between earnings, home hours and the incidence of performance pay, which we confront with the data. The empirical evidence broadly supports our hypothesis.     

Do investors value companies' mandatory nonfinancial risk disclosure? An empirical analysis of the Italian context after the EU Directive

In October 2014, the European Union adopted Directive 2014/95/EU (hereafter, EU Directive), mandating companies of a certain size to draft and publish corporate nonfinancial information (NFI) regarding society and the environment. In this study, we examine the mandatory disclosure of nonfinancial (NF) risks by listed Italian companies, as required by the EU Directive, focusing on both the state‐of‐the‐art of such disclosure and its usefulness for investors. For this purpose, the study adopts a two‐staged research approach; in the first stage, we employed a manual meaning‐oriented content analysis to investigate the NF declarations (NFDs) of the listed Italian companies that were obliged to disclose NFI, returning a quality NF risks disclosure index. In the second stage, we used the value relevance methodology to investigate whether the disclosed NF risk information affects the levels of equity prices, through a modified Ohlson model. Our research is one of the first to investigate the value relevance of mandatory disclosures of NF risks following the implementation of the EU Directive, in the Italian context. The research was carried out in 2017, the first year of the directive's application for listed Italian companies. The main findings support a positive association between NF risk information disclosure levels and companies' market value. Moreover, they provide evidence of a significant mediating effect of NF risk on the relationship between financial risks and market value.