The contribution of vacations to quality of life

The contribution of vacations to people’s life satisfaction and Quality of Life (QOL) has recently attracted substantial attention among tourism researchers. Yet, most QOL scales do not include vacations: 7% explicitly measure vacations whereas 42% only include items relating to vacations within the broader Leisure domain. Leisure and vacations, however, differ substantially in nature with leisure referring to regular home-based activities and vacations being infrequent leisure activities away from home. As a consequence of the common amalgamation of vacations with leisure, there is limited knowledge about the specific contribution of vacations to people’s QOL. The present study (1) presents empirical evidence for the contribution of vacations to QOL, (2) determines the extent of this contribution, and (3) investigates variation in the extent to which vacations contribute to the QOL of different people. Results indicate that vacations contribute to the QOL of the majority of people, are as important a QOL domain as Leisure and People, and that QOL means different things to different people at different points in their life, representing an individual and dynamic concept.     

A preliminary study on customer expectations of hotel hospitality: Influences of personal and hotel factors

This study attempts to explain the influence of personal and hotel factors on the expectation level of hotel hospitality as well as to propose a scale to measure commercial hospitality for hotel services. A total of 101 local and international hotel guests were involved in the study. The results revealed that the expectations of hotel hospitality are influenced by personal factors such as gender, purpose of stay, nationality, and private domain of hospitality. The hotel's star rating is the only hotel factor that might have strong association with hotel hospitality.     

Effects of community,family, and education on earnings of black and white men

Summary The primary purpose of this paper was to determine the effect of background on the education and earnings of black and white men.It was largely motivated by a desire to quantify the extent to which past discrimination against Blacks, resulting in lower achievement, inhibits the progress of individuals today in a somewhat more benign environment.It has demonstrated that both community and family background factors are important in determining the levels of education and earnings of black and white men.The community effects for Blacks operate largely through their moving into more integrated neighborhoods, so that many positive community externalities are apparently not available to families in predominantly black middle-class neighborhoods.While the effects of father’s education, city origin, and community income are comparable between Blacks and whites, white men’s education is more affected by number of siblings, family income, and age of 1968 head of household than is black men’s education.The relative sizes of the coefficients of these latter variables are consistent with steeper age-earnings profiles for older white men than older black men and higher prices paid for investing in children by black parents.     

Cultural Consonance in Leisure,Leisure Satisfaction,Life Satisfaction,and Self-Rated Health in Urban Taiwan

The purpose of this study threefold: to determine whether a shared cultural model of the importance of a set of leisure activities to a good leisure life existed in urban Taiwan, the degree to which cultural consonance in leisure mediates the relationship between leisure constraints and leisure satisfaction, and the degree to which leisure satisfaction affects life satisfaction and self-rated health. Results indicate that a cultural model of the importance of leisure activities to a good leisure life existed among sample members. Second, higher levels of self-reported participation in leisure activities that are culturally agreed upon as more important for a good leisure life are more strongly associated with leisure satisfaction than are activities culturally agreed upon as less important. Finally, leisure satisfaction strongly predicts both life satisfaction and self-rated health.     

A performance evaluation model for international tourist hotels in Taiwan—An application of the relational network DEA

This research utilizes relational network data envelopment analysis to construct a model to analyze the efficiency and effectiveness of international tourist hotels (ITHs) in Taiwan. The different production processes within the hotel are evaluated, as well as the relationships between efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance. Finally, based on the results, we recommend ways of enhancing the overall performance of the hotel industry in Taiwan.     

Exploring new product portfolio management decisions: The role of managers' dispositional traits

Product strategy links to new product development (NPD) through new product portfolio management (NPPM). This dynamic decision process addresses the strategy implementation questions of identifying which new product ideas to pursue and their relative priorities. Despite the importance of NPPM in implementing product strategy, firms exhibit substantial performance-affecting differences. We investigate one potential source for such differences by examining the impact of managers' dispositional factors as a possible explanation. Using a case study research method, we examine differences in NPPM strategies and managers' revealed dispositional traits across three divisions of a single conglomerate firm operating in different business-to-business markets. Based on our analysis, we offer propositions relating managers' dispositions to NPPM strategy: analytic cognitive style is associated with balance, ambiguity tolerance is associated with strategic fit, and leadership style is associated with the relative weights applied to each dimension.     

SOCO's impact on individual sales performance: The integration of selling skills as a missing link

Conventional wisdom suggests that a customer orientation is a vital cornerstone upon which the success of salespeople is predicated in terms of serving their customers and prospects. However, at a pragmatic level, not all salespeople practice a customer-oriented philosophy in their day-to-day selling. In fact, decades of sales research provide largely inconclusive results with respect to individual salespersons' customer orientation and performance outcomes. We argue that for customer orientation to be a predictor of sales performance, specific selling skills must be present. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that without these requisite selling skills, salespeople are better off utilizing a sales orientation approach, as opposed to a customer orientation approach. More provocatively, this research shows that a “missing link” in the long standing body of research on the SOCO (sales orientation/customer orientation) perspective is that specific selling skills can impact sales performance directly as well as moderate the impact that both a “sales orientation” and a “customer orientation” ultimately have on sales performance.     

Effects of employees' perceived dependability on success of enterprise applications in e-business

Electronic business (e-business) plays a major role in modern economic networks due to its shorter cycle time and faster information transactions. Building enterprise applications that can coordinate activities, decisions, and knowledge across many functions is a good solution for e-business. Hence, how to implement enterprise applications successfully has become an increasingly important management issue. Although success of information systems (IS) has received fairly extensive attention from prior research, issues regarding whether functions and service delivered by systems can be justifiably relied on by users are seriously ignored, especially complex systems like enterprise applications. Thus, this paper attempts to extend this kind of concept, perceived dependability, into DeLone and McLean's IS success model to explore how it influences success of enterprise applications. Results from a survey of 170 respondents taken from six internationalized e-businesses in Taiwan strongly support that perceived dependability is indeed an important factor for success of enterprise applications. Additionally, over and beyond the effects of dependability on success of enterprise applications, it can help practitioners and managers get deep insights into how to implement e-business successfully.     

Entry mode choice in China's regional distribution markets: Institution vs. transaction costs perspectives

In this paper, we investigate the entry mode choice of a leading Taiwanese food company in setting up regional distributors in China's 312 sales districts. Our study shows that, in entry mode decisions, the institutional factors are more important than transaction cost considerations. Both formal and informal institutions are considered. Formal institutions refer to government prescribed institutions (laws and regulations), while informal institutions refer to rules prescribed by the industry and the society. Both institutions are shown to affect the entry mode choices but one important type of institution, professional norms, is conspicuously missing in China. Professional norms exert peer pressures on the practitioners in the same profession, forcing their behaviors to conform to a common pattern. In the absence of professional norms, the roles of network ties and mimetic behaviors are heightened and they become a proxy for professional norms. As a foreign enterprise operating in China's local markets, the Taiwanese food company attained legitimacy by forming alliances with local wholesalers and by following its predecessors in selecting organization forms.     

Explaining alliance success: Competences, resources, relational factors, and resource-advantage theory

Business alliances, by filling critical resource gaps, enable firms to have positional advantages that lead to superior financial performance. Some alliances, however, are more successful than others. The three prominent theoretical approaches to explaining alliance success rely on resources, competences, and relational factors. The authors theorize that the three approaches are interdependent and, using resource-advantage (R-A) theory as a framework, develop an integrative model. This model proposes that the three approaches are linked by means of relationships among (1) alliance competence, (2) complementary resources, (3) idiosyncratic resources, and (4) cooperation. A test of the model, using a sample of alliance professionals, finds support for the theory that the three approaches are, indeed, interdependent and that resources, construed in the manner of R-A theory, influence alliance success through positional advantage.