Interpretive structural modeling for E-electricity utility service

Service quality has been recognized as one of the major factors for an organization's sustainability. It is one of the driving forces for an organization??s achievement. Service quality may be represented by the comparison between customers?? expectations of how a company or organization should perform and the customer??s perception of the service performance. For successful delivery of public services, use of online technology has rapidly become a benchmark for effective public sector management. Governments worldwide are attempting to harness the potential offered by these new technologies to create new dimensions of economic and social progress. The present article discusses the important aspects of customer's satisfaction in service quality of E-electricity utility service by interpretive structural modeling method.     

Too much of a good thing? Absorptive capacity,firm performance,and the moderating role of entrepreneurial orientation

Absorptive capacity (ACAP) refers to a firm's ability to acquire, assimilate, transform, and exploit new knowledge. Research has yet to acknowledge the possibility of limits to the financial returns of this important strategic construct. This study suggests an inverted‐U shaped relationship between ACAP and financial performance. Based on data from 285 technology‐based small and medium enterprises, we observe gains within three prospective, secondary measures of growth to diminish beyond lower levels of ACAP, even turning negative and becoming harmful beyond intermediate levels. We find that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) moderates the ACAP‐performance relationship, enhancing financial gains at lower levels of ACAP and mitigating the decline in financial performance at higher levels of ACAP. Further, with higher EO, higher ACAP can be achieved before financial returns diminish.Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exploring competitiveness in banking sector of a small island economy: a study of Fiji

The paper explores the competitiveness in the banking sector in Fiji using the Panzar and Rosse (J Ind Econ 35:443–456, 1987) method. We compute the concentration ratios and Herfindahl–Hirschman index based on total assets, loans, and deposits to examine the concentration level. To compute the Panzar-Rosse H-statistics, we use fixed effect regression method duly controlling for heterogeneity. The results show banks in Fiji exhibit monopolistic behavior and are biased towards monopoly/conjectural variation short-run oligopoly upon examining the significance level of the upper and lower bounds of the computed H-statistics. Moreover, the results also show that banks revenue are influenced positively by interest expenses, capital adequacy ratio, and the number of branches; and negatively by personnel expenses, other operating expenses, and firm size measured by total assets.     

Struggling with social capital: Pakistani women micro entrepreneurs’ challenges in acquiring resources

Abstract

A crucial aspect of successful venturing is social capital. In contrast to traditional Western-oriented research where social capital is construed positively, we found that in the traditional, patriarchal society of Pakistan, social capital puts high restrictions on women micro entrepreneurs – where social capital prevents or slows venturing efforts. Results also show that although women do get some selective access to resources from family members, they are restricted by limited access to social capital outside of family members. As women entrepreneurs have the potential to play an important role in the development of any society, and especially so in developing countries, based on the insights derived from this qualitative study, we propose suggestions for further research on women micro entrepreneurs in non-Western contexts.     

The information content of a convertible debt offer announcement

We develop a model of convertible debt financing that combines issue and call decisions into a common framework. The model suggests a role for refinancing costs in a manager's efforts to signal firm productivity to investors by an appropriate choice of debt issue terms. A cross section of convertible debt offers can be divided into two groups: a high conversion ratio group and a low conversion ratio group. The model predicts that high conversion ratios are negatively correlated with offer announcement stock returns and low conversion ratios are uncorrelated with offer announcement stock returns. The model is tested on a sample of 124 convertible debt offer announcements. Test results support model accuracy.     

Entrepreneurial Discovery as Constrained,Sytematic Search

This research uses a randomized, two-sample, post-test experiment to pit the alertness perspective against a new approach for searching systematically for venture ideas to create new wealth. The new approach uses self-selected consideration sets to constrain an entrepreneur’s search domain, which makes it possible to maximize the search results. The constrained domain conforms to the behavior of repeat entrepreneurs who do not search the whole world for venture ideas. Subjects in the treatment group were successful 60% of the time compared with 6.25% success rate for the control group. Fourteen percent of control group emulated the treatment group without receiving instructions to do so.      

Toward a Unified Framework of Perceived Negative Leader Behaviors Insights from French and British Educational Sectors

In this paper, we challenge the commonly held assumption that actors in the education sector are largely ethical, and that there is therefore little need to scrutinize leader behaviors in this sector. We also overcome past scholars’ tendencies to either focus selectively on positive leader behaviors, or to stay content with categorizing leader behaviors into effective and ineffective (if at all they do focus on negative leader behaviors). Using data (Critical Incidents) from three case studies previously conducted in eight British and French academic establishments, we show that not only do negative leader behaviors abound in the education sector, but they can also be differentiated into three types: (1) behaviors emanating from leaders’ lack of functional skills i.e., ineffective behaviors, (2) behaviors emanating from leaders’ insouciance toward harming the organization and its members i.e., dysfunctional behaviors, and (3) behaviors emanating from leaders’ lack of honesty, integrity, ethicality, and transparency i.e., unauthentic behaviors. We enrich current understanding on ineffective, dysfunctional, and unauthentic leader behaviors, and offer a unified (yet differentiated) framework of negative leader behaviors in the academic sector. Since each type of negative behavior emanates from different motivational drivers, different measures are required to curb them. These are also discussed. A comparison of our findings with those from leadership studies in other sectors reveals that negative leader behaviors in the education sector are quite similar to those in other sectors.