Hotel employees’ expectations of QWL: A qualitative study

The hospitality industry needs to provide a good quality of work life (QWL) in order to attract and retain employees. There is yet to be a study that defines the ‘expected dimensions of QWL’ by the potential and present hotel employees. QWL being multifaceted and context-based, this researcher conducted a qualitative study in an attempt to identify QWL dimensions expected in the working environment of a hotel. 84 students and 64 employees from three hotel management institute and three hotel organization from Mangalore city in India participated through a purposeful sampling frame. Data were collected using interviews, focus group discussions and open-ended questionnaires, and analyzed in line with grounded theory method. The content analysis of the data yielded eight dimensions of QWL. Implications and limitations of this study along with areas for future research are discussed.     

Analysing the risks of adopting circular economy initiatives in manufacturing supply chains

The concept of circular economy (CE) has proven its worth due to the scarcity of natural resources and huge amounts of wastage which impacts the environment. Thus, the adoption of the CE concept in the supply chain becomes critical. However, due to the complex nature of processes/activities in the circular supply chain (CSC), managing risk has become a priority to avoid disruption. In current literature, no discussion has been conducted on how to analyse the risks in the context of CSC. Therefore, to fill this literature gap, this study concentrates on identifying and analysing the risks to promote effective circular initiatives in supply chains in the context of the manufacturing industry, thus minimising the negative environmental impact. A total of 31 risks were identified through an extensive literature review and discussions with experts. A grey-based decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method is applied by incorporating the experts' knowledge to compute prominence and cause/effect scores to develop an interrelationship map. Finally, a vulnerability matrix for risk categories is developed using the average of prominence and cause/effect scores of risks. The results show that transparent process is the most prominent risk and branding is the least significant risk. By using the average prominence and cause/effect score, a risk category, namely, financial risk, is identified as most vulnerable to CSC. These findings will help industry managers not only to prepare business strategies in the adoption of CE initiatives in supply chains by eliminating risks but also in minimising negative environmental impact.     

Some statistical problems in the presence of an outlier when sampling from truncation parameter densities

Summary In this paper we derive some recurrence relations for moments of order statistics of a random sample from a truncation parameter density when one of the observations is an outlier. We also derive uniform minimum variance unbiased estimator of a parametric function.