Human Systems Management

This article recounts the business-enterprise transformation that ensued from an action or praxis research, through the synthesis of statistical process control (SPC) and system dynamics (SD) simulation modeling. Intended to minimize the waste that a polymer-coating production process churned out, the SPC-SD union generated insight about the negative feedback structure of product thickness and its temperature through time, thereby enabling the client firm to leverage the dynamic equilibrium of its polymer-coating production process. Newly generated knowledge led to significantly improving end-product quality and, thereby, productivity, which tampering previously cumbered. Accrued from transforming the firm’s polymer-coating production process and operations governance, these benefits facilitated the self-development of its capability of relying on both SPC and SD for its production-strategy design and implementation tactics. Despite the praxis-research limitations, the article also offers future-research directions and policymaking recommendations. These can help capable professionals continually improve business enterprises and other societal human organizations, through the high technology of collegially self-organizing and self-governing societal human systems.

This study’s intentionality was to analyze the influence of employee commitment and service performance on the marketing and sales processes in Lippo Cikarang Bekasi, Inc, one of big financial services company in Indonesia. The failure of marketing and sales was not highlighted from the marketing strategy but judging from the competence of employees who were inconsistent with the knowledge or expertise that a superior performer carries. Path analysis was applied on the data collected from 218 questionnaires respondent. The results show that competence along with knowledge, ideals, motivation, personal characteristics, self-concept, and skill indicators, had a positive significant effect on employee commitment. Through commitment, a competence indictor had a significantly positive effect on service performance. This Suggests that workload can increase commitment and thereby indirectly improve service performance. According to its multiple facets, employee commitment appears to have a significant effect on service performance, the later construct operationalized via its accessibility, courtesy, credibility, reliability, responsiveness, security and tangibility indicators. Competence is a top priority in completing job responsibilities.

This article examines social service delivery through the social enterprise model of IBEKA (Institute of People Centered Business and Economics), a social enterprise linked with Indonesian’s micro-hydro power. Data for this exemplary case were obtained through a qualitative approach, via non-participative observations, document study and interviews. IBEKA’s social service practice purposefulness focuses on active participation, continuity and environmental sustainability. Poised to surpass the criteria of a typical social enterprise foundation, IBEKA’s social entrepreneurship model is applicable to many social service organizations that address social problems. To prevent social problems, societal stakeholder groups are encouraged to establish synergy with social services organizations.

This article conveys the competitive priorities of manufacturing companies, with different strategic thrusts. Supported by the 2009 International Manufacturing Strategy Survey, the reported empirical research uses multivariate testing methods. The results show four competitive priorities, namely price, quality, delivery and service, which are important for European manufacturers to win orders. Besides, business enterprises’ different strategic thrusts influence their selection of competitive priorities, namely the ordering of quantity, flexibility, innovation, environmental protection and social responsibility. Dependent on European manufacturers’ strategic thrusts, crafted is a chart that depicts their competitive priorities. The chart shows the important differences among said manufacturers’ competitive priorities, according to their strategic thrusts. The article concludes with recommendations for manufacturing enterprises that intend to extend their business to Europe, depending on: parent-subsidiary relations and relationships, the competitive priorities of European competitors, and their own competitive priorities, transferred through their evolving strategic thrusts.

This article identifies and ranks the components of competency-based recruitment and the vital role it plays in managerial succession, at Bank Saderat, Isfahan province, Iran. The case study entailed a synthesis of qualitative and quantitative methods, with both interviews and a questionnaire used for data collection. The statistical sample contained 400 personnel experts and senior managers, while the qualitative sample included 17 interviewees. The questionnaire data were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics, including exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. The results show 22 components of competency-based recruitment, along five dimensions: competency, prospection, flexibility, justice and integrity. Competency has the highest factor loading and justice the lowest one. Indeed, competency-based recruitment seems to have a significantly positive effect on managerial succession. The article concludes with the study’s limitations, while also discussed are policymaking implications and future research directions.

Using data from a 13-year period panel, this study analyzes the interaction of Taiwan’s technology investment and industrial development, through the training and extraction of a multi-layered, feed-forward neural network. The simulation experiments provide a reference behavior pattern for China, while accounting for its culture-specific context. Also analyzed are the potential effects of technology investment on the GDP and employment rates of China’s primary and tertiary industries. The simulation results show that the basic-research budget percentage could positively affect China’s tertiary industry, yet increasing both the basic-research budget percentage and the research and development (R&D) personnel could decidedly increase the GDP rate of China’s primary industry. Following the study’s limitations, explored are its potential implications for policymaking and future research.

This research study compares the financially-distressed and financially-healthy companies, on the basis of their board composition and size, ownership and performance, over the 2006–2010 time period. While focusing on manufacturing sectors in Pakistan, the logit-regression results reveal that all variables are significantly different between financially-distressed and financially-healthy companies. The first of its kind, the present study benefits business people as well as financial analysts and investors. Their decision-making processes will be enhanced as they evaluate financially-distressed firms and financially-healthy ones. The study has some limitations also. It has ignored financial sector of Pakistan because of different reporting style of financial firms. The periods before and after the period of financial distress have also been ignored in the study. Despite its limitations, the study contributes a pragmatic insight into the systemic aspects of financial performance, most helpful both to future business research and to policymaking practice.

Customers engage in the word of mouth (WOM) diffusion and adoption process, owed to their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the goods and services they purchase and use. WOM is crucial to making or breaking business enterprises and other societal organizations. A satisfied customer will spread favorable word of mouth, while a customer who is dissatisfied will spread unfavorable WOM. Using a non-recursive SPSS model, this study empirically tests how Xiaomi customers in China and a few other countries, such as, Australia, South Africa and United States of America, express their dissatisfaction through unfavorable WOM. Despite the study’s limitations, one of which entails assessing WOM through non-recursive statistics, the main findings and conclusions are discussed, along with future-research directions and policymaking recommendations.

This study explores the barriers to environmentally-conscious innovation of manufacturing firms. Gleaned via a survey from 333 manufacturing firms in Pakistan, and analyzed through a partial least-squares technique, the data show that organizational resources, resistance to change, business traditions and technical issues appear to be the internal barriers to environmentally-conscious innovation. Conversely, extant policies, shortage of consumer demand, shortage of external affiliation, uncertain benefits and shortage of information seem to be the external barriers to environmentally-conscious innovation, which must also be addressed. These findings have significant implications for manufacturing management and, despite its limitations, the study offers pragmatic policymaking guidelines and future research suggestions.

In the context of natural-language processing, keyword extraction has been studied widely. In promoting business-enterprise goods and services, however, a major challenge remains to extracting keywords effectively and efficiently from social-media user-generated data, wherein employed are traditional, language-dependent and supervised keyword-extraction techniques. This study contributes a keyword extraction analytic hierarchy process (KEAHP), as a language-independent and unsupervised keyword-extraction technique. By using four user-generated data attributes, KEAHP identifies keywords from the word co-occurrence in linguistic networks, based on a multiple-attribute decision-making approach. The proposed technique has been validated via a publically-available standard dataset, and the experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm in KEAHP. Despite its limitations, the study contends that KEAHP can drastically improve performance in promoting business-enterprise goods and services, while also discussed are implications for future research and practice in keyword-extraction techniques.