Municipal environmental management and regional conservation in eastern Amazon: perceived performance by public agents in the Pará state, Brazil

Public agents play a key role in municipal environmental management (MEM) under decentralised regimes. This study aimed to evaluate the MEM through the combined perception of municipal agents and the municipal performance previously calculated by secondary data in Pará, Brazil. A questionnaire with a 5-point Likert scale was applied to environmental agents. The respondents (n = 75) from 53 municipalities were divided into poorly performing and well-performing municipalities. The perception of agents from poorly performing municipalities was more optimistic than shown by empirical data. Agents from well-performing municipalities prioritised “economic issues” as significant threats to management over the “institutional capacity” chosen by the other group, indicating a broader view of the reality. As the perception over land-use practices was vital to differentiate the agents from different groups, we concluded for the use of mixed monitoring methods and feedback information for agents for a better MEM, focusing on five variables (Rural environmental register – CAR, in Portuguese acronym; degraded area; deforested area; rural credit; and abandoned pasture) that differentiated the municipalities.

Women’s Representation and Implications for Fairness, Trust, and Performance in Local Government: A Survey Experiment in Sri Lanka

How do quotas for women in Sri Lanka’s local government institutions affect key governance indicators such as perceived fairness, institutional trust, and perceived performance? These dimensions of governance are underexplored in the context of gender quota policies in patriarchal societies like that of Sri Lanka. The study hypothetically varied the quota provision for women (decrease to 10%, increase to 45%, or keep at the current 25%) in local government, and then tried to understand people’s opinions about the three governance indicators. When examining the results of the experiment (around 1,200 samples), it was found that perceived fairness, institutional trust, and perceived performance increased along with the greater quota provision. Possible mechanisms for the increases in institutional trust and perceived performance may be associated with the signal of fairness generated by the increase of quota provision for women.

A Two-Stage SEM—Artificial Neural Network Analysis of the Rewards Effects on Self Perceived Performance in Healthcare

Healthcare managers consider the rewards and performances of employees as central elements of their activities due to the challenges caused by the phenomenon of healthcare employees’ emigrating to higher-income countries, which has reduced patient satisfaction and led to a negative image of hospitals. In this context, this paper analyzes how employee rewards influence the employees’ self-perceived performances in the hospital units of the emergency medical system in Romania. Using structural equation modeling, we analyzed the relationships between the investigated variables, showing that financial motivation and the recognition of employees’ merits are central to employees’ self-perceived performances. Ensuring equity also has a positive impact on how the reward package is established and managed. While financial rewards are the most important incentives to increase efforts to exhibit higher performances, recognition has a long-term motivational effect.

Value Creation Perceptions of Management Accountants in South Africa

The Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism launched the Embankment Project for Inclusive Capitalism (EPIC) to tackle the challenge of communicating how value is created for the stakeholders of a company. However, discord on how stakeholder value should be measured exists. Management accountants can successfully measure the value of money in their cost control function, but it remains a challenge on how they perceive the adding or creating of value in their respective roles and if their own perceived performance. The aim of this study was to obtain an understanding study of how management accountants view and navigate through this concept of value creation in general and in their organisation, how and why they engage in value-creating activities for their organisations and its stakeholders. A qualitative approach was adopted to conduct the study and the data collection technique constituted a literature review and questionnaires distributed to 30 participants. The majority of the participants believe that they are creating value for their organisations and positioned their perceived value creation into the economic value category. Some participants believe that the value they create within their organisation cannot be measured. Overall, it is recommended that possible development of tools, models or frameworks to assist management accountants in the measuring or capturing of value should be explored that is of a more subjective nature, so that it would be easier to implement and drive value creation practices in the workplace.