Performance Appraisal – A Source of Employee’s Motivation: A Case Study of Educational Institute of Karachi

The organizational success is largely depending on its employees; they are considered as vital assets for any organization. Therefore, the management should know how to appraise them so that they can get the desired results. The current study aims to investigate the impact of performance appraisal on employee’s motivation in an educational institute of Karachi. The population of interest was permanent faculty, visiting faculty and non-teaching staff of the ABC institute which was selected through convenience sampling technique. A survey of 56 employees was conducted with the help of a questionnaire based on close ended items on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from strongly agrees to strongly disagree. For data analysis, SPSS was used to check the reliability test, descriptive statistics and regression analysis. The research findings provided the insights regarding the impact of performance appraisal on employees’ motivation and showed a positive significant impact. The more satisfied employees are by their appraisals, the more motivated and committed they would be. Moreover, the study also shed light for future direction by keeping in view the respondents concern regarding biasness free rating, feedback and appeal process. The educational institutes should come up with better strategies in order to build trust among employees by providing fair appraisal solely based on their performance.

Examining the Relationship between Consumer Brand Relationships and Brand Evangelism

It is a well-known fact now that consumers falsify profound and meaningful relationships with particular brands and that such consumer brand relationships are expected to impact brand-related behavior of consumers. The study investigates the influence of three consumer-brand relational constructs - brand trust, brand affect and brand identification – and their effects on brand evangelism behavior, which was operationalized in the form of two supportive behaviors namely; purchase intentions and positive referrals. After assessing common method bias as well as reliability and validity estimates, structural equation modelling was employed with 458 sample data to test the study model fit and hypothesized relationships. The findings reveal that the consumer-brand relationship influences brand evangelism. All consumer-brand relational constructs (i.e., brand trust, brand affect and brand identification) influence brand evangelism positively in terms of purchase intention and brand referral. The study highlights the importance of brand evangelism in the marketing literature by establishing its causal relationships with the key brand attributes of brand affect, brand trust and brand evangelism. Implications of the results are deliberated with future scope for research.

Social Media and The COVID-19 Response: A Case Study of Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) in New Zealand

COVID-19 pandemic is spreading across the globe, causing huge losses to humans and changing people’s lifestyles. New Zealand has also suffered from this fatal virus outbreak. Social media has been used by governments from many countries for communication about COVID-19, but the research on social media used in COVID-19 remains limited. This research aims to study how the leading New Zealand business agency, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), used Facebook to disseminate COVID-19, and how businesses and the public benefitted from it. Facebook posts from MBIE published over two months from March 18, 2020, to May 12, 2020, as well as user reviews were collected and thematically analysed. Before the research was conducted, an Official Information Act request was submitted to MBIE and an approval confirmation was received for using any publicly available information released by MBIE. The findings indicate Facebook was used by MBIE as a comprehensive channel to address COVID-19, as well as being an avenue to interact with businesses and people, and businesses and people benefitted from it in multiple aspects.

Factors Affecting Organizational Commitment of Employees: Evidence from Pakistan

Organizational commitment is important for overall performance of an organization and wellbeing of its employees. Organisational commitment has gained much importance and it can lead to the positive and favourable outcomes for an organisation like improved employees’ performance, increased organisational effectiveness, decreased employee turnover ratio, increased organisational financial revenues and decreased absenteeism among employees. This study identifies the important organisational factors from prior literature and using a questionnaire survey examines the influence of these factors on the organisational commitment among employees of software industry of Pakistan. Results revealed that all the identified factors except gender affects organisational commitment among the employees of software industry of Pakistan. Recommendations were also made for making the organizational commitment practices and their implementation more vibrant and stronger within an organization based on research results and in relation with prior research studies. A summary table with all the identified factors is presented in this paper for helping other researchers doing research for knowing about different factors that can affect organizational commitment.

Human Capital Sustainability and Organizational Performance: The Case of a Travel Agency

The tourism industry in the Middle East plays a critical role in maintaining and energizing countries' economic status. It has a major element in facing numerous human capital obstacles that are deepening its development. This paper seeks to explore how the enhancement of human capital in a travel agency can have a significant positive impact on its performance, by studying the importance and consequences of the enhancement of human capital to improve specifically a travel agency's performance. This research aims to identify and remedy the delinquencies in the enterprise’s human capital that are obstructing its growth performance. We utilized the socio-economic methodology, which is a mix of qualitative, quantitative, and financial approaches, to remediate the organizational transition from within the travel agency at all stages and with the participation of all the members in the enterprise. The research study focuses on human capital dimensions across metrics for maximizing performance effectiveness that endorsed our hypothesis: “Enhancement of human capital improves travel agency firm’s performance”. The results of this intervention research add to the literature of the human capital variable of intellectual capital theory, which previous authors did not explore, by providing considerable contributions to the field of intellectual capital in a specific set of metrics. It demonstrated a positive impact on the travel agency firm’s performance through the enhancement of Human capital through time management, sales activity, marketing, and communication skills enhancement.

Want Engaged Employees? Encourage Human Resource and Enhance Organizational Connectedness

Work engagement is not only a "nice-to-have" but has been shown to be linked to various positive outcomes of work, including its proven financial and behavioural gains. The concern regarding employee engagement is increasing, and organizations of the 21st century are looking for every possible way to develop the culture of employee engagement deliberately. In this context, this research introduces employee engagement as a viable method to encourage organizational productivity and examines how perceptions of specific human resource (HR) practices and organizational identification relate to experiences of employee's work engagement. The study data was collected using standard psychometric tools from 75 mid-level managers working in various organizations. Statistical analysis was performed to answer research questions. The results conveyed the significance of applying encouraging human resource practices and demonstrated the positive effect of organization-al identification (OID) on work engagement. HR practices and OID were found instrumental in positively predicting the significant amount of work engagement. By discovering the relationship between HR practices (conditions that organizations can influence easily), organizational identification, and employee engagement, this study relates to the realistic implementation of measures to improve employee engagement and especially emphasises them. As most companies are searching for ways to promote employee engagement, the latest re-search results are of practical importance to HR executives.

CHALLENGES AND CONSTRAINTS TO ENHANCE THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION IN HIGHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS OF A DEVELOPING COUNTRY: EVIDENCE FROM SRI LANKA

This study through an exploratory approach review the challenges and constraints faced in enhancing entrepreneurship education in developing countries using Sri Lanka as a case study. Previous studies on the subject matter is very scarce and even in international journals only few papers appeared on entrepreneurship education in developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to study the current entrepreneurship education system in Sri Lankan state universities with reference to challenges and constraints and to propose an action plan to raise entrepreneurship education in Sri Lanka to be in par with that of developed nations so that these universities can act as the centerpieces of business innovations and entrepreneurship development. This paper employs an exploratory study approach by analyzing current entrepreneurship education system in Sri Lanka by reviewing secondary data such as various journals and government publications to build the arguments and recommendations outlined. Among constraints and challenges for the development of entrepreneurship education, lack of resources, lack of entrepreneurial skills in lecturers, poor stake-holder engagement, weak government policies and industry � university gap are common to most developing countries. In addition with its free education policy, Sri Lankan universities are faced with strict university entrance procedures and lack of selection of desired courses for majority of students. Findings of this study and salient suggestions will be an invaluable toolkit for policy makers to design effective strategies for entrepreneurship education in developing countries.

THE UNGOVERNABILITY OF REFORMS: THE HIGHEST CONTEXT COST RED TAPE COSTS IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REFORMS

This article aims to analise in the context of state and public administration reforms, the so-called context costs, known in the literature as red tape costs. In particular, there is a strong evidence that the reform mechanisms themselves, when inefficient, generate more costs, or more red tape costs for public administration, business and society in general.

IMPACT OF LEADERSHIP STYLES ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE: A MODERATING ROLE OF GENDER

The impact of different leadership styles on employee performance was investigated in this study, whereby the proposed styles included transformational leadership, Laissez-Faire leadership, democratic leadership, and autocratic leadership. Concomitantly, the moderating effect of gender between such leadership styles and employee performance was also tested. The required data were collected by utilising a structured questionnaire and disseminating it through an online survey, engaging a sample size of 211 employees of multinational corporations in Malaysia selected using convenient sampling. Accordingly, IBM SPSS 24 was employed to conduct the reliability and normality assessment, while IBM SPSS AMOS 24 application was for the purpose of conducting the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), structural equation modelling (SEM), and moderation analysis. As a result, a positive and significant relationship was found between the transformational, Laissez-Faire, and democratic leadership styles towards employee performance in Malaysia, respectively. Furthermore, the relationship between autocratic leadership and employee performance was statistically insignificant following the hypothesis testing. Meanwhile, the impact of transformational and Laissez-Faire leadership styles on employee performance was fully moderated by gender, whereas the correlation between democratic leadership and employee performance was only partially moderated. In contrast, gender posed a statistically insignificant impact for autocratic leadership and employee performance association. Moreover, the effect of transformational leadership on employee performance was more pronounced in males compared to females. The effect of Laissez-Faire leadership on employee performance is more pronounced in �female� compared to �male�. Meanwhile, the effect of democratic leadership on the variable was more pronounced in females compared to males, but with a minimum difference. The managerial implications, limitations, and future research avenues are discussed accordingly.

CHALLENGES AND CONSTRAINTS TO ENHANCE THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION IN HIGHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS OF A DEVELOPING COUNTRY: EVIDENCE FROM SRI LANKA

This study through an exploratory approach review the challenges and constraints faced in enhancing entrepreneurship education in developing countries using Sri Lanka as a case study. Previous studies on the subject matter is very scarce and even in international journals only few papers appeared on entrepreneurship education in developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to study the current entrepreneurship education system in Sri Lankan state universities with reference to challenges and constraints and to propose an action plan to raise entrepreneurship education in Sri Lanka to be in par with that of developed nations so that these universities can act as the centerpieces of business innovations and entrepreneurship development. This paper employs an exploratory study approach by analyzing current entrepreneurship education system in Sri Lanka by reviewing secondary data such as various journals and government publications to build the arguments and recommendations outlined. Among constraints and challenges for the development of entrepreneurship education, lack of resources, lack of entrepreneurial skills in lecturers, poor stake-holder engagement, weak government policies and industry � university gap are common to most developing countries. In addition with its free education policy, Sri Lankan universities are faced with strict university entrance procedures and lack of selection of desired courses for majority of students. Findings of this study and salient suggestions will be an invaluable toolkit for policy makers to design effective strategies for entrepreneurship education in developing countries.