From Customer-Oriented Strategy to Organizational Financial Performance: The Role of Human Resource Management and Customer-Linking Capability

Drawing on the organizational capabilities literature, the authors developed and tested a model of how supportive human resource management (HRM) improved firms’ financial performance perceived by marketing managers through fostering the implementation of a customer-oriented strategy. Customer-linking capability, which is the capability in managing close customer relationships, indicated the implementation of the customer-oriented strategy. Data collected from two emerging economies – China and Hungary –established that supportive HRM partially mediated the relationship between customer-oriented strategy and customer-linking capability. Customer-linking capability further explained how supportive HRM contributed to perceived financial performance. This study explicates the implication of customer-oriented strategy for HRM and reveals the
importance of HRM in strategy implementation. It also sheds some light on the ‘black box’ between HRM and performance. While making important contributions to the field of strategy, HRM and marketing, this study also offers useful practical implications.

Dynamic Knowledge Creation Through Value Management Teams

With the intention of introducing unique and value-added products to the market, organizations have become more conscious of how to best create knowledge as reported by Ganesh Bhatt in 2000 in 'Information dynamics, learning and knowledge creation in organizations'. Knowledge creation is recognized as having an important role in generating and sustaining a competitive advantage as well as in meeting organizational goals, as reported by Aleda Roth and her colleagues in 1994 in 'The knowledge factory for accelerated learning practices.' One of the successful ingredients of value management (VM) is its utilization of diverse knowledge resources, drawing upon different organizational functions, professional disciplines, and stakeholders, in a facilitated team process. Multidisciplinary VM study teams are viewed as having high potential to innovate due to their heterogeneous nature. This paper looks at one of the VM workshop's major benefits, namely, knowledge creation. A case study approach was used to explore the nature, processes, and issues associated with fostering a dynamic knowledge creation capability within VM teams. The results indicate that the dynamic knowledge creating process is embedded in and influenced by managing team constellation, creating shared awareness, developing shared understanding, and producing aligned action. The catalysts that can speed up the processes are open dialogue and discussion among participants. This process is enhanced by the use of facilitators, skilled at extracting knowledge.

Active Phase Conjugating Lens With Sub-Wavelength Resolution Capability

Experimental results are presented for the focusing capability of an active phase conjugating lens for a single and a dipole source pair and these are compared with predictions. In addition for a single source we illustrate the ability of the lens to project a null at the lens focus instead of a peak. A scheme is also presented such that when a source or pair of sources is imaged through an identical pair of passive scatterers located symmetrically about the lens that imaging with sub-wavelength resolution is possible. The rationale for the operation of the lens and aberrations observed due to its finite array size is discussed and is supported throughout by means of numerical simulation.

Mapping NGO Competency to Reduce Human Vulnerability in Post-disaster Communities: Comparing Strategies in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh

Natural hazards trigger disasters, the scale of which is largely determined by vulnerability. Developing countries suffer the most from disasters due to various conditions of vulnerability which exist and there is an opportunity after disasters to take mitigative action. NGOs implementing post-disaster rehabilitation projects must be able to address the issues causing communities to live at risk of disaster and therefore must build dynamic capacity, capabilities and competencies, enabling them to operate in unstable environments. This research is built upon a theoretical framework of dynamic competency established by combining elements of disaster management, strategic management and project management theory. A number of NGOs which have implemented reconstruction and rehabilitation projects both in Sri Lanka following the Asian Tsunami and Bangladesh following Cyclone Sidr are being investigated in great depth using a causal mapping procedure. ‘Event’ specific maps have been developed for each organization in each disaster. This data will be analysed with a view to discovering the strategies which lead to vulnerability reduction in post-disaster communities and the competencies that NGOs must possess in order to achieve favourable outcomes. It is hypothesized that by building organizational capacity, capabilities and competencies to be dynamic in nature, while focusing on a more emergent strategic approach, with emphasis on adaptive capability and innovation, NGOs will be better equipped to contribute to sustainable community development through reconstruction. We believe that through this study it will be possible to glean a new understanding of social processes that emerge within community rehabilitation projects.

The psychological effects of organizational restructuring on nurses

This paper reports a comparison of nurses affected by the restructuring associated with healthcare organization mergers (1998-2000) in the United Kingdom and those of non-affected nurses in the UK.