Businesses are entering into a period of transformation, where winners and losers may be separated according to their ability to succeed in a carbon-constrained world. CEO’s vision is vital for accelerating the response to this transformation. We examined CEO letters in order to understand the strategic importance of this issue to CEOs.
The goal of this research is to demonstrate that the financial performance of the current year in Swedish steel SMEs is dependent on the amount of maturity of supply chain processes. This is examined by considering current supply chain process maturities of the firm together with financial performance of prior years. It was found that the delivery process of supply chain processes and prior cost of goods sold (COGS) have an effect on current COGS. Additionally, prior inventory and plan process of the supply chain have a positive and negative effect on inventory turnover respectively.
The world economy currently seems to be failing, and the effects are being felt around the globe. There are many upcoming news about rising unemployment, major corporations cutting jobs and workers who can't seem to find work. The current economic climate makes many people wary of spending money, which can be bad news for those who make a living through the buying of others. Many things, however, are not simply going to go away because the economy is rough. Some buyers and employers may feel reticent when it comes to hiring, and this could create trouble for those who survive by self employment. But in every economic crisis, some markets remain successful - and those who live through self employment are generally pretty good about applying their skills where needed. Increasing self-employment is an objective frequently seen on government agenda, as small businesses are often seen as a remedy for unemployment and pivotal for economies to grow8. Despite the distinct value of self-employment to the economy as a whole as well as to the individual starting her own, in the Nordic countries, self-employment rates are far lower than one would expect. This has led to extensive research efforts on the impact of economic and other external factors on self-employment rates, in order to crystallize out key drivers to self-employment in an economy, related to which specific government programs and initiatives can be launched. This paper contributes by specifying and testing the impact of internal factors that determine an individual's decision on whether to become self employed. Understanding the internal drivers of individuals' intentions will help to further trace the impact of external initiatives on individual behavior. This paper applies the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), on the most well established models explaining social behavior, to test the impact of attitude, social pressures and perceived control among Swedish men and women. Data is collected from over 400 Swedish university students with various backgrounds. As is suggested in TPB, the results provide that the strongest determinant of individuals' intention to become self-employed is their attitude towards being self employed, which stems from behavioral beliefs about having one's own business. The paper further finds that, along with the attitude, men are mainly influenced by their perceptions of control, whereas women are affected by their perceived pressures in their social surrounding. The paper provides several implications for governments and some avenues for future research.
Given the important role that businesses play in addressing the issue of environmental sustainability, a perspective on organizations’ responsiveness toward environmental sustainability suggests that one of the most challenging decisions to be made within an organization is to engage in environmental purchasing. Because preserving the environment and maintaining economic growth have become the goal for many organizations, decisions about sustainable organizational purchasing are growing in importance.Ethics research in business has tended to focus on a perspective of consumer environmental purchasing, leaving the understanding of the organizational perspective and why and how organizations purchase sustainably relatively under-researched. Among all the decisionmaking units, individual executives play a key role in sustainably responsible purchasing within a business. However, few previous studies have contributed to the role of the individual in such processes or examined the drivers and motives of environmentally responsible individual behavior in an organization. This thesis is a study under the rubric of understanding environmentally responsible purchasing behavior among purchasing professionals in the food retail industry of Sweden. Developed here is a theoretical framework that seeks an understanding of how environmental purchasing decisions are managed and affected by various factors in the organization. In other words, the research model of this thesis aims to investigate what determines purchasing professionals’ decision to engage in environmentally responsible purchasing. This is initially based on cognitive frameworks proposed by Fishbein and Ajzen’s theory of reasoned action, and ethical decision-making theories, but extended from findings of interviews with experts in the field and an in-depth review of the related literature. Based on the model, the factors of attitude, relativism, idealism, peers, and top management influence were proposed as possible drivers of environmentally responsible purchasing, considering stakeholder influence as a moderator in the framework. All of these relationships were empirically tested in response to the research question of this thesis. Using a quantitative research method, a survey was conducted to test this research model. This was to examine whether empirical results confirm this study’s hypotheses on the drivers of environmentally responsible purchasing at the individual level within the organization. A total of 573 usable questionnaires, providing a response rate of 37.4%, were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis to evaluate the proposed hypotheses on the research model. The results show how these factors influence environmentally responsible purchasing and provide support that all the proposed hypotheses are acceptable in the studied context.The acceptance of all proposed hypotheses highlights that moral beliefs and situational and organizational factors play an important role in an individual’s environmentally responsible decision–making process within an organization. The empirical findings also imply that the decision making in the context under study is far too complex to be explained only in terms of cognitive beliefs. The model offers insight into the drivers of attitudes and behavior in this context, positing a relationship between cognitive and emotional variables based on individual and situational aspects. In addition to theoretical insights, the findings of this study offer suggestions on how companies can effectively implement environmentally responsible purchasing by influencing their employees, yet fundamentally improve organizational culture.
In today's competitive marketplace, customer retention is a critical issue in the success of any business system. One of the key challenges of service-oriented businesses, such as mobile telecoms, is how to retain customers. Customer retention is gaining increasing attention in business today, since loyal customers are seen as essential components to organizational success. Therefore, corporations strive to identify and manage effective methods to retain their customers, since such retention will lead the company to a greater number of loyal customers and thus more profit and market share.Many models and theories focused on assessing customer retention and describing its determinants have been advanced in different formats. However, determining exactly what affects customer retention in the mobile telecom market and identifying which drivers have the largest impact on customer retention in this sector are not yet fully understood. These issues are addressed in this paper, which utilizes the customer retention formation model based on past theories (e.g., Kim, 2004) and ideas from experts in this market. Our empirical analysis is based on a sample of 280 consumers who were contacted face-to-face. Our results indicate that the proposed model is applicable to the mobile telecom market.
This paper sheds light on the quality of relationships between salespeople and their customers and friends as well as how their personality traits affect these relationships. The findings revealed that salespeople’s personality traits do not influence relationship quality with customers in the same way as with friends, and significant differences exist
This study investigates the quality of buyer-seller relationships from the seller’s perspective, by addressing the influence of salespeople’s personality traits on the quality of the relationships with customers as compared to friends. Results indicate that the personality traits of salespeople influence both of these relationships, but in different ways.
In order to understand the industries-universities collaboration (IUC) tendency on technology development in developed and developing countries, we analyze the current state of affairs in Sweden and Tunisia. Empirical investigation from 45 companies in both countries was conducted to measure their propensity (actual) and predisposition (in the future) to collaborate with the universities. R&D managers first proposed a categorization of the IUC with regard to the technology development stages. Then, they explained to which extent their industries have been cooperating with the research centers at the universities and their intentions for future partnership. Results show that industries in Sweden are more involved in developing new processes; while Tunisian companies cooperate more with the universities to acquire new knowledge. Swedish companies tend to work on new technologies development as well. Conclusions on tendencies in both countries are drawn and recommendations for the universities are offered.
As more people choose to obtain their news online, most notably young people, it became of interest to look at the changing habits of online news consumers. Using conjoint analysis of Swedish college students, this paper aims to answer the question, which news attributes within various news categories are most preferred by today’s online news consumers? Results indicate that accuracy and source credibility are the most important attributes across many news categories, followed by immediacy. Interestingly, interactivity was, overall, the least preferred attribute for young, online news consumers in one of the most Internet-connected countries in the world
The social and environmental responsibility of business has become a major issue in recent years and communicating messages about such initiatives are likely to evoke strong and often positive reactions among stakeholders of every firm. Companies can generate favorable attitudes among their stakeholders by engaging them in CSR activities and eventually strengthen stakeholder-company relationships. As a result, there is a need for companies to communicate their CSR activities more effectively to stakeholders using different media. This paper considers the content of one type of such communications, the CSR report. Trough a content analysis, it looks at how five of top sustainable organizations address their stakeholders in their CSR reports. The readability of such reports for stakeholders will also be evaluated. The results suggest that only a selected number of stakeholders are addressed in the studied CSR reports and these reports found to be not readable enough for the intended audience.
While companies may seek to rejuvenate and/or adapt their brands, circumstances will arise where the company may seek its brand closure. Studies on the consumer-side of brand death are sparse. This paper argues that how consumers react toward brand deletion can be explained by grief and bereavement theories used in psychology.
This paper evaluates service quality in Iran’s mobile telecom market based on the well-known SERVQUAL model, with modifications made by Wang Po-Lo (2002) to reflect the industry attributes of mobile telecom. Based on 250 respondents, results indicate that there is a support for the application of this model in Iran.