Kedge Business School

Managing diversity is a challenge for many organizations and their diversity initiatives are often criticized for an inability to produce tangible outcomes. One reason for such mixed results is the fact that espoused diversity policies are often implemented in multi-objective contexts in which various stakeholders perceive of diversity and its place in the organization in different ways, thus affecting organizational outcomes. To shed new light on these challenges, we apply paradox theory to diversity management. Based on a series of interviews with all key stakeholder groups of one organization that successfully implemented a diversity initiative in a challenging context, we are able to provide a systematic account of differences between stakeholder groups in terms of both the tensions they perceive in diversity management and the solutions they prefer. Our data show that stakeholders perceive of tensions in a nested fashion, where some only see one or two categories of tensions, whereas others perceive a much wider range. This nested fashion re-appears in the coping strategies which different stakeholders prefer. Here, we found that ‘observers’ and ‘makers’ – that is, the two groups who are, respectively, least and most involved with the policy – favour strategies that accept the paradoxical tensions, whereas ‘beneficiaries’ tend to emphasize strategies to resolve them. We conclude our paper by discussing managerial implications of our findings, as well as avenues for future research.

Existing non-image-based solutions for detecting Phalaenopsis orchid diseases rely on time domain analysis of environmental conditions. These solutions are suitable for loosely controlled open farm fields. Conversely, the diseases are infrequent events in Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart orchid greenhouses, where environmental conditions are well-controlled. In tightly controlled settings, standard time domain methods fall short in detecting subtle changes in environmental conditions during rare orchid disease events. We observed that the influence of the time series of temperature and humidity on orchid fungus within the well-controlled greenhouse is not readily apparent, and the time-frequency coefficients of temperature and humidity must be used to detect orchid disease in this rare event case. In order to address this challenge, we propose OrchidTalk, an IoT-based deep learning platform, which employs a time-frequency domain analysis using the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) filter, for the purpose of detecting rare events of orchid diseases. Through a non-trivial process, we select the Gaussian wavelet with four derivatives to serve as the mother wavelet of the CWT in the data extraction phase, and invent the CWT IoT device to translate the time-domain IoT raw data to the time-frequency domain IoT data. The resulting CWT features are used as inputs to the Orchid-3D model (three-dimension ConvLSTM), which significantly outperforms the previously proposed Orchid-1D (CNN and LSTM) and Orchid-2D (two-dimension ConvLSTM) models. For the rare event detection of 0.2% of sick orchid plants, OrchidTalk achieves a recall of 0.902, precision of 0.92, accuracy of 0.99, and an F1-score of 0.911. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the highest prediction performance achieved for a well-controlled orchid greenhouse.

The first quarter of the 21st century is witnessing an efflorescence of right-wing populism that is flourishing in a period of heightened precarity, global trauma, anxiety and gross inequalities. One branch of right-wing populism, neoconservatism, aims to restore patriarchy; entry into organizations would help it achieve those ends. This paper uses an extreme case study of a profession in which chauvinism flourishes to examine organizations’ receptivity, at ‘shop-floor’ level, to neoconservative political ideologies and the restoration of patriarchy as an entry-route. Using Judith Butler’s work and psychoanalytical theory for theoretical inspiration we develop a theory of ‘chauvinizing’, i.e. the performative constitution of chauvinism. This incorporates a contrast between ‘old’ and ‘new’ chauvinism and the conscious and unconscious allure of misogynistic practices to practitioners. We argue that chauvinizing practices may offer neoconservatism both a means of entry into organizations and opposition to its infiltration. This paper contributes to political organization studies an understanding of how organizations may be permeated by unwelcome political activities, and a warning for organizations of the need for both wariness and strategies of resistance.

Accurate and reliable forecasting of cancellations is important for successful revenue management in the tourism industry. The objective of this study is to develop classification models to predict hotel booking cancellations. The work involves a number of key steps, such as data preprocessing to properly prepare the data; feature engineering to identify relevant attributes to help improve the predictive ability of the models; hyperparameter settings of the models, including choice of optimizers and incorporation of dropout layers to avoid overfitting in the neural networks; potential overfitting is evaluated using K‐fold cross‐validation; and performance is analysed using the confusion matrix and various performance metrics. The algorithms used are Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network, Radial Basis Function Neural Network, Deep Neural Network, Decision Tree Classifier, Random Forest Classifier, Ada Boost Classifier and XgBoost Classifier. Finally, the results of all models are compared, visualizing Deep Neural Network and XgBoost as the most suitable models for predicting hotel reservation cancellations.

Recently, commercial unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, have received substantial interest in public and civil environments because of their potential to deliver services and products. These are relatively new applications of drone technology. This study was conducted to understand people’s perspectives on the benefits, challenges, and attitudes towards the use of this technology for delivering these services in the UAE. We conducted a descriptive survey with 238 respondents who were students and employees at the University of Dubai and collected data using an online questionnaire. The present study reveals people’s perceptions of the benefits and risks of drone services. Additionally, this study gauged attitudes and concerns related to the use of drones. These results will enable scholars and decision-makers to conduct further investigations on the adoption of services delivered by drones.

Consistent with recent developments, we question the validity of trait neuroticism (N) and conscientiousness (C) as antecedents of psychological contract breach (PCB) and violation feelings. We investigate how key mediating (i.e., approach/avoidance goals) and moderating (i.e., emotion regulation strategies) mechanisms of the personality-PCB relationship operate over time. In Study 1 (550 observations), state N or C was associated positively with PCB and state N was associated positively with violation feelings. In study 2 (394 observations), state N was positively related to momentary avoidance goals, which in turn were related negatively to PCB and related positively to violation feelings. Moreover, suppression moderated the latter relationship; as suppression increased, the relationship between avoidance goals and violation feelings grew stronger. In contrast, state C was related positively to approach goals, which in turn were related positively to PCB and negatively to violation feelings. We discuss implications for theory and practice.

Although scholars and practitioners argue that organizations should provide justice information in the aftermath of a psychological contract breach (PC breach) to prevent or reduce violation feelings, it remains unclear whether that information should be provided within a few hours, days, or weeks following a PC breach. We estimated a 2-level time-lagged regression model on experience sampling data from 76 (226 observations), 70 (213 observations), and 70 (344 observations) employees with different intervals to test the durability of informational justice as a moderator on the PC breach-violation feelings relationship. We found that justice information should be provided in close temporal proximity (i.e., within the same day; Study 1) of PC breach to reduce violation feelings. In contrast, neither justice information provided the day (Study 2) or week (Study 3) after a PC breach successfully moderated the PC breach-violation feelings relationship. The current paper underscores the importance of being informationally just in close temporal proximity to a PC breach in line with resolution velocity as an indicator of the effectiveness of the recovery process. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

So-called “Hidden Champions”—little-known German companies that occupy global leadership positions in specific B2B markets—have received significant attention for their business acumen and ability to retain specialized workforces in predominantly rural areas. In this chapter we explore the extent to which humanistic leadership, focused on employees’ freedom and well-being, might be considered a core ingredient in this recipe. We begin by analysing the German business context in which the Hidden Champions phenomenon arose. Is the success of Hidden Champions driven primarily by the institutional and sociological context of the country or by the leadership styles of individual managers? Citing relevant German case study examples, we engage critically with discourse on “humanistic leadership”, discuss possible tensions between humanism and profitability, and reflect on the extent to which managers can and should convey normative ideas (i.e. preach).

Supply chain resilience is one of the most relevant topics of operations research and production management, which is aimed to risk mitigation in the global manufacturing, logistics, and trade. Conventional approach for resilient supply chain design involves the stochastic modeling and scenery-based description of anticipated failures in transportation networks. However, the stochastic approach can be insufficiently adequate in a situation of an unexpected failure or interruption. In this paper, we introduce the Reliable Production Process Design Problem (RPPDP), where the goal is to guarantee a suitable behaviour of the given highly distributed manufacturing system with respect to an (almost) arbitrary potential failure. This problem appears to be strongly NP-hard, similarly to the famous Constrained Shortest Path Tour and Shortest Simple Path with t Must Pass Nodes combinatorial problems. In order to find (close to) optimal solutions of the problem in question efficiently, we propose a compact Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) model and an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) based primal heuristic. Results of their extensive numerical evaluation on top of the Gurobi branching framework, against the instances derived from the PCGTSPLIB library show high performance of the proposed methods.

Given their need for social recognition, narcissists often engage in activities that are valued on social media. While communicating about such socially rewarding activities on social media—what we refer to as narcissistic content—has become common, little is known about how narcissists communicate and how this communication affects social media engagement. Using the hashtag #workout and a combination of application programming interface and human coders to generate a unique dataset of 1096 Instagram posts, we show that online communication style varies with the degree of narcissism and that such communication deeply shapes audiences’ engagement with narcissistic content. Further, we show that using more hashtags significantly increases low-level engagement, while using more emojis significantly increases high-level engagement when posted by a profile with a higher degree of narcissism. By shedding light on these overlooked aspects, we aim to guide both research and practice toward a more holistic understanding of narcissistic communication and its effects on social media.

We set out to investigate how organizations respond to the variety of requirements as experienced in their pluralizing institutional environments. We found that, in addition to acquiescence and compromise, Dutch vocational education and training (VET) organizations predominantly respond with cooperation and coordination strategies. Extensive multistage qualitative data analysis of 26 semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with management team (MT) members showed that cooperation and coordination are viable and effective response strategies to face a divergent and highly differentiated set of sometimes‐conflicting institutional requirements. Our study advances understanding of how organizations deploy strategic choice to arrive at their strategic responses. It offers organizational leaders, legislators, policymakers, and other constituents' insights into complex reality of how contemporary organizations actually relate to and act in their pluralizing institutional environments.

This study focuses on optimising sales of different brands of a single-product supply chain model that consists of several manufacturers and a retailer. The price and quality of the products drive competition between manufacturers who sell a single product through a retailer to the customers. This study aims at maximising the profit values of the retailer and manufacturers, simultaneously. Accordingly, four scenarios are defined with respect to the different contracts, including the cost sharing, profit sharing, revenue sharing, and buyback. Mean-variance risk management is applied to the proposed models. A full-refund return policy and warranty are also considered. A novel hybrid metaheuristic that combines the advantages of the group search optimiser (GSO) and human behaviour-based optimisation (HBBO) algorithms, entitled ‘GSO-HBBO’ algorithm is provided to find the high-quality solutions in fewer numbers of the iterations. The performance of the GSO-HBBO algorithm is compared with the GSO and HBBO algorithms based on different measures such as quality of the generated solutions and CPU-Time. The results show that the presented algorithm generates much better solutions than GSO and HBBO algorithms in a reasonable time. The managerial insights confirmed that the profit-sharing and buyback contracts make the most profit for both manufacturer and retailer.

This research aims to empirically determine the drivers of patient satisfaction with home health care services and to develop an instrument for measuring patient satisfaction in this context. The empirical study focuses on insulin and respiratory assistance therapies. Two large patient samples of a private home care provider in France are surveyed. Two distinct, yet complementary, analytical procedures are performed to maximize the validity and reliability of the results. We identify four core concepts (interpersonal relationship, support and guidance, delivery of consuma-bles, and equipment use) that play a key role in influencing patient satisfaction across the two therapies studied. The results also reveal that the relative role of each factor in driving overall patient satisfaction varies across these therapies, possibly due to differences in the characteristics of the therapies and related care services. Our empirical results enrich the existing literature, largely focused on hospital and primary care settings, by providing evidence to capture patient satisfaction drivers at the level of spec-ificity required to account for the unique context of home care services. The article's main theoretical contribution is to establish, from the patient's perspective, a core set of drivers that determine patient satisfaction in the context of home health care services. The instrument provides practitioners and policy makers with a practical tool that supports them in achieving patient satisfaction and in understanding why and how such satisfaction is achieved. The suitability of the patient satisfaction instrument to other forms of home care services needs examining.

Business schools, and universities providing business education, from across the globe have increasingly engaged in responsible management education (RME), that is in embedding social, environmental and ethical topics in their teaching and research. However, we still do not fully understand the institutional pressures that have led to the adoption of RME, in particular concerning under‐researched regions like Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Hence, we undertook what is to our knowledge the most comprehensive study into the adoption of RME in CEE to date (including 13 countries: Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine). We find that, with regard to RME, isomorphic pressures seem to shape teaching and research in different ways, which suggests that the idea of a holistic approach to RME, promoted by, for example, the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME), needs to be revisited; rather, different trajectories of organizational engagement may emerge for each principle. As a contribution to institutional theory, we discuss how a highly fragmented organizational field—like RME with its multiple dimensions—impacts on notions of actor centrality, where actors achieve centrality with regard to some dimensions of the field but fail to do so for others. In particular, we found that the European Union holds centrality in the area of RME teaching, but not in RME research. Our findings thus suggest that the concept of field centrality needs further clarification.

In this study, we employ pooled data from four rounds of Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) to examine whether, and to what extent, does the incidence of early marriage shape the married women’s perspectives on gender preference associated with reproduction. We employ a number of econometric techniques (Probit, OLS, Cox Hazard Model, IV Probit and treatment effects) and a large set of model specifications, and find significant evidence supporting the role of early marriage in perpetuating disproportionate preference for boys. Women who married before turning 18 not only state a greater desire for boys but are also less likely to stop reproduction as long as they do not have a boy. Early-age marriage is associated with 7.7–12.5 per cent higher incidence of fertility discontinuation among women without a son. This son-preferring behaviour is stronger at higher birth order and also reflects in differential spacing patterns. Women’s education appears to be the strongest channel through which these effects are mediated. The divergence between early- and late-marrying women appears to have sharpened over time. The findings of this study underscore the role played by early marriage in altering the gender-specific attitudes prevalent in the society, and highlight existing gender inequality traps.