A quantitative survey with 164 employees of a town hall in Switzerland reveals that only 35 HR practices out of 150 are linked to employee commitment. HR practices are more linked to normative commitment than to affective or continuance commitment. Normative commitment depends on employees’ job and work relations, and to indirect compensation. Affective commitment also depends on the job and work relations, and on vertical communication, but not on indirect compensation. Continuation commitment is negatively linked to hiring, performance management and work place. Performance management, training & development and career have no positive impact. Our results complement research but also differ from other studies since HR practices’ impact on commitment depends on the organizational activity/business and culture as well as on local culture.
While paradoxical tensions may induce anxiety and slower decision-making they also live at the heart of the creative process. Paradox theory scholars suggest that the key to unlocking the innovative potential of these tensions lies in the paradoxical thinking abilities of individuals. In the context of innovation projects, however, the optimal distribution of paradox mindsets within the project team is an open question. First, our findings show that teams that simultaneously engage in exploration and exploitation activities experience higher levels of paradoxical tensions. Second, we find that teams that exhibit greater paradox mindset diversity across their members were able to leverage paradoxical tensions and create more innovative solutions, while teams with low paradox mindset diversity were negatively impacted by these tensions.
This study aims to explore whether the time-money constraint in tourism can be exerted to foster unconventional social innovation in the tourism industry. This study builds its conceptual framework upon the concept of time banking as an alternative currency in spurring social innovation in the tourism economy. To explore the applicability of the concept in tourism, we investigated the intentions and needs of the supplier and consumer sides through interviews and focus groups. To explore the entrepreneurial perspective three in-depth interviews were conducted respectively with the co-founder of TimeRepublik, an independent social entrepreneur, and a sharing economy specialist. Three focus groups were also conducted to evaluate and elaborate the practical appliance of the framework from a user’s point of view. We found that using time as a measure of work shows a potential to reconcile the time-money constraint especially for disadvantaged groups. However, this study has exposed discrepancies between the intentions and the needs of the social entrepreneurs and the users, undermining the feasibility of the concept in the tourism context. Namely, the challenges included the value of time, trust and relationship building, and network effects and scaling. As long as the innovation is unable to achieve inclusive and sustainable growth building upon its social values, the lack of users’ support will only lead to selected and limited application of the concept in tourism and therefore fails to generate social benefits on a larger scale.
The current architecture for VANET related services relies on a Client-Server approach and leads to numerous drawbacks, such as network congestion due to the bottleneck problem or, more importantly, data privacy concerns. Indeed, because of the network topology, traffic must go through nodes which limit the bandwidth and thus bound the overall network capacity. Finally, user data is collected and stored in servers, used by third party services. However, these providers are known to treat lightly user privacy by selling or using the data for their own purposes (Beresford and Stajano, 2004). By use of a decentralized and distributed communication protocol (i.e. D2D), one can overcome these problems by spreading the communication burden to all nodes in the mesh. By means of cryptographic techniques, we can ensure that the shared data is secured and controlled at the end-user side. This paper presents a study and proposes a proof of concept of a decentralized and distributed information system by means of a dynamic navigation system for VANET, using a low-cost solution such as Wifi or LTE-direct new 3GPPP protocol. This system preserves user privacy and is augmented with forensics capabilities.
Intra-family moral hazard refers to the disincentive for informal caregivers to provide care to their dependent relatives in the presence of long-term care (LTC) insurance. This article uses crosssectional data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) database to test the effect of both public and private LTC insurance on the reception of informal care in Italy and Spain. The results support the hypothesis of intra-family moral hazard for Spain in the case of public LTC insurance while they reject it for Italy. They confirm recent theoretical findings showing that fixed insurance benefits provide much less disincentives to offer informal care than proportional insurance benefits.
Cet article analyse la structure du secteur des PME sous-traitantes de l’industrie horlogère franco-suisse, sa chaîne de valeur et ses acteurs-clés. Il explore les relations des PME de la sous-traitance avec leurs grands clients en termes d’innovation, de qualité, de prix, de communication et de partenariat. La méthodologie est basée sur une méthode mixte : une étude qualitative réalisée auprès de 19 PME sous-traitantes de divers métiers et analysée au moyen d’une approche thématique, ainsi qu’une étude quantitative en ligne administrée à une base de données de 456 PME sous-traitantes identifiées dans le secteur horloger. Une grille REL-PERF (Lages & al.: 2008) est mobilisée et validée. Cette recherche met en lumière les pratiques de ces PME sous-traitantes selon leurs stratégies et activités en matière de marketing et de vente ; leur spécificité est celle d’un marketing relationnel activant des réseaux personnels et professionnels. Cet article suggère des pistes pour que ces PME deviennent de véritables co-traitantes pour accroître leur pouvoir de négociation face à leurs grands clients: les marques horlogères.
