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1 – 10 of 189Aashish Garg, Pankaj Misra, Sanjay Gupta, Pooja Goel and Mohd Saleem
Spiritual tourism is becoming a significant growth area of the Indian travel market, with more Indians opting to go on pilgrimage to popular religious cities. There are many…
Abstract
Purpose
Spiritual tourism is becoming a significant growth area of the Indian travel market, with more Indians opting to go on pilgrimage to popular religious cities. There are many spiritual destinations where some of this life's essences can be sought to enjoy harmony and peace. The study aims to prioritize motivators driving the intentions of the tourists to visit the spiritual destination.
Design/methodology/approach
The current study applied the analytical hierarchical process, a multi-criteria decision-making technique, on the sample of visitors from all the six spiritual destinations to rank the motivational factors that drive the intentions of the tourist to visit a spiritual destination.
Findings
The study's results postulated that spiritual fulfillment motives and destination atmosphere are the top prioritized motivations, while destination attributes and secular motives emerged as the least prioritized.
Practical implications
The research study provides valuable insights to the spiritual tourism industry stakeholders to target the tourists' highly prioritized motivations to augment the visits to a particular spiritual destination.
Originality/value
Previous research has explored the motivations and modeled their relationships with tourists' satisfaction and intentions. But, the present study has applied a multi-criteria decision-making technique to add value to the existing knowledge base.
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Ahmad Hakimi Tajuddin, Shabiha Akter, Rasidah Mohd-Rashid and Waqas Mehmood
The purpose of this study is to examine the associations between board size, board independence and triple bottom line (TBL) reporting. The TBL report consists of three…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the associations between board size, board independence and triple bottom line (TBL) reporting. The TBL report consists of three components, namely, environmental, social and economic indices.
Design/methodology/approach
This study’s sample consists of top 50 listed companies from the year 2017 to 2019 on Tadawul Stock Exchange. Ordinary least squares, quantile least squares and robust least squares are used to investigate the associations between board characteristics and TBL reporting, including its separate components.
Findings
The authors find a significant negative association between TBL reporting and board independence. Social bottom line is significantly and negatively related to board size and board independence. Results indicate that board independence negatively influences the TBL disclosure of companies. Therefore, companies are encouraged to embrace TBL reporting. This suggests that businesses should improve the quality of their reporting while ensuring that voluntary disclosures reflect an accurate and fair view in order to preserve a positive relationship with stakeholders.
Originality/value
The present study explains the evidence for the determinants of the TBL in Saudi Arabia.
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Waqas Mehmood, Rasidah Mohd-Rashid, Ahmad Hakimi Tajuddin and Hassan Mujtaba Nawaz Saleem
This study aims to investigate the effect of Shariah-compliant status and Shariah regulation on initial public offering (IPO) underpricing in Pakistan.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the effect of Shariah-compliant status and Shariah regulation on initial public offering (IPO) underpricing in Pakistan.
Design/methodology/approach
Besides the ordinary least square’s method, this study used quantile least squares as a robust approach and stepwise regression for further analysis to investigate the underpricing phenomenon in Pakistan. Data of 84 IPOs listed on Pakistan Stock Exchange from January 2000 to December 2018 were collected to determine the impact of Shariah-compliant status and Shariah regulation on IPO underpricing.
Findings
Results of the study show that Shariah-compliant status has a negative relationship but Shariah regulation has a positive relationship with IPO underpricing. Hence, it is contended that Shariah-compliant firms have lower asset volatility and uncertainty than non-Shariah-compliant firms because of less information asymmetry, resulting in lower underpricing. These Shariah-compliant firms provide signals of high-quality IPOs as they must comply with the strict guidelines issued by the Securities Exchange Commission of Pakistan in addition to being considered as amicable by investors. Further, this study suggests that investors are more attracted to Shariah-compliant firms than non-Shariah-compliant ones.
Research limitations/implications
This study’s offers limited consideration of nonfinancial and financial characteristics that could influence the decision of investors to subscribe to IPOs. Besides, future studies could consider the screening benchmarks; for instance, debt and cash may explain the intensity of IPO initial return in Pakistan.
Originality/value
The present work empirically investigated the influence of Shariah-compliant status and Shariah regulation on IPO underpricing in Pakistan’s IPO market, which has been scarcely covered in the existing literature.
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Mohd Tariq Jamal, Imran Anwar, Nawab Ali Khan and Imran Saleem
A sudden shift of work from the office to home amid global lockdown demands exploration of factors that facilitate or obstruct remote working and their impact on practical and…
Abstract
Purpose
A sudden shift of work from the office to home amid global lockdown demands exploration of factors that facilitate or obstruct remote working and their impact on practical and psychological outcomes for the employee when individual mandatorily telecommutes full-time with no prior experience of the same. Based on job demands and resources model (JD-R), the present study explores the role of certain job demands and resources on negative and positive outcomes through mediating role of strain and well-being, respectively.
Design/methodology/approach
A data sample of 371 IT sector employees was collected and confirmatory factor analysis model was run to assess the model fit indices, convergent and divergent validities of the data. While proposed hypotheses of the study were tested using structural equations modeling (SEM) technique.
Findings
It was found that workload pressure, task interdependence, professional isolation and family interference in work lead to exhaustion and further stress, whereas the presence of autonomy and schedule flexibility and sufficient technology resources improve employee work-life balance and further better productivity and performance and job satisfaction. Improved well-being was also found to reduce stress for full-time telecommuters.
Practical implications
This study provides implications that will help in doing away with exhaustion and stress for employees and ensure business continuity in emergencies like COVID-19 pandemic.
Originality/value
There are no past instances of mandatory full-time telecommuting arrangement by organizations, and researchers never had the opportunity to study it. This research, based on the JD-R model provides for the first time empirical insights into the experiences of mandatory full-time telecommuting during COVID-19 induced lockdown.
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Abbas Zare-ee, Zuraidah Mohd Don and Iman Tohidian
University students' ratings of teaching and teachers' performance are used in many parts of the world for the evaluation of faculty members at colleges and universities. Even…
Abstract
University students' ratings of teaching and teachers' performance are used in many parts of the world for the evaluation of faculty members at colleges and universities. Even though these ratings receive mixed reviews, there is little conclusive evidence on the role of the intervening variable of teacher and student gender in these ratings. Possible influences resulting from gender-related differences in different socio-cultural contexts, especially where gender combination in student and faculty population is not proportionate, have not been adequately investigated in previous research. This study aimed to examine Iranian university students' ratings of the professional performance of male and female university teachers and to explore the differences in male and female university students' evaluation of teachers of the same or opposite gender. The study was a questionnaire-based cross-sectional survey with a total of 800 randomly selected students in their different years of undergraduate study (307 male and 493 female students, reflecting the proportion of male and female students in the university) from different faculties at the University of Kashan, Iran. The participants rated male and female teachers’ performance in observing university regulations, relationship with colleagues, and relationships with students. The researchers used descriptive statistics, means comparison inferential statistics and focus-group interview data to analyze and compare the students’ ratings. The results of one-sample t-test, independent samples t-test, and Chi-square analyses showed that a) overall, male university teachers received significantly higher overall ratings in all areas than female teachers; b) male students rated male teachers significantly higher than female students did; and c) female students assigned a higher overall mean rating to male teachers than to female teachers but this mean difference was not significant. These results are studied in relation to the findings in the related literature and indicate that gender can be an important intervening variable in university students' evaluation of faculty members.
Raida Abu Bakar, Rosmawani Che Hashim, Sharmila Jayasingam, Safiah Omar and Norizah Mohd Mustamil
Khalid Farooq, Mohd Yusoff Yusliza, Zikri Muhammad, Muhamad Khalil Omar and Nik Hazimah Nik Mat
Successfully fostering employee ecological behaviors can reduce the environmental impacts of an organization while boosting performance. This paper aims to investigate the factors…
Abstract
Purpose
Successfully fostering employee ecological behaviors can reduce the environmental impacts of an organization while boosting performance. This paper aims to investigate the factors and organizational strategies for employees to engage in ecological behaviors.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses a qualitative method. Academicians from four top-ranked research universities from Malaysia participated in semi-structured interviews.
Findings
The in-depth analysis of the interviews identified several factors (environmental attitude, feedback, green self-efficacy, leadership role, organizational culture and employee empowerment) and strategies (incentives; top management support; creating environmental knowledge and awareness; rules and regulations; and sustainability advocates) for promoting ecological behavior in the workplace.
Research limitations/implications
This study was limited to Malaysian public research universities. Future research could investigate additional variables that might influence employee ecological behavior. Implications include policymaking, which emphasizes boosting environmental factors among academicians.
Originality/value
Research studies on employee ecological behavior are minimal. This research contributes to the literature by discussing how different stimuli and strategies are used in the top four-ranked green universities of Malaysia for ecological behavior in the workplace.
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Mohd Nasir, Mohd Adil and Aruna Dhamija
Under a dynamic business environment that is seen today, organizations need to adopt the right blend of strategies to attract, retain and maintain customers. Extant marketing…
Abstract
Purpose
Under a dynamic business environment that is seen today, organizations need to adopt the right blend of strategies to attract, retain and maintain customers. Extant marketing literature has shed light on some key roles that after-sale service and the larger customer support system could play in attaining the same. Specifically, this paper aims to attempt to model the linkages between after-sales service, service quality, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and word of mouth (WOM).
Design/methodology/approach
A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 280 two-wheeler owners, who had a recent experience of after sales service at their respective authorized service centers, through purposive sampling method.
Findings
The findings reveal that both customer loyalty and repurchase intention significantly and positively mediate the relationship between customer satisfaction and word of mouth. This indicates that satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal to the service firms and would spontaneously engage themselves with positive word of mouth.
Originality/value
Despite the increasing importance of after-sales service, empirical researches on this subject have been quite limited. This study aims at filling the void in extant literature by examining the inter-relationships between after-sales service, service quality, customer satisfaction and WOM.
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Muhammad Izzul Syahmi, Mohammad Taqiuddin Mohamad and Mohd Anuar Ramli
There are two purposes to this study: first, to identify the status of ḥiyal (legal devices) in the offering of deposit products based on the tawarruq contract in the Malaysian…
Abstract
Purpose
There are two purposes to this study: first, to identify the status of ḥiyal (legal devices) in the offering of deposit products based on the tawarruq contract in the Malaysian Islamic banking industry and second, to identify the reasons for the widespread offering of tawarruq-based deposit products by Malaysian Islamic banks (IBs).
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses the qualitative method that involved interviews with Malaysian Sharī‘ah experts and Islamic banking operations experts.
Findings
The findings show that Malaysian IBs resolved to use the tawarruq munaẓẓam contract in deposit products due to several constraints in the existing banking system and in view of customer preferences.
Research limitations/implications
This study solely focuses on tawarruq-based deposit products due to its extensive application in the Malaysian Islamic banking industry.
Practical implications
The implication of the study is that more stringent procedures are required in the offering of tawarruq-based deposit products as they are extensively utilised and have sparked controversy among Sharī‘ah scholars. Moreover, to retain Malaysia's Islamic banking reputation and trustworthiness, new and less controversial contracts must be developed.
Originality/value
This paper discusses the extensive usage of ḥiyal-based contracts such as tawarruq in Islamic banking institutions' deposit products, with justifications from Malaysian Islamic banking experts. The widespread use of the tawarruq munaẓẓam contract in deposit-based product offerings is based on a reasonable view considering the constraints that Malaysian Islamic banking is currently facing, with strict operation procedures by Bank Negara Malaysia to ensure real operations and to avoid fictitious elements. This paper reveals the use of tawarruq munaẓẓam in deposit products which allows the Islamic banking industry to operate effectively under Malaysia's dominant conventional banking system.
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Jianming Wang, Ninh Nguyen, Xinru (Angie) Jiang, Hoang Viet Nguyen and Muhammad Abid Saleem
COVID-19 and its measures such as physical distancing have shifted consumer payment behaviors toward cashless payment. Physical distancing is likely to remain a norm for some time…
Abstract
Purpose
COVID-19 and its measures such as physical distancing have shifted consumer payment behaviors toward cashless payment. Physical distancing is likely to remain a norm for some time to come and will be relevant in any future pandemics. This study aims to examine the impact of consumers’ perceived value of cashless payment on their use intention in the physical distancing context, with the mediating role of psychological safety and the moderating role of trust propensity.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used a survey method to obtain data from 690 consumers in an Asian emerging market, i.e. Vietnam. The data were analyzed using different statistical methods, including structural equation modeling.
Findings
Results show that perceived value of cashless payment positively affects use intention, and this effect is mediated by psychological safety. Furthermore, trust propensity has a positive moderating effect on the link between perceived value and psychological safety.
Practical implications
This study’s findings provide implications for retailers and other stakeholders in implementing and promoting cashless payment systems, especially in the physical distancing context.
Originality/value
This study is among the first attempt to explain the relationships between consumers’ perceptions, feelings of psychological safety and use intention toward cashless payment in the physical distancing context. The study’s findings may also be relevant to any future pandemics.
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