Business Commons^™

Business Confidence And Tax Reform Key To Turnbull Government Re-Election: Ceda, Stephen Martin

Sydney Business School - Papers

If the Malcolm Turnbull-led government wins over business and brings to the table a strong economic agenda it will be returned to office, albeit with a reduced majority, the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia's 2016 Economic and Political Overview predicts.

Workplace Wellbeing Programs: If You Build It They May Not Come...Because It's Not What They Really Need!, Gordon B. Spence

Sydney Business School - Papers

Public and private sector interest in employee wellbeing has grown steadily in the past 20 years. Arguably the most visible manifestation of this interest is workplace health promotion and wellbeing (WorkWell) programs, which can be found in various guises within many contemporary organisations. Despite their recent proliferation, research in this area has focused mainly on how participation in these programs impacts upon a narrow range of factors related to finance (e.g. health care costs) and productivity (e.g. absenteeism). Whilst the focus of these programs is invariably positive (insofar as they aim to improve physical, psychological and social functioning), it cannot …

Coaching - Experiences Of Pluralism In A Young Discipline, Grace Mccarthy

Sydney Business School - Papers

This paper explores the cross-disciplinary approaches adopted in coaching research, coaching education and coaching practice. Coaching is a young discipline which has attracted researchers and practitioners from a variety of different disciplines and professions. Focusing on coaching in organisational contexts, the paper explores the research approaches adopted in the papers published in two peer-reviewed journals dedicated to coaching research, the International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Research, and Coaching: an International Journal of Coaching Theory, Research and Practice. The paper next examines the curriculum content and pedagogical approaches in selected postgraduate coaching programs. Finally the paper looks at some of …

The Australian Retirement Lottery: A System Failure, Amandha Ganegoda, John Evans

Sydney Business School - Papers

The purpose of this paper is to assess the adequacy of the Australian retirement system to fund the needs of retirees by taking into account both the Knightian risk arising from market volatility under normal market conditions as well as the Knightian uncertainty arising from rare but severe market shocks. We have also taken into account changes in employment during the pre-retirement phase. Given the low frequency, high impact of market shocks, the result is that cohorts of Australian retirees will enjoy very different levels of retirement income and there will be consequent shocks to the demand for the Age …

Avenues To Sustainable Road Transport Energy In New Zealand, Geoffrey D. Kelly

Sydney Business School - Papers

Reduction of the energy use and emissions associated with the provision of transport services is one of the most challenging areas of energy policy. This arises both from the pervasive nature of transport use in modern society, and its dependence on the most limited of fossil fuels. Advances in renewable energy utilisation offer an avenue by which this may be addressed, including the possibility of achieving fully sustainable transport energy supply. The paper considers what potential exists for sustainable road transport energy in New Zealand. That country already has high renewable energy utilisation, but also a high per capita transport …

Awakening Giant: International Business In China Growth, Opportunities And Challenges, Ananda Wickramasinghe, Alberto Ordigoni

Sydney Business School - Papers

This paper analyses China's growth through a developmental state framework, taking into account the positive role of the state in deliberately fostering a strategic industrial policy, with the aim of creating a process of rapid industrialisation and overcoming structural and technological constraints. It is argued that China growth has been achieved through a strong industrial policy implemented by state intervention in a way similar to other late-industrialised East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. In particular, there are three main features in Chinese development typical of a developmental state policy: the constant control by the …

Preliminary Development And Validation Of A New End-Of-Life Patient-Reported Outcome Measure Assessing The Ability Of Patients To Finalise Their Affairs At The End Of Life, N Mccaffrey, Pawel Skuza, Katrina Breaden, Simon Eckermann, Janet Hardy, Sheila Oaten, Michael Briffa, David Currow

Sydney Business School - Papers

Introduction: The ability of patients to finalise their affairs at the end of life is an often neglected aspect of quality of life (QOL) measurement in palliative care effectiveness research despite compelling evidence of the high value patients place on this domain.

Objective: This paper describes the preliminary development and evaluation of a new, single-item, end-of-life patient-reported outcome measure (EOLPRO) designed to capture changes in the ability of patients to finalise their affairs at the end of life.

Methods: Cognitive interviews with purposively sampled Australian palliative care patients (N=9) were analysed thematically to explore content validity. Simultaneously, secondary analysis of …

Managing Sub-Branding Affect Transfer: The Role Of Consideration Set Size And Brand Loyalty, Yi He, Qimei Chen, Wing Yin Leona Tam, Ruby Lee

Sydney Business School - Papers

Although the essential role of affect transfer has been evidenced in the brand extension literature, scant research has focused on affect transfer when a firm attempts to add sub-brands into its brand portfolio. We conducted a series of four experiments to demonstrate that affect associated with a family brand does in fact transfer to its sub-brand, and the effect is more pronounced for a sub-brand that is closer to (vs distant from) its family brand. Further, the transfer of affect is contingent upon consideration set size and brand loyalty. While affect transfer is observed when consideration set is small, this …

Mixed Methods To The Rescue: Addressing The Problem Of Employee Turnover Using Marital Research, Irit Alony, Helen M. Hasan, Andrew J. Sense

Sydney Business School - Papers

Decades of turnover research have identified sets of factors that lead to voluntary employee separation. However, the predictive power of existing turnover models is extremely limited, and does not go far beyond 30%. In contrast, marital research has developed a MMR tool for predicting dissolution which has an accuracy of over 90%, based on a couple's reflections on their past. This paper presents this complex prediction method in current MMR terms, and details the process of adjusting it into employment setting. The paper presents the main issues to consider when adjusting this tool, and provides a detailed description of the …

Leaders As Team Coaches? Insights From An Australian Study, Julia Ahrens, Grace Mccarthy

Sydney Business School - Papers

We will draw on recent findings from a study with 580 managers in Australia on team coaching from a managerial perspective. Managers who coach their teams are seen as part of the team instead of being on a superior level. By using coaching skills, a more collaborative, trusting environment is created in which teams feel empowered and engaged, and deliver results. These positive outcomes can have a positive impact on team members, the manager and the whole organisation. The study also revealed potential shortcomings of the coaching approach e.g. the difficulty of balancing coaching with other leadership styles. Future studies …

Detecting The Work Of Essay Mills And File Swapping Sites: Some Clues They Leave Behind, Ann M. Rogerson

Sydney Business School - Papers

Essay mills are commercial enterprises delivering assessable work on a fee-for-service basis. File-swapping sites encourage students to upload graded work and institutional materials to exchange for work or solutions submitted by others. The number of both types of sites continues to grow, indicating the issue is unlikely to disappear. Plagiarism preventative measures such as promoting academic integrity practices, and including recent real-world events in assessment design do not provide a disincentive to stop students purchasing or repurposing assignments due to the seemingly low risk of detection. This paper summarises the results of a content analysis study of detailed interview notes …

Training For The Leader As Coach In The Australian Context, Julia Ahrens, Grace Mccarthy

Sydney Business School - Papers

This paper looks at how Australian managers perceive the training they receive from their organisations in order to meet increasing expectations that they coach their employees. 580 managers in Australian organisations provided information regarding their coaching training experiences, and that which they would ideally like to obtain, from their organisation. The level of coaching training varied widely from coaching-specific training to no preparation at all. Any training provided was generic coaching training. From our findings we see a distinct need for tailored and more detailed training opportunities for managers, a more structured and coordinated approach to within-organisation coaching initiatives.

A New Model For Ranking Suppliers In The Presence Of Both Undesirable And Non-Discretionary Outputs, Abdollah Noorizadeh, Reza Farzipoor Saen, Mahdi Mahdiloo

Sydney Business School - Papers

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) can be used for supplier selection problem due to its multiple criteria nature. In suppliers' evaluation, there might be some factors, which are beyond the control of their management, that are needed to be modelled in an appropriate way. Also, there are some situations in which some factors are undesirable and they are favourable to be decreased. The aim of this paper is to propose a model for evaluation of suppliers' performance in the presence of both undesirable and non-discretionary outputs. This model can rank efficient suppliers by a super-efficiency DEA model. A numerical example has …

Improving National Hospice/Palliative Care Service Symptom Outcomes Systematically Through Point-Of-Care Data Collection, Structured Feedback And Benchmarking, David Currow, Samuel Allingham, Patsy Yates, Claire Johnson, Katherine Clark, Kathy Eagar

Sydney Business School - Papers

Purpose Every health care sector including hospice/palliative care needs to systematically improve services using patient-defined outcomes. Data from the national Australian Palliative Care Outcomes Collaboration aims to define whether hospice/palliative care patients' outcomes and the consistency of these outcomes have improved in the last 3 years.

Methods Data were analysed by clinical phase (stable, unstable, deteriorating, terminal). Patient-level data included the Symptom Assessment Scale and the Palliative Care Problem Severity Score. Nationally collected point-of-care data were anchored for the period July-December 2008 and subsequently compared to this baseline in six 6-month reporting cycles for all services that submitted data in …

Communication Accommodation To Achieve Research Student Autonomy, Grace Mccarthy, Rodney Clarke, Ann M. Rogerson

Sydney Business School - Papers

Universities throughout the world are grappling with ways to improve the quality of research supervision and thereby improve successful completion rates. Much effort has been spent on defining the research skills students are expected to develop and how to assist students improve them, e.g. Willison (2012). The concept of developing researcher autonomy has also been the focus of research, e.g. Gurr (2011). As supervisors, we help our students become skilled autonomous researchers through discussions and feedback, in other words, through our communication skills. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) can be applied in …

David Clutterbuck, Mentoring And Coaching: A Commentary, Grace Mccarthy

Sydney Business School - Papers

David Clutterbuck has made tremendous contributions to both coaching and mentoring theory and practice over the past three decades. One of the pleasures of reading David Clutterbuck's work is that he communicates clearly without jargon, a tribute perhaps to his journalistic background. He captures what is known or believed about a topic at the time and is not afraid to say that things have changed or that his predictions have not yet come to pass. By articulating the conceptions of coaching and mentoring at a particular point in time, Clutterbuck allows us to recognise the changes that take place over …

The Australian Corporate Closet, Why It's Still So Full: A Review Of Incidence Rates For Sexual Orientation Discrimination Gender Identity Discrimination In The Workplace, Ian Smith, Lindsay G. Oades, Grace Mccarthy

Sydney Business School - Papers

The paper reviews the extant Australian literature on sexual orientation (SO) discrimination within the Australian workplace. In the research, there is variation in organisational workplace and a bias towards health and educational sectors as a research setting, which raises some methodological considerations such as poor generalisability to other organisational contexts. The small body of Australian research into SO discrimination encompasses; (i) varied methodological and theoretical approaches, (ii) disparate authors selecting a varied range of aspects of discrimination thus absenting a unifying framework to guide research and lacking as yet seminal authorship providing focus, iii) limited sampling of participants making comparisons …

Insights Into Mature Consumers Of Financial Services, Trenton Milner, Daniela Rosenstreich

Sydney Business School - Papers

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate psychographic, demographic and situational characteristics of Baby Boomer generation consumers, specifically in relation to their consumption of financial services.

Design/methodology/approach: A survey was pre-tested and 776 responses (77.6 per cent response rate) were subjected to correlation and ANOVA analysis. The survey covered a wide range of variables for decision making for financial services, including situational, demographic, and psychographic.

Findings: Consumers who scored higher on scales for competitiveness and need for material resources tended to have higher incomes. Mature consumers were likely to face major life events involving their children and parents, …

Managerial Coaching: Challenges, Opportunities And Training, Grace Mccarthy, Julia Milner

Sydney Business School - Papers

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the growing practice of managerial coaching. Much of the coaching literature is set in the context of an external coach coming into an organisation. However managers are increasingly being expected to coach their employees, a change in role which can create tensions. Design/methodology/approach - This paper examines the literature on coaching managers. The paper also discusses practical implications for coach training. Findings - This paper identifies key differences in the issues faced by coaching managers and by internal/external coaches and recognises the importance of adequate training of managers …

Critical Incidents In Cross-Cultural Coaching: The View From German Coaches, Julia Milner, Esther Ostmeier, Ronald Franke

Sydney Business School - Papers

The importance of a cultural perspective in coaching is increasingly significant for coaching practitioners and academics living in a globalised world. The question remains as to how the coaching methods rooted in the Western approach can be applied in the context of other (national) cultures. Using semi-structured interviews and based on the critical incidents technique, fifteen German coaching experts were interviewed to determine those critical incidents they experienced in cross-cultural coaching settings. The results show incidents in four main areas: communication, coach-client relationship, coaching setting and role understanding. These are aimed at improving outcomes but not at the expense of …

Innovation In Small And Medium-Sized Wood-Furniture Firms In Central Java, Indonesia, Amie Kusumawardhani, Grace Mccarthy

Sydney Business School - Papers

The aim of this paper is to explore the perception of innovation within Indonesian SMEs in the wood-furniture industry in Central Java, Indonesia. Qualitative research was employed by interviewing SMEs managers/owners. The study showed that SMEs' perception of innovation was not necessarily related to 'newness' or 'novelty' as suggested by some scholars. The innovation carried out by the majority of SMEs in this study is likely to be considered as incremental innovation. The characteristics of the wood-furniture industry and SMEs are believed to contribute to the different perspectives concerning innovation than those reported in the literature. Even so, they are …

Linking The Principles Of Supply Chain Management To Aid And Development: A Case Study - Waters Of Ayole', Mark Edwards, Lee Styger

Sydney Business School - Papers

The current protocols used in humanitarian aid management date back to the 1970's. Since the introduction of these protocols, there is little evidence to suggest that a paradigm improvement in overall efficiency has occurred in humanitarian aid compared for example, to industrial process improvements within the same time frame. Fundamentally, humanitarian aid is an end-to-end process demonstrating similar aspects to any other business organisation (for profit or not). This raises the possibility that the use of supply chain theories, including the Supply Chain Operating Reference (SCOR), are relevant and can play a part in developing initiatives to improve the end-to-end …

A Review Of Consumer Decision-Making Models And Development Of A New Model For Financial Services, Trenton Milner, Daniela Rosenstreich

Sydney Business School - Papers

It is recognised that existing theories of Consumer Decision Making (CDM) are not well suited for financial services and there have been calls for development of a new conceptual model. This article reviews prominent models of CDM and identifies strengths and limitations. A new conceptual model that is applicable to financial services is developed. An important element of the model is the recognition that the components interact rather than a consumer following a linear progression through a series of stages. The new model better reflects the iterative decision-making process relevant to financial services and enhances marketers' understanding of the process …

Why Do Women Vote For Women: An Exploration Of Decision Criteria In The Australian 2010 Federal Election, Diann Rodgers-Healey

Sydney Business School - Papers

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore if women who are in positions of leadership are influenced by gender when voting for a party led by a female candidate and if perceptions of the media's portrayal of a woman candidate influences the voting preferences of women leaders.

Design/methodology/approach - The paper reports the results of an online survey of women leaders to provide a pre-election analysis about how they would vote and what was influencing their vote for Gillard, if they chose to vote for her. Data were analysed using Content Analysis and Descriptive Statistical Analysis.

Findings …

The Palliative Care Phase Assessment In Practice, Sabina P. Clapham, Maree Banfield

Sydney Business School - Papers

PCOC is a national approach towards the routine assessment in palliative care practice using standardised assessment tools.

Security Without Secrecy? Counter-Terrorism, Asio And Access To Information, Mark Rix

Sydney Business School - Papers

The Foreign Office declined to disclose the reasons for deciding that specific files should be withheld, with the result that the reason for the continuing secrecy is itself ... a secret.

An Identification Of The Current Constraints Of Knowledge Business Modelling As A Strategic Decision Making Tool, Lee Styger

Sydney Business School - Papers

Business models are widely used and it might be argued, have an important role to play in assisting users to develop, plan and analyse their organisations better. Typically, many business models are however poorly understood and executed by their users. This often leads to inappropriate decision making and the wrong strategic direction being implemented. There are complex and interrelated factors for the poor execution of business modelling, however, some of the key influencing factors include, lack of training, a disassociation of the graphical representation from the narrative, and the lack of formal rules in the use of the business models. …

Public Interest Litigation: Making The Case In Australia, Andrea Durbach, Luke Mcnamara, Simon Rice, Mark Rix

Sydney Business School - Papers

Litigation is widely and appropriately recognised as an important component of the public interest advocacy 'toolkit'. Yet, little attention has been paid in Australian research and scholarship to an important question: under what circumstances is public interest litigation (PIL) an effective way to bring about progressive social change? Informed by a review of the international literature on PIL, the authors of this article argue for the importance of drawing on Australia's rich history with PIL to develop a solid empirical evidence base which can inform future decision about the strategic employment of PIL in campaigns to address the concerns and …

Airline Innovation And Sustainability: A Systems Perspective, Peter Critchley, Lee Styger

Sydney Business School - Papers

Air transport has been the scene of remarkable and rapid innovation since man first controlled powered flight in Kitty Hawk in 1903. Significant developments in aviation technology, for example, the onset of the Jet Age, tend to dominate popular perception of aviation innovation. The commercial airline industry is hugely complex and inexorably tied to our economic, social and technological systems. Consequently, it is also on the leading edge of the sustainability debate. Modern air transportation has developed into a hugely complex system in a relatively short time. That rapid development and complexity, however, offers insights into how the industry can …

Reasserting Freedom? Response To The Prevent Agenda By The Uk Coalition Government, Mark Rix, Nick Johns, Alison Green

Sydney Business School - Papers

In the UK the New Labour government under Tony Blair bought into the 'War on Terror' declared by George Bush Junior in 2001 the consequences for the general public was a significant loss of civil liberties that was supposedly justified by the enhanced degree of risk. In opposition the Conservatives argued that this loss was unacceptable and that on a sliding scale of freedom and security, freedom should always take priority as the fundamental political principle. In power from 2010 alongside their Liberal Democrat partners, they sought to return what had been lost, and to rebalance the scales. One of …