Business Commons^™

Climate Change Policy: Actions And Barriers In New Zealand, Geoff Kelly

Sydney Business School - Papers

The success of global negotiations in structuring a new broadly based agreement towards greenhouse emission reduction will be much influenced by the extent to which developed countries have met their commitments under the current Kyoto agreement. It is apparent however that many developed countries have failed to reduce their emissions, and it is important to understand why this has been so. The paper examines the case of one such developed country, New Zealand, and the factors which have helped shape its climate policy implementation. While New Zealand’s emissions have risen, few substantive steps have been taken to counter them in …

Employee Wellbeing In Australian Organisations - A Snapshot Of Current Practices, Grace Mccarthy, Shamika Almeida, Julia Ahrens

Sydney Business School - Papers

Research has shown that employee wellbeing is associated with a range of positive outcomes such as reduced stress and improved productivity. The aim was to assess the nature and prevalence of wellbeing programs in Australian organisations. An email invitation was sent to 3471 HR professionals in Australia of whom 313 responded to the online survey (9%). Findings indicate that this small subset of Australian HR professionals consider that the benefits of well-being programs outweigh the costs and have a variety of initiatives in place which contribute to employee wellbeing. However, the low response rate may suggest that many organisations do …

Interconnection Between Motives And Performances Of Internationalisation Processes, Ty T. Choi

Sydney Business School - Papers

Over the last thirty years, scholars vigorously attempted to theorise internationalisation of the firm based on analysis of firms’ internationalisation processes. Many studies attempt to explain the motives of firms’ decisions to commence internationalisation processes. This is because motives are triggered by both internal and external forces or factors that a firm’s decision-makers take into account when considering whether to initiate the internationalisation process. Scholars in this field argue that although the vast majority of studies around internationalisation processes capture firms’ activities upon actual commencement of the internationalisation process, they overlook the actual factors that lead firms to initiate such …

Cultural Values And Demographic Correlates Of Citizenship Performance, Anil Chandrakumara, John Glynn, H W. Gunathilake, S P. Senevirathne

Sydney Business School - Papers

This study examines the impact of cultural values on citizenship performance (CP) in the context of a developing country. Although differences in CP across cultures have been examined, the situation in developing countries is often not clear. Using a sample of 362 Sri Lankan employees, it is found that gender and education have significant impact on CP. While collectivism, future orientation, and uncertainty avoidance are found to be positively related to CP, power distance and masculinity values are negatively correlated with CP. It is also evident that the same cultural value orientation can have both positive and negative impacts on …

Graduating Professional Engineers And Management Skills - Are They Adequate For The Workplace?, Peter Childs, Peter Gibson

Sydney Business School - Papers

This paper considers the notion that for the majority of engineers, the development of managerial skills will be essential and cannot be 'picked up on the job'. Engineers increasingly need to understand the interactions between design, quality, sustainability product planning, organisation, management of people, team work and finance. This paper considers the need to develop managerial skills and will discuss the development of a survey to be carried out in an Australian context. The survey will cover a range of firms and governmental bodies that employ graduate engineers. The questions will cover a wide range of non-engineering skills that could …

Impact Of Work Values And Ethics On Citizenship And Task Performance In Local And Foreign Invested Firms: A Test In A Developing Country Context, Anil Chandrakumara, Paul R. Sparrow, Nelson Perera

Sydney Business School - Papers

This study examines the impact of work values and individual characteristics on organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) and task performance (TP). A theoretical foundation was developed in order to use work values and ethics as antecedents of OCB. Using five work related values orientations and 416 responses from Sri Lankan manufacturing sector employees, it is found that gender, employment category, and level of education influence citizenship performance. Importantly, the impact of work values on OCB is found to be more significant than that of demographic factors, with three dimensions (work norms, work ethics, and intrinsic values) found to be significant in …

The Customer Service Hall Of Shame, Mercedez Hinchcliff, Grace Mccarthy

Sydney Business School - Papers

This paper examines the reasons why some companies, in particular financial services companies, are listed on the MSN “Customer Service Hall of Shame” list year after year. This paper reviews the qualities service providers must possess in line with the SERVQUAL framework, in order to maintain customer loyalty. As the survey also publishes a ‘Hall of Fame’ list which identifies the top ten companies in excellent customer service, this paper will also investigate what these companies are doing that the others are not. In addition to analysing the survey results, the paper reviews related blogs to understand factors contributing to …

Rationale And Design Of The Kanyini Guidelines Adherence With The Polypill (Kanyini-Gap) Study: A Randomised Controlled Trial Of A Polypill-Based Strategy Amongst Indigenous And Non Indigenous People At High Cardiovascular Risk, Hueiming Liu, Anushka Patel, Alex Brown, Sandra Eades, Noel Hayman, Stephen Jan, Ian T. Ring, Greg Stewart, Andrew Tonkin, Tarun Weeramanthri, Vicki Wade, Anthony Rodgers, Tim Usherwood, Bruce Neal, David Peiris, Hugh Burke, Christopher Reid, Alan Cass

Sydney Business School - Papers

Background: The Kanyini Guidelines Adherence with the Polypill (Kanyini-GAP) Study aims to examine whether a polypill-based strategy (using a single capsule containing aspirin, a statin and two blood pressure-lowering agents) amongst Indigenous and non-Indigenous people at high risk of experiencing a cardiovascular event will improve adherence to guideline-indicated therapies, and lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

Methods/Design: The study is an open, randomised, controlled, multi-centre trial involving 1000 participants at high risk of cardiovascular events recruited from mainstream general practices and Aboriginal Medical Services, followed for an average of 18 months. The participants will be randomised to one …

Why Do Corporations Accept Voluntary Codes On Corporate Governance And Why Is The Acceptance So Rapid Among The Corporations? A Theoretical Explanation, Walter Gunathilake, Anil Chandrakumara

Sydney Business School - Papers

Implementation of principles of the Codes on Corporate Governance (CCG) is aimed at minimizing agency conflicts and corporate governance problems in the listed firms but we see them emerging over and over again despite the rapid implementation of CCG by listed firms, motivate us to develop this theoretical framework to understand why do the firms accept the voluntary principles and what type of behaviours could be expected among and between the top management personnel.

Agreeing On Meaning: A Fundamental Sharing Of Health Information, Michael J. Lawley, D P. Hansen, M Kemp, D Vickers, Donna Truran

Sydney Business School - Papers

Topic: A preliminary study on the reproducibility of results when mapping terms from an existing terminology to SNOMED CT post-coordinated expressions is described. Background: Implementing SNOMED CT requires a strategy for migrating existing systems and data that currently use other terminologies as well as ensuring that SNOMED CT contains suitable content that covers the domain. Mapping terms from these terminologies to SNOMED CT is one element of such a strategy. Snapper is a tool designed to assist in this complex task and enable the creation of quality mappings. Methods: Ten terms from the ANZICS diagnosis codes were selected to be …

Analyzing The Gap Between Sustainability And The Supply Of New Talented People Within The Global Foundry Sector, Lee Styger

Sydney Business School - Papers

The goal of federated identity management is to allow principals, such as identities and attributes, to be shared across trust boundaries based on established policies. Since current Single Sign-On (SSO) mechanism excessively relies on the specifications of Circle of Trust (CoT), the need for service collaboration from different domains is being addressed on CoT. For the motivating issue of the cross-domain SSO mechanism, we need an emergent dynamic trust list for calculating the trust parties, thus, the CoT specifications require an initial effort on enrolling members automatically to adapt to the dynamic open environment. In this paper, we propose a …

Representative But Irrelevant Arguments In Advertising, Charles S. Areni

Sydney Business School - Papers

A representative but irrelevant conditional is an if-then statement that implies, but does not logically establish, a link between evidence and a product claim. For example, in the argument "If kids are cramped, then they will start fighting. Model X has plenty of room. What's left to fight about?" the product claim (i.e., no fighting) does not follow from the conditional, which states what happens when there is a lack of space, but logically establishes nothing about what happens when there is plenty of space in a car. In a lab experiment, subjects exposed to an actual 30-second TV ad …

Quantifying Qualitative Data: A Novel Approach To Measure Brand Associations, Kaleel Rahman, Charles S. Areni

Sydney Business School - Papers

The branding literature suggests that not all brand associations are equal and the strength, uniqueness and valence of brand associations need to be considered when measuring brand associations (Keller 1993). We provide an approach to address all these dimensions simultaneously. Using a pilot study, uniqueness of brand associations is determined by coding associations into several mutually exclusive meaning components. The serial order of free association elicitation is used to assess association strength. This serial order, combined with a measure of valence, is used to create a quantification of open-ended brand associations called a “Weighted Valence Index” (WVI). Then, the WVI …

The Temporal Construal Of Work And Leisure Results In Illusory Daily Mood Patterns, Charles S. Areni, Mitchell Burger

Sydney Business School - Papers

In an internet survey, 349 respondents predicted that their moods for the work week ahead would be lowest in the early morning, rising steadily to a peak in the evening, but there was no obvious trend in the momentary moods they actually experienced on each day. These results suggest that, several days in the future, paid work is viewed more negatively than free time, but that there is little or no systematic pattern in the moods actually experienced throughout a work day. In other words, paid work may not be as bad as we think and free time may not …

Privatisation And Marketisation Of Indonesian Public Universities : A Systematic Review Of Student Choice Criteria Literature, Andriani Kusumawati

Sydney Business School - Papers

The transformation of higher education from the dependency on government funding to the competitive funding market indicates that universities have to compete for students in the recruitment markets. As the result, the motivating factors for students in choosing a university have undergone change also and the role of marketing in student recruitment has increasingly important. This study approach has entailed systematically searching, collecting and reviewing of the pertinent and recent literature from relevant databases. The purpose of this systematic review is to explore the nature of the privatisation and marketisatisation of higher education especially in the student choice context. The …

The Study Of Environment On Aboriginal Resilience And Child Health (Search): Study Protocol, Anna Williamson, Emily Banks, Sally Redman, Jonathan Craig, Alan Cass, Debra Fernando, Sandra Eades, Sandra Bailey, Richard Taylor, Kathleen F. Clapham, John Daniels, Sue Kippax, Peter Mcintyre, Ann Baker, Beverley Raphael, Frank Vincent

Sydney Business School - Papers

Background: Aboriginal Australians have a life expectancy more than ten years less than that of non-Aboriginal Australians, reflecting their disproportionate burden of both communicable and non-communicable disease throughout the lifespan. Little is known about the health and health trajectories of Aboriginal children and, although the majority of Aboriginal people live in urban areas, data are particularly sparse in relation to children living in urban areas.

Methods/Design: The Study of Environment on Aboriginal Resilience and Child Health (SEARCH) is a cohort study of Aboriginal children aged 0-17 years, from urban and large regional centers in New South Wales, Australia. …

Approaches To The Postgraduate Education Of Business Coaches, Grace Mccarthy

Sydney Business School - Papers

This paper focuses on the education and training of business coaches, specifically at the Masters/graduate level. The paper first reviews the knowledge and skills required of business coaches, comparing the recommendations of professional associations and the literature. Next the paper reviews the approaches to education which are best suited to help students acquire knowledge and skills, and how these may be assessed. The paper discusses the challenge of developing both knowledge and skills, and the use of e-learning as an on-going support for students. The benefits of authentic assessment and a varied approach to learning are also reviewed. Thirdly, the …