Purpose Despite technological advancements in supply chain forecasting methods and supporting software, human know-how remains indispensable to the forecasting process. Research suggests that forecasting models that incorporate human feedback will continue to outperform models that do not. The current research develops a theory about forecasting management climate and an associated measurement scale. Design/methodology/approach This research employs an exploratory sequential mixed-methods research design to develop and validate a forecasting management climate construct. We began with an initial qualitative approach to refine and contextualize the concept of forecasting management climate and then used survey and structural equation modeling to assess the reliability and validity of the resulting measurement scale. Findings The findings suggest a new theory about and measures of forecasting management climate, including seven managerial practices (first-order constructs) that characterize an organization’s forecasting climate. Originality/value This research provides empirically validated theory on the dimensions of forecasting management climate that managers can use to inform management best practices aimed toward improving forecasting processes.
Scholars argue that workplace safety is a fundamental human right, emphasizing the ethical responsibility of managers and workers to ensure workplace safety. In this light, business ethics research is well suited to illuminate patterns across values and practices to better inform organizations in managing workplace safety. Drawing from managerial approaches to ethics and compliance, this research evaluates a novel measure, preservation orientation, designed to capture workers’ perceptions of the underlying motives for organizational safety practices and programs. Specifically, a preservation orientation refers to workers perceiving safety programs and initiatives as reflecting management’s insincere approach to safety, where safety measures are primarily a means of protection against liability. Six scale development and validation studies (N = 1,454) revealed a reliable and valid construct that had varying effects on worker perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. This research offers several implications for evaluating and improving safety program effectiveness. Of primary concern is a need for researchers and managers to understand how workers truly perceive the organization’s posture toward organizational safety programs and practices. The consequence of a preservation orientation toward safety is that workers’ perceptions of safety-related attitudes, behaviors, and psychological safety may be negatively impacted. The preservation orientation scale could be used in conjunction with other assessments, such as safety climate assessments and organizational compliance audits, to help managers maintain or improve safety in their organizations by aligning values and practice.
Firms continually experience supply chain sustainability issues that seem to conflict with stated values, highlighting the importance of supply chain integrity. As stakeholders evaluate how firms align their values and practices with supply chain partners, decision makers will need to balance normative and instrumental goals to make ethical and sustainable relationship decisions. Indeed, researchers have called for an exploration of the ethics of supply chain partnerships with the intent of identifying ways to create more sustainable and productive supply chains. Yet, much is still unknown about the mechanisms driving the ethical decision-making process to achieve integrity in supply chain relationships. Therefore, in a field experiment, this research evaluates ethical decision-making in buyer-supplier relationships by assessing individuals' evaluations of environmental or social sustainability norms and economic consequences on their ethical judgments and decisions related to buyer-supplier relationship continuance. Results revealed that while individuals' ethical judgments positively influenced relationship continuance intentions, individuals may have relied more heavily on evaluations of economic outcomes when considering tradeoffs with environmental or social outcomes. Results also indicated individuals' bottom-line mentality influenced decision-making to a degree. Overall, we suggest firms move from chain liability to chain responsibility by centering integrity in supply chain relationships.
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced the use of color-coded COVID-19 guidance maps to communicate varying levels of transmission based on local public health data and infrastructure capacity. This study explores the application of an extended Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to understand how color-coded COVID-19 guidance, pandemic fatigue, and risk perception influence intentions to seek COVID-19 risk information and engage in preventative behaviors. Through two separate studies comprising nationally representative samples in the U.S. (N =169 and N =148), conducted at different points during the pandemic, we examine the effect of these factors on intentions to seek COVID-19 risk information and intentions to engage in preventative behaviors. Study 1, conducted in November 2020, focused on these behavioral intentions before vaccine availability, while Study 2, conducted in March 2022, examined these behavioral intentions as the pandemic evolved and vaccines were widely accessible. Path analysis using OLS regression was used to evaluate the models proposed in each study. Our findings highlight that while color-coded risk maps significantly influenced preventive behavior intentions, their impact on information-seeking intentions was less consistent. Results surrounding the influence of pandemic fatigue are mixed, with pandemic fatigue leading to increased risk information seeking in Study 1 and greater preventative behavioral intentions in Study 2. This study offers implications and recommendations for public health officials responsible for communicating complex, prolonged, and location-specific health information.
Logistics organizations' cultures inherently produce tension between safety and operational requirements. Perhaps counterintuitively, such tension is important for organizations to achieve safe practice and effective operational outcomes. In this study, we evaluate how logistics managers and workers create, identify, and manage various tensions between operational requirements and personnel health and safety during an extended period of uncertainty. Using a grounded theory (GT) approach, this research draws on multiple data sources from six global U.S. Air Force logistics organizations during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. A six-stage GT empirical analysis process revealed a tension-centered approach to safe, effective logistics, presented as a substantive (middle-range) theory with an accompanying process model. Data demonstrate operations- and people-focused cultural elements are activated based on respective requirements, thus inducing tension between potentially competing, yet interrelated, areas. In high-performing organizations, logistics managers and workers address tensions via a balanced focus to alleviate conflicts and conduct safe, effective logistics. This research responds to calls for organizational culture research using qualitative methods while offering implications for theory and practice. Specifically, logistics leaders can use the process model to prepare personnel to safely and effectively handle dynamic operational logistics in the face of unforeseen crises or changes.
PurposeTo investigate the influence of logistics and transportation workers' perceptions of their management's simultaneous safety and operations focus (or lack thereof) on related worker safety and operational perceptions and behaviors.Design/methodology/approachThis multi-method research consisted of two studies. Study 1 aimed to establish correlational relationships by evaluating the impact of individual-level worker perceptions of operationally focused routines (as a moderator) on the relationship between worker perceptions of safety-related routines and workers' self-reported safety and in-role operational behaviors using a survey. Study 2 aimed to establish causal relationships by evaluating the same conceptual relationships in a behavioral-type experiment utilizing vehicle simulators. After receiving one of four pre-task briefings, participants completed a driving task scenario in a driving simulator.FindingsIn Study 1, the relationship between perceived safety focus and safety behavior/in-role operational behavior was strengthened at higher levels of perceived operations focus. In Study 2, participants who received the balanced pre-task briefing committed significantly fewer safety violations than the other 3 treatment groups. However, in-role driving deviations were not impacted as hypothesized.Originality/valueThis research is conducted at the individual (worker) level of analysis to capture the little-known perspectives of logistics and transportation workers and explore the influence of balanced safety and operational routines from a more micro perspective, thus contributing to a deeper understanding of how balanced routines might influence worker behavior when conducting dynamic tasks to ensure safe, effective outcomes.
The 2020 Covid pivot highlighted the need for cost-free, online learning tools. We present an approach which enables learners to master process analysis material in and outside the classroom using an LMS-generated learning feedback approach. We present the approach with its implementation procedures, benefits, and limitations. This approach is used in an undergraduate operations management class and evidence of the approach's effectiveness is presented using standardized data points from four instructors across several sections of the operations management class. Additional advantages to this approach include efficiency in building and grading assessments, and collaborative assessment, while no additional monetary or learning cost of a new system is required. Continuous improvement of the approach could be extended to all course content and other courses, and even into crowdsourcing content and assessment tools via Learning Management Systems.
Given the United States Department of Defense’s (DoD) unique conservation responsibility, its natural resource professionals need a guide to frame interagency collaboration in a way that shapes productive partnerships. Our research examined successful DoD conservation partnerships to identify key success factors (KSFs), prominent challenges encountered, and how those characteristics enable the accomplishment of each stakeholder’s objectives. We employed the multiple-case study method with 19 key informants from three DoD installations participating in semi-structured interviews. Documentation and archival records from the same installations provided additional data. We identified four themes of KSFs to enhance a partnership’s ability to overcome four key groups of challenges that support achieving three main categories of organizational objectives. The culmination of our effort was the development of a collaborative framework to outline the main elements in the formation and maintenance of successful partnerships. We discussed strategies to implement this framework and recommendations for future research.
The health information environment surrounding COVID-19 is complex, with varying and competing information. This study uses the risk information seeking and processing model (RISP) to examine COVID-19 information seeking and avoiding among young adults. Pandemic fatigue is also operationalized and tested as a more nuanced measure of negative affective response within the RISP framework. Survey results (N = 527) reveal pandemic fatigue predicts information seeking and avoidance, but may have a weaker influence on these outcome variables than the RISP's original construct of negative affective response. Additionally, the original RISP model achieved slightly more explanatory power in predicting risk information seeking than our revised RISP model, using pandemic fatigue as an alternative measure of negative affective response. These findings indicate that contemporary concepts such as pandemic fatigue may be incorporated into applications of the RISP model, thus allowing researchers to evaluate other types of negative affective responses to risk and further expanding the utility of the model. Theoretical implications and practical recommendations for public health officials and health care workers are discussed.
Integrity is considered an important corporate value. Yet recent global events have highlighted the challenges firms face at living up to their stated values, especially when extended supply chain partners are involved. The concept of Supply Chain Integrity (SCI) can help firms shift focus beyond internal corporate integrity, toward supply chain integrity. Researchers and managers will benefit from an understanding of the SCI concept toward implementing SCI to better align supply chain partners with stated corporate values. This research fully develops and empirically grounds the firm-level, inter-firm-oriented SCI concept. The thematic analysis of six firms' archival and website content elaborated empirical descriptions of SCI themes and enabled the development of a process model for SCI, presenting a novel view of the underlying process by which firms can assess, develop, and maintain SCI across their supply chains. We propose the SCI model as an evolutionary process to improve a firm's supply chain sustainability, rather than a dichotomous end state where firms either "have" integrity or they don't. The SCI model could be used as a tool to help leaders create necessary change to better align values and supporting statements with culture, while influencing and affecting stakeholders across the supply chain. This is particularly important in today's world, where business leaders must consider all stakeholders and address important stakeholder-driven issues such as supply chain sustainability, resilience, and security, which are now at the forefront in the ever-changing environment.
This article presents results of a systematic review of the US motor-carrier safety literature in transportation, logistics, and safety journals. The discipline has seen growth in research over the decades, and growth of the field rapidly increased in the last decade. We organize the literature into a systems framework and summarize the research across industry system levels to include government, regulators, carriers, and drivers. We then apply a goal-framing approach to reveal some of the dynamic interactions between system levels and the environment, as entities work to minimize risk to life and property during freight operations while striking a balance between the industry's welfare and societal welfare. This article provides recommendations for future research to fill gaps in the current body of knowledge and to aid government officials, regulators and law enforcement officials, carrier managers, and drivers in addressing industry challenges and maintaining safe roads in 2020 and beyond.
With the rapid global expansion of dockless shared bicycles, disorderly parking has not only generated convenience to users but also negative consequences to enterprises and urban management. We proposed an integrated model and recruited 1722 participants from diverse professions and geographic locations in China, examining the influence of individual and social environmental factors on orderly parking behavior. It was shown that descriptive social norms played an important role in shaping user?s attitudes toward orderly parking directly and indirectly via personal norms, and thus influence the behavioral intention of orderly parking. Cultural tightness-looseness further moderated the effect of descriptive social norms. At the individual level, antecedents of personal norms (moral awareness, awareness of consequences, and ascription of responsibility) were investigated based on Norm Activation Model. This study indicates that descriptive social norms can act as a complimentary policy and regulations of dockless bikesharing, which provides valuable insights on urban operation and policy making concerning shared bicycles.
Public bicycles have been touted as a convenient, environmentally friendly, and sustainable travel mode. Public bicycles have also been viewed as one part of a holistic solution to reducing negative transportation externalities. However, government and private entities need a better understanding of factors influencing user adoption of public bicycle systems. In this survey study, 470 prospective public bicycle users from Beijing, China completed face-to-face and web-based surveys, providing their perceptions of public bicycle system attributes, perceived risk associated with public bicycle use, and their intention to switch to public bicycles as a new mode of transportation. Our findings suggest that switching intention is directly influenced by user perceptions of the risk of public bicycle use, as well as user perceptions of the system's relative advantage over other modes of transportation and perceived compatibility of public bicycles with the user's current travel habits. Moreover, perceptions of risk are found to mediate the relationship between system attributes (complexity and observability) and switching intention. That is, user perceptions that public bicycles are difficult to access and use increases perceived risk and reduces the likelihood they will switch to public bicycles as a mode of transportation. Moreover, when prospective users can observe others using the system, their perceptions of risk decrease, which increases the likelihood they will adopt public bicycles as a new mode of transportation. This research contributes to theory-building in public bicycle adoption and informs business and government leaders on how to promote public bicycle adoption through an increased focus on important public bicycle system attributes.
INTRODUCTION:Safety research in the U.S. motor carrier context remains important, as the trucking industry employs approximately 1.7 million large truck drivers. Drivers face many competing pressures in this unique high risk, high regulation, and low direct supervision context. They represent the cornerstone of safe carrier operations.METHODS:Using a multi-theoretical approach, this study investigates how drivers' perceptions of carrier safety climate influence their safety-related attitudes and intentions.RESULTS:Responses from nearly 1500 over the road drivers provide evidence that safety climate directly influences drivers' attitudes toward safety, safety norms, and driver risk avoidance, and indirectly influences drivers' intentions to commit unsafe acts. These findings replicate previous findings and also extend the nomological network of theory in this context, adding driver risk avoidance as a central factor to the driver safety theoretical framework. Additionally, carrier managers are encouraged to reflect on the study's evidence and pursue a better understanding of their drivers' risk perceptions and tolerance, while minimizing avoidable risk through prudent safety and operational policies, procedures, and processes. Future research in this area is highly encouraged.
Crowd logistics platforms play an important role in value creation, but the extant literature has not clarified how platforms create value. Consequently, this multiple case study identifies three main types of value creation capabilities for crowd logistics platforms: resource matching, operations management, and risk control. Additionally, the study demonstrates that these crowd logistics platform capabilities create value by providing the most accurate matches between resources and requests while also enhancing driver agility and compliance. Based on these findings, we present four propositions that extend our understanding of crowd logistics platforms' value creation capabilities and the process through which these capabilities lead to value creation. The study also provides valuable insights for crowd logistics companies to improve their value creation capabilities.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand how big data and predictive analytics (BDPA), as an organizational capability, can improve both visibility and coordination in humanitarian supply chains. Design/methodology/approach The authors conceptualize a research model grounded in contingent resource-based view where the authors propose that BDPA capabilities affect visibility and coordination under the moderating effect of swift trust. Using ordinary least squares regression, the authors test the hypotheses using survey data collected from informants at 205 international non-government organizations. Findings The results indicate that BDPA has a significant influence on visibility and coordination. Further, the results suggest that swift trust does not have an amplifying effect on the relationships between BDPA and visibility and coordination. However, the mediation test suggests that swift trust acts as a mediating construct. Hence, the authors argue that swift trust is not the condition for improving coordination among the actors in humanitarian supply chains. Research limitations/implications The major limitation of the study is that the authors have used cross-sectional survey data to test the research hypotheses. Following Guide and Ketokivi (2015), the authors present arguments on how to address the limitations of cross-sectional data or use of longitudinal data that can address common method bias or endogeneity-related problems. Practical implications Managers can use this framework to understand: first, how organizational resources can be used to create BDPA, and second, how BDPA can help build swift trust and be used to improve visibility and coordination in the humanitarian supply chain. Originality/value This is the first research that has empirically tested the anecdotal and conceptual evidence. The findings make notable contributions to existing humanitarian supply chain literature and may be useful to managers who are contemplating the use of BDPA to improve disaster-relief-related activities.
Safety is of critical importance in many industries. One of the more dangerous environments in industry, and the military, is air freight handling, where the fatal injury rate has consistently been higher than the national average. Nonetheless, peer-reviewed safety research that is focused on air freight handling is practically non-existent. Therefore, research that helps academicians and managers better understand safety climate and its potential influence on employee attitudes and behaviors is vitally important. To address these concerns, we develop and validate an air freight handling-specific safety climate scale capable of capturing employees' safety climate perceptions at the organization and group levels. We also found that, in general, measurement scale dimensions in this context are like those in other high-risk, transportation-related contexts, and that the nomological network may be converging on a cross-context set of safety climate dimensions. The resultant scale can be used to investigate safety climate's relationship with various employee attitudes, safety and operational behaviors in this high-risk environment. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Environmental concerns have propelled public and private entities to search for ways to increase usage of public bicycle sharing systems. However, usage rates in many cities remain below expectations. Using the theory of perceived value to motivate our hypotheses, this paper evaluates the impact of perceived value on consumer adoption intentions, and assesses the moderating effects of social and personal attitudes towards environmental behavior, on perceived value-adoption intention relationships. Our findings suggest that public bicycle sharing adoption intention is significantly influenced by its perceived functional, conditional, green and social values. Moreover, personal and social attitudes towards "greenness" and bicycle sharing, respectively, are found to moderate the relationship between perceived values and adoption intentions. This research contributes to theory-building in bicycle sharing adoption, and informs business and government leaders on how to promote adoption. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Purpose The United States Air Force often provides effective airlift for cargo distribution, but is at times inefficient. This paper aims to address the under-utilization of military airlift cargo compartments that plagues the airlift system. Design/methodology/approach The authors examine seven techniques designed to increase cargo compartment utilization and increase airlift utilization rates. The techniques were applied through load planning software to 30 real-world movements consisting of 159 sorties. They then ran each post-technique movement through a modeled flight environment to obtain cycle movement data. The metrics gained from both the load planning software and the modeled environment were regressed to provide statistical understanding regarding how well each technique influenced cost savings. Findings The results showed a 24 per cent elimination of aircraft required and a savings of $14.5m. Extrapolation of the authors’ findings to four years of airlift mission data revealed an estimated annual savings of $1.6bn. Originality/value This research effort provides multiple options to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of military airlift.