African Journal of
Business Management

  • Abbreviation: Afr. J. Bus. Manage.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 1993-8233
  • DOI: 10.5897/AJBM
  • Start Year: 2007
  • Published Articles: 4190

Table of Content: 18 August 2011; 5(16)

August 2011

Positioning strategies in the case of oligopolistic competition: The case of telecommunications industry in Senegal

Innovation is the major instigator in competitive industry. The competition forinnovation is traditionally analyzed within the framework of deterministic andstochastic models (Reinganum, 1989). Boone (2001), Fethke and Birch (1982) have respectively analyzed the standard models of competitive strategies in a duopoly and oligopoly industry. By focusing our analysis on deterministic models that is, the models...

Author(s): Babacar Ndiaye and Cheikh Thiaw

August 2011

E-management development and deployment strategy for future organization

In today’s global networked economy, integrated information system is a vital fundamental to a competitive advantage. In order to survive or succeed in the future characterized by radical pace of changing, organizations need to think of ways to integrate, automate as well as intelligentize their operational systems, both internally and externally. This paper firstly conceptualizes what a future...

Author(s): Liu Yao, Ahmad Bin Othman, Ahmed N. Aballa and Omar R. Mahdi

August 2011

Effective integration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) toward knowledge management in the changing world of work

The relevance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the field of Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) cannot be exhausted by studies available in the “knowledge-based” society. The world of work is in continuous change as ICT itself, thus posing more challenges to the workers in the 21st century and the institutions responsible for their preparation. Despite numerous...

Author(s): Muhammad Sukri Saud, Babawuro Shu&#;aibu, Noraffandy Yahaya and M. Al-Muzammil Yasin

August 2011

Influence of humorous leadership at workplace on the innovative behavior of leaders and their leadership effectiveness

The influence of humor on interpersonal relationship and behavior has been attracting increasing attention from various enterprises. Participants in this study were Taiwan’s corporate leaders and the influence of their styles of humor on innovative behavior and leadership effectiveness was examined. The study results showed that self-enhancing humor played a key role in leadership at work place. It not only...

Author(s): Li-Hsing Ho, Ya-Ping Wang, Hung-Chen Huang and Hsueh-Chih Chen

August 2011

Designing a model for analyzing the effect of risks on e-banking adoption by customers: A focus on developing countries

Recently, e-banking has become increasingly important in banking activities. The main reasons include modern technologies, expansion of competition, needs for efficient and comfortable services, cost and economical changes. The aforementioned factors cause complexity, challenge, ambiguity and risk feeling in the customers who use electronic capabilities. The main goal in this paper is to study the adopted customers risk...

Author(s): Reza Shafei and Vala Mirani

August 2011

Faculty members’ perceptions of organizational justice in Institutes of Higher Learning of Pakistan

The current study attempted to determine whether or not demographic groups of faculty in the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) differ significantly in their perceptions regarding organizational justice and its three dimensions. Since relationship of organizational justice with teachers’ demographic characteristics has rarely been investigated up till now in academic organizations of higher learning so, the...

Author(s): Muhammad Ehsan Malik and Basharat Naeem,

August 2011

An alternative to measure national intellectual capital adapted from business level

In this paper, a new model to measure the intellectual capital of nations adapted from business level was proposed. In other words, the study obtained an indicator that enhances the picture and position of a nation’s wealth. It was based on the observation of hidden capital as implicit generators of long term wealth, considering not only sustainability and social wellbeing, but also intangible assets such as...

Author(s): José Luis  Alfaro Navarro, Víctor Raúl López Ruiz and  Domingo Nevado Peña

August 2011

Barriers to women leadership and managerial aspirations in Lagos, Nigeria: An empirical analysis

This study investigated the barriers faced by women managers in the public and private organizations in moving to the topmost level of their managerial career. A sample of three hundred and ninety-seven (397) women managers spread across major relevant sub-sectors of the Nigerian economy (that is, manufacturing, banking, insurance sub-sectors and the public service sub-sector) and an additional sample of fifty (50) male...

Author(s): Emeka E. Okafor, Ayodele O. Fagbemi and Adedoyin R. Hassan

August 2011

A proposed dynamic model for a lean roadmap

Lean manufacturing is an integrated socio-technical system. Its main objectives are to eliminate waste and reduce the variability of suppliers, customers, and internal resources and processes. A “lean” roadmap guides the transition from an existing operation to one that fully implements a “lean” philosophy and its best practices. In this study a comparative literature review showed that there is...

Author(s): Alireza Anvari, Norzima Zulkifli, Rosnah Mohd Yusuff, Seyed Mohammad Hossein Hojjati and Yusof Ismail

August 2011

Goal, customer experience and purchase intention in a retail context in China: An empirical study

In a retail business, how does goal affect customer experience? What are the relationships among the various dimensions of customer experience? And how does customer experience influence consumer’s purchase intentions? In a retail business, the impacts of goal on customer experience are widely acknowledged to be important in current literature. To investigate this problem, we need to identify the relationships...

Author(s): Zi-Ying Yang and Ling-Yun He

August 2011

Size and value premium in Pakistani equity market

This study examined the relationship among size premium, value premium and equity returns in Pakistani equity market for the period of June 2000 to June 2007 by using Fama and French (1992, 1993) methodology. This is the first study in Pakistan that explores the relationship among stated variables by employing a large sample of more than 250 stocks listed at Karachi stock exchange. An analysis of the results...

Author(s): Arshad Hassan and Muhammad Tariq Javed

August 2011

An empirical study on assessing brand equity for global shipping carrier-based logistics service providers

The main purpose of this paper is to apply a fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) model to assess brand equity (BE) for the global shipping carrier-based logistics service providers (GSLPs) from shippers’ perspective in Taiwan shipping market. Firstly, some concepts and methods of the fuzzy set theory are applied to develop a fuzzy MCDM...

Author(s): Ji-Feng Ding, Kuo-Liang Lee and Shu-Chen Lin

August 2011

How to develop Taiwan's tourism nation brand

Globalization and the intensification of economic competition are increasing demand for nation brands. Tourism has a significant association with nation brand for the rapidly growing tourism industry in the future. A good nation brand will help a country's economic growth by promoting the tourism industry. In this study, Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Maximum Mean De-Entropy (MMDE) are...

Author(s): Chun-An Chen, Hsien-Li Lee, Ming-Huang Lee and Ya-Hui Yang

August 2011

Technical efficiency among the bulrush millet producers in Kenya

South Rift Valley, which has some of the highest poverty levels in Kenya would greatly benefit from increased production of bulrush millet as it will both improve the diet and contribute to household income. Though south Rift Valley is suitable for growing of bulrush millet, its production levels remain low, and farmers continue to achieve much lower yields than the potential. This suggests that farmers are losing out...

Author(s): Ngeno Vincent, Rop Wendi, Langat B., Ngeno E. K. and Kipsat M. J.

August 2011

A focus group study of consumer motivations for e-shopping: UK versus Malaysia

Despite many previous empirical investigations in the area of e-shopping, it is not clear why the adoption of e-shopping in one country is faster than in another country. This study investigates the motivation of e-shopping between two different countries from a qualitative approach. In particular, this paper compares between consumer perception of e-shopping in the United Kingdom (UK), a developed country and Malaysia,...

Author(s): Yusniza Kamarulzaman

August 2011

Behavioral approach to policy making of the internet banking industry: The evaluation of factors influenced on the customers’ adoption of internet banking services

This study combines the Theory of Perceived Risk (TPR) with the Theory of planned Behavior (TPB) to understand customers’ adoption of internet banking in Iran. The questionnaires are designed to survey the randomly selected sample of Iranian national bank customers. The selected sample contains 349 customers who responded to the questionnaire. This research used the structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the...

Author(s): Nour-Mohammad Yaghoubi and Ebrahim Bahmani

August 2011

The role of emotions and face-saving concerns for others on conflict management

In recent years, conflict management has attracted a lot of attention in the field of organizational behaviors. It is investigated that each person has a unique style or approach to conflict and that we, possibly, alter the conflict approach in regards to a given situation. The present study aims to identify the role of emotions and the approaches people utilize in conflict management, and to examine the extent,...

Author(s): Shih-Chieh Chuang, Sui-Min Wang, Chaang-Yung Kung and Wan-Ling Wang

August 2011

Artificial immune algorithm-based approach to recognizing unnatural patterns among autocorrelated characteristics

A control chart is a tool for statistical process control (SPC) used to determine variations in manufacturing processes resulting from common or assignable causes. The presence of unnatural patterns in control charts is an indication that the process has been influenced by assignable causes, and corrective actions must be taken. However, the assumption of uncorrelated or independent observations is not suitable for all...

Author(s): Hui-Ping Cheng and Chuen-Sheng Cheng

August 2011

“The Granger causality between health expenditure and income in Southeast Asia economies”

The objective of this study is to investigate the health-income relationship for the ASEAN-5 economies within the time series framework from 1970 to 2006. This study adopted the bounds testing approach to cointegration developed by Pesaran et al. (2001) to examine the presence of long run equilibrium relationship via the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework. The empirical evidence reveals that health...

Author(s): Chor Foon Tang and Kean Siang Ch’ng

August 2011

Studying the relationship between employees’ occupational burnout levels and satisfaction of life: A research in private banks

This study was carried out to determine whether bank employees’ burnout levels and satisfaction of life differentiate significantly according to certain variables and to reveal the relationship between them. Bank employees’ satisfaction of life was measured by using Satisfaction of Life Scale and their burnout levels by Maslach Burnout Inventory. The main scope of research comprised of bank employees working...

Author(s): Arzu Çakinberk

August 2011

The Feldstein-Horioka paradox in the perspective of foreign direct investment (FDI): A pragmatic validation

The purpose of this study is to test fundamental relationship between domestic saving and domestic investment for Pakistan from 1972 to 2008. Saving and investment are closely related to highlight the economic state of affairs of a country. Saving is a strapping source to enhance investment. Raising income enables people to increase consumption and saving levels. The higher the level of income will improve the level of...

Author(s): Tariq Hussain, Bilal Mehmood, M. W. Siddiqi and Saima Sarwar

August 2011

Investigation of the methods of the enterprise modeling

This paper presents briefly the domain of conceptual modeling of the enterprise and the famous methods used. Some techniques present hiatuses and they are not precisely coherent or complementary for modeling the functional and decisional system of the enterprise. The objective of this paper is to show the relevance of these methods particularly for the methods of SADT (Structured Analysis Design Technique) and GRAI...

Author(s): Lakhoua M. N. and Rahmouni M.

August 2011

The impact of job security on employees’ commitment and job satisfaction in Qom municipalities

The aim of this study is to explore the impact of job security on employees’ commitment and job satisfaction in Qom municipalities. This research is conducted as a descriptive and field study. Its population consists of employees (N = 158). To collect data, two Wysocki and Kromm job satisfaction and Mowday, Steers and Porter organizational commitment questionnaires were utilized. To analyze data, Spearman’s...

Author(s): Gholamreza Jandaghi, Ali Mokhles and Hamid Bahrami

August 2011

The role of private sector participation in achieving anticipated outcomes for low-income group: A comparative analysis of housing sector between Malaysia and Nigeria

This paper examines private sector participation in housing development for low income group (LIG) in Malaysia and Nigeria. This is to contribute to the literature on housing paradigm shift from state provision to privatisation and market-driven housing delivery. The study is based on comparative case studies of identified housing estate projects in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) and Abuja (Nigeria). The primary data of the...

Author(s): Bawa Chafe Abdullahi and Wan Nor Azriyati Wan Abd Aziz

August 2011

A study on indigenous housing developers in Malaysia

Urbanization, which is espoused in the National Economic Policy (NEP), has contributed to the significant development of the housing sector in Malaysia. As they provide houses, private developers earn significant amounts of profit. However, after more than 30 years of implementation of NEP, indigenous developers are still conspicuously under-represented in the sector. Thus, a research on indigenous entrepreneurs in the...

Author(s): Mastura Jaafar and Roslinda Ali

August 2011

Creating value governance: What it ought to be

This study aimed to explore the aspect of ethics in the context of corporate governance and to examine the possibility of integrating ethics in the corporate governance structure and process. This study analysis focused on qualitative methodology. The study found that corporate governance structure and institutionalisation of ethics are attributes of ethics that support the foundation of value governance practices. The...

Author(s): Zaleha Othman and Rashidah Abdul Rahman

August 2011

An investigation of conflict management in public and private sector universities

The purpose of this paper is to gain an insight into the conflict management in public and private sector universities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. To achieve the earlier mentioned purpose, survey method was used with the help of questionnaire. In this research, impact of university type (public and private sector) was examined on the conflict management strategies of the teachers in higher education. Moreover, a...

Author(s): Siraj ud Din, Bakhtiar Khan, Rashid Rehmanand Zainab Bibi

August 2011

Electronic government services in Europe: Strategies, projects and applications

In Europe, national electronic government incentives have made a significant contribution to the modernization of administration and its processes as well as its customer oriented services. In this study, European strategies and projects for electronic government as well as their implementation plans were analyzed, followed by an examination of the electronic services offered by the national governmental authorities in...

Author(s): Birgit J. Oberer and Alptekin Erkollar

August 2011

Academic staff and employment equity profile in business management departments at universities in South Africa

This article is a report on an attempt to determine the composition of academic staff of business management departments at South African universities. The objective was to determine the qualifications, level of employment and ranks filled by academics from the designated groups (black, coloured and Indian) and whites. Business management and related departments from 13 universities representing 136 academics...

Author(s): Cecile Nieuwenhuizen

August 2011

The behaviour of the Istanbul Stock Exchange Market: An intraday volatility/return analysis approach

This study investigates intraday effects in the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) during the latest period of financial turmoil which began in August 2007 and extended to February 2010. We tested for the possible existence of intraday anomalies using both return and volatility equations, empirically applying GARCH (p,q) models. The unique data set we utilized was compiled from 15-min intraday values of the ISE-100 Index...

Author(s): Veysel Ulusoy, M. Hasan Eken and Serkan Çankaya

August 2011

An importance-performance analysis of fitness centre service quality: Empirical results from fitness centres in Turkey

This study proposes the SQS-FC (Service Quality Scale for Fitness Centres) scale for fitness centres and examines its effectiveness using importance-performance analysis (IPA). Fitness centre service quality attributes are developed using a sample of Turkish fitness centre consumers and personal interviews. Data for the study is obtained from the customers of a private commercial fitness centre (n = 246). The results...

Author(s): S. Murat YILDIZ

August 2011

The role of intelligent agents in customer knowledge management

Customers are known as a brilliant source of knowledge for the companies, because they gain knowledge and expertise while selecting and using products or services. Customer knowledge management is a new stage of relationship management between organizations and the customers. Most of the models in the literature are focused on human resources to set up a framework to exchange knowledge with the customers. In this paper,...

Author(s): Sai Hong Tang, Seyed Mahdi Homayouni,  and Hamed Alaei

August 2011

The underground economy: What is the influence of the discount factor?

Underground economy is a continuous concern of economists all over the world and finding determinants and factors acting on its size is crucial in the fight to control and stop this negative phenomenon. In this paper, there is investigated a mathematical model founded on the basis of the inter-action between underground economy and official economy. As starting point, it used the logistic model of Verhulst,...

Author(s): Alina Badulescu and V. A. Caus

August 2011

The impact of perceived value dimension on satisfaction and behavior intention: Young-adult consumers in banking industry

The paper introduced new multidimensional perceived value and its impacts. This study aimed to analyze direct/indirect effect of perceived value dimensions (functional and relational value) on attitudinal and behavioral components of loyalty: satisfaction and behavior intentions to use retail bank services. Factor analysis indicated that functional service value, functional service quality, relational value of trust and...

Author(s): Nasreen Khan and Sharifah Latifah Syed A. Kadir

August 2011

Patient safety training programs and the effectiveness of training in the Taiwanese medical industry

This research aims to understand the factors influencing the transfer of training, establish model of training design, trainee’s characteristics, and work environment with transfer of training effect. Taking all colleagues in a teaching hospital in Taiwan as the objects, applying valid 866 copies of questionnaires recovered through online investigation, response rate is 45%.  Through empirical analysis, this...

Author(s): Chung-Hsiung Fang, Sue-Ting Chang and Kuan-Li Chen

August 2011

A study of service model among interactive marketing, service value, customer satisfaction and behavior intention: A case of I-Lan area leisure farm in Taiwan

In the current service literature, most researches focus on either physical facility or service personnel. There is little attention to the factor of service process. Therefore, in this paper, the service process into the dimension of interactive marketing was added. This paper tried to link three factors of interactive marketing: service value, customer satisfaction and behavior intention to develop a new service model...

Author(s): Feng-Jenq Lin and Yi-Ju Wang

August 2011

An investigation of the relationships among industry structure, strategy type, organizational characteristics and organizational performance: A case study of the food and chemical industries of Iran

Studying the influence of main factors on organizational performance is an important subject in the strategic management literature. Generally, performance differentiations’ resources among organizations are definable in terms of the existing industrial structure in industrial organization literature (OI) or characteristics of the organization in resource-based view (RBV). In this article, a model has been...

Author(s): Bahman Hajipour, Mohammad Talari and Arash Shahin

August 2011

A TAM-based study on senior citizens’ digital learning and user behavioral intention toward use of broadband network technology services provided via television

As population aging is a growing phenomenon in the 21st century, products and services aimed at the elderly have emerged one after the other. Great market opportunities in relation to senior citizens have attracted increasing investment from industries. Governments across the globe are making efforts to work out a variety of programs to meet the demands. Among them, the needs for information technology learning,...

Author(s): Mei-Liang Chen, Tzu-En Lu, Kuang-Jung Chen and Chumei E. Liu

August 2011

Impact of microcredit on poverty alleviation among rural women: A case study of Panchagarh District in Bangladesh

Although women constitute almost half of the total population of Bangladesh, they experience adverse situations in terms of socio-economic inequality and gender disparity. Especially, rural women are the most deprived section of the society and a majority of them are extremely poor. They have very limited access to economic and income generating activities outside their home and consequently, the less opportunity to...

Author(s): Ferdoushi Ahmed, Chamhuri Siwar Nor Aini Hj. Idris and Rawshan Ara Begum

August 2011

Factors influencing the behavior of online group-buying in Taiwan

This study presents three perspectives of sociology, economics, and psychology to investigate factors influencing the behavior of online group-buying. In Taiwan, group-buying is a unique online business model with great potential for influencing e-business. The study collects information on the demands of consumers to increase bargaining power and get volume discounts or better purchase conditions. In the past, most...

Author(s): Shih-Ming Pi, Hsiu-Li Liao, Su-Houn Liu and I-Shan Lee

August 2011

The e-business strategies fit on different supply chain integration structures

This study explores the different e-business strategies fit on different supply chain integration structures. We generalize three research frameworks through three e-business strategies including e-commerce, e-operations, e-marketing; and three integration structures including complete integration, supplier integration, and customer integration. Through testing for research frameworks, we can understand the application...

Author(s): Ping-Kuo Chen and Chun-Hsien Su

August 2011

Efficiency analysis of sausage industry: Evidence from Greece

The article analyzes the technical and scale efficiency of Greek sausage companies for the period of 1994 to 2007, by using a bootstrapped data enveloped analysis. The motivation for employing the bootstrapping approach stems from the need to improve the accuracy of the conventional DEA model. The results suggested that technical inefficiencies were present and increased over the considered period in the sample of...

Author(s): Ioanna Keramidou, Angelos Mimis and Evangellia Pappa

August 2011

Testing a model of the antecedents and consequences of IT employees’ trust of software development business in Thailand

Although the research of trust in leadership has increasingly gain attention in past two decades, existing research do not provide a sufficiently clear picture of the relationships among trust in different leadership referents and its antecedents and consequences. To fill this gap, this study aim to test the relationships among different dimensions of organizational justices, which are...

Author(s): Karun Pratoom and Pilaipan Cheangphaisarn

August 2011

Burnout levels of sport managers in provincial organizations of Turkish Youth and Sport General Directorate

The aim of this study was to investigate the “physiological burnout, desensitization and burnout of individual success among personnel working in provincial organizations of Youth and Sport General Directorate (YSGD) of Turkey. Data were collected by Maslach Burnout Inventory which was developed by Maslach and Jackson (1981) and adapted in Turkish by Ergin (1992). One hundred and thirty nine managers were selected...

Author(s): Ekici, Summani

August 2011

A study of the key success factor of the operational performance of theme park

This study focused on theme park industry using the balanced scorecard developed by Kaplan and Norton (1992) and referred to past literatures to sort out related strategic factors to build the fundamental structure of the research. Through the fuzzy Delphi method and the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, the key success factors for improving theme park’s operational performance were extracted. Finally, the...

Author(s): Meng-Shiunn Lee, Chung-Te Ting and Chung-Hui Chen

August 2011

Determining how and why consumer purchasing of grocery and household products varies

In order to broaden the research on household consumption patterns, this paper aims to determine how and why consumer purchasing of grocery and household products varies. Several variables, such as shopping frequency, overall satisfaction with the stores and demographic characteristics of the household and the buyer have been examined. An ad-hoc survey has been used to test the influence of these variables on...

Author(s): Noemi Martinez-Caraballoand Steve Burt 

August 2011

Return performance and leverage effect in Islamic and socially responsible stock indices evidence from Dow Jones (DJ) and Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE)

Empirical studies on stock returns and volatility have not made serious attempt to examine these two issues on the context of Islamic and socially responsible stock market indices. This paper therefore investigates the behavior of returns and volatility of three Islamic and socially responsible stock market indices, Dow Jones Islamic Market Index (DJIMI), DJSIW, Financial Times Stock Exchange Global Islamic index...

Author(s): Mohamed Albaity and Rubi Ahmad

August 2011

Mega-events impact on economic growth: Analysis of the South African World Cup

According to the literature, a sport mega-event such as the Football World Cup or the Olympic Games has many advantages for the organizing country, not only in economic terms but also in other areas. This paper analyses the possible impact of the South African economy of the 2010 World Cup. In order to do so, it studies the former 6 World Cups obtaining the positive differential in terms of the economic growth that...

Author(s): Antonio J. Monroy Antón, Juan José Méndez Alonso and Gema Sáez Rodríguez

August 2011

Can solar electricity production and use help to promote economic development in Africa?

This paper investigates natural factor endowments and management opportunities in development of solar photovoltaic electricity production in sunray Mediterranean, particularly in Northern African areas. The focus is on the investigation of the natural factor endowment supply-side factors as potentials for determining and management of solar photovoltaic electricity production and use. With the regression analysis we...

Author(s): Štefan Bojnec and Drago Papler

August 2011

CRM practice in an emerging market: The case of China Mobile

This study uses the case of China Mobile Communications Corporation to explore CRM practice in an emerging economy. While still in its infancy and with many deficiencies, China Mobile adapted its CRM practice to China market successfully. It does focus on key customers, but never gives up unprofitable customers. In fact, China Mobile has done a lot to cultivate the low-end market and is being rewarded now. China Mobile...

Author(s): Lin Shengdong and Ke Xue

August 2011

Evaluation of the effects of product involvement facets on brand loyalty

Brands are viewed as the main asset of businesses. Marketers believe that branding is the art and cornerstone of marketing. But branding is not an easy task and several factors must be considered. Product involvement is an important factor in brand attitude and consequently in brand loyalty. This study was performed to investigate the effects of product involvement on brand loyalty. Data was collected from a sample of...

Author(s): Kambiz Heidarzadeh Hanzaee, Mahsa Khoshpanjeh and Afshin Rahnama