Hartini Ahmad

Business process reengineering: critical success factors in higher education

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the critical success factors of business process reengineering (BPR) in higher education (HE).Design/methodology/approach – Empirical case studies collected from three private higher education institutions in Malaysia, which have embarked on BPR successfully.Findings – Seven factors were found to be critical to BPR implementation success. The factors are teamwork and quality culture, quality management system and satisfactory rewards, effective change management, less bureaucratic and participative, information technology/information system, effective project management and adequate financial resources.Research limitations/implications – The paper provides a framework for future research to explore organisational development in making BPR happen successfully.Originality/value – This research contributes to studies of BPR in HE context, by considering the soft issues in its implementation.

Assessing the relationship between firm resources and product innovation performance: A resource‐based view

– This paper seeks an answer to the question about which of a firms resources contributes most to product innovation performance (PIP). The paper aims to adopt the resource‐based view (RBV) and consider both tangible and intangible assets., – A mail administrated survey was distributed to a randomly selected list of 700 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia. The response rate was 20.1 percent and the usable response rate was 15.4 percent which is favorable for this type of research. As comparable to other SME studies and particularly in Malaysia, this relatively low‐response rate is not surprising for mail administrated questionnaire., – The findings indicate that, in the Malaysian context, intangible resources are the main drivers of PIP. This is keeping with the expectations of the RBV., – Establishing a cooperative relationship with the Small and Medium Size Industries Development Corporation of Malaysia plays a significant role in helping us to garner a larger than expected response rate among the SMEs. Alliances such as this may help researchers improve survey response rates among smaller manufacturers., – This paper is unique in that it is the first paper to address the relationship between firm resources and PIP among Malaysian companies. While the paper is primarily descriptive in nature, it does provide some evidence that can be used in the development and testing of hypotheses concerning the relationship between PIP and firms resources.

Organisational Culture, Leadership Styles and Employee's Affective Commitment to Change: A Case of Yemen Public Sector

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of leadership style on the affective commitment to change, moderated by the organisational culture. The research adopts both qualitative and quantitative approaches through a survey with 371 employees of public organisations in Yemen, as well as interviews with the managers. The findings showed that the transformational leadership was positively related to the employee’s affective commitment to change; similar to the transactional leadership that was positively related to the affective commitment to change. The results showed that organisational culture had positively moderated the relationship between the leadership styles and employee affective commitment to change. Finally, the findings revealed that the transactional leadership was a strong predictor to affective commitment to change compared with the transformational leadership.

Operational Excellence and Change Management in Malaysia Context

The objective of this paper is to provide the conceptual understanding on the effect of managing organizational change and affective commitment to change on operational excellence. This paper attempts to ascertain the relationship between managing organizational change, employees’ affective commitment to change and operational excellence. The literature review leads to the development of a conceptual framework that incorporate the influence of management of change to the operational excellence. The operational excellence literature shows on the many important elements as a framework itself. In addition, the paper organises the burgeoning management of change literature into six main elements: leadership style, manufacturing technology, human resource, organizational culture, organizational structure and operations strategy. Based on the literatured syntheses, the authors develop a linkage that the management of change factors and are likely to contribute positively to the operational excellence of the organization only in situations where the employees’ committed to change in the management of change efforts. This gaps in the literature also shows that there is a need for a study in the context of the Malaysian Electrical and Electronics (E&E) industry. This research explains that it cannot be used to represent the operational of others industry because the effect of managing organizational change to operational excellence could be different. The limitation suggest a gap for future research by validate others industry. Practical adoption of managing change will improve infrastructural decision areas of manufacturing strategy such as benchmarking, best practices, quality practices and HR policies. The originality in terms of the model to reflects a growing interest in extending operational management paradigms to emerging in developing country context, particularly on the knowledge on the insight of MOC and operational excellence.

Emerging Themes of the Leadership and Green Innovation of the Government-Linked Companies

The main reason businesses need to innovate is due to its necessity to sustain and survive, and not for the matter of how brilliant and visionary the leaders of the organisation are. Innovation has known for its very significant role in the organisation progression and growth. Innovation can happen in the products, processes, and services being embarked by organisations to make more profit by reducing operational cost and making processes more efficient. The concern over the environment all around the world has encouraged innovation to be more tailored to the “green”. “Green” is a name that is being associated with anything or any action that has impact to the environment such as green building, green government and green innovation. This constructive research is a qualitative multicases study. Data collection is done via interviews, focus group discussions and document analysis. The result has been analyzed to see the themes emerging from the data before the analysis is being interpreted. This paper discusses the impact of green innovation to the top management leadership in the Government-linked Companies (GLCs) in Malaysia. The key findings highlighted that the leadership must be sensitive and must understand the green demand and situation in Malaysia and around the world with respect to the industries that these GLCs are operating. This is where the top management leadership “attribute” is justified to fit the green innovation implementation.

The Effect of Change Management on Operational Excellence in Electrical and Electronics Industry: Evidence from Malaysia

The objective of this study is to investigate the main hypothesis between change management and operational excellence.This empirical research utilizes causal studies as it attempt to ascertain the relationship between the soft systems in the change management and operational excellence. The study focuses on the soft systems (i.e. leadership, human resource, culture) in the change management.Based on the literature review, the authors develop a linkage that the change management factors are likely to contribute positively to the operational excellence of the organization.A survey of a sample of Malaysia’s manufacturing leading sector, Electrical and Electronics (E&E) industry was conducted between February 2013 and June 2013.More than 100 organizations responded to the questionnaire survey.Data was analyzed using multiple regressions.The theoretical framework guided by theoretical perspectives which is the resource-based view.There was a significant and positive relationship between transformational leadership style, human resource practices and involvement cultural trait on the achievement of operational excellence.Importantly, this research finding adds value to theory building in both change management and operational management domains.The contribution to a body of knowledge in terms of promoting better understanding of the operational excellence in Malaysian E&E industry. Practical adoption of change management may improve infrastructural decision areas of manufacturing strategy such as bench marking, best practices, quality practices and human resource policies. Therefore, it has implication on activities concerning organization and managing change.

Relationship between personality traits and sense of urgency: A study of Repso Malaysia

Sense of urgency is a crucial element of a successful change process. This research was designed to investigate the relationship between personality traits and sense of urgency. It employed quantitative method in examining the said relationship against a real-life scenario of major change in a single entity of a Multi National Corporation – Repso Malaysia. Through on-line questionnaire, a total of 247 employees of various functions, job levels and cross border cultures made up the case study of this research. The findings of the research confirmed the positive relationship of conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experiences with sense of urgency. The trait of neuroticism revealed a negative but non-significant relationship to sense of urgency and duly supported with justification by the research. The paper addresses the limitations; first, the use of modified instrument lacks the established knowledge of its validity and reliability within the contexts of the case organization. Secondly, the researcher has no control on who actually responds to the questions. Thirdly, the research sample represents only single entity and cannot be generalized to the total population. Other than contributing to the body of knowledge over a subject which is empirically scarce, the research further renewed the importance of micro level analysis of an organization i.e. individuals rather than only the macro level.

Traditional Job-Related Factors and Career Salience in IT-Based Workplace

Despite growing academic and practical concerns about IT-transformed workplaces, little research empirically investigates these concerns. This paper adopts a unique approach to address these concerns by evaluating the appropriateness of traditional drivers of career salience in high IT working environments. Building on established measures of role stress, participation in decision making, job involvement and career salience, questionnaires were distributed to staff working in high IT organizations in Nigeria. Multiple regressions were run from a valid response of 223, resulting in the three traditional drivers accounting for 25% of the variance in career salience. Similarly, standardized β coefficients indicate on job involvement 0.46 makes unique significant contribution to career salience. This finding is in line with sociotechnical theory-that changes in technical sub-system affect the social sub-system and vice versa. The finding also provides indirect exploratory support for the decreasing importance of non-IT factors in the evolving digital workplace. Other implications, limitations and direction for future research are highlighted.

Hydrotherapy: An innovative treatment for obese Malaysians

Malaysia is ranked as a country with the most obese population in the Southeast Asia region, and placed sixth in the Asia Pacific. Obesity does not only influence the persons’ mobility and quality of health, but could also link to medical leaves and absenteeism affecting the overall workforce productivity and efficiency. Routine physical activity is essential for good health and it is particularly important for those who are trying to lose weight or to maintain a healthy weight. However, it is disheartening to note that only 32.6 percent Malaysians above the age of 15 are involved in physical exercise or vigorous sports. There is an emergence of many types of hydrotherapy system, which are either active or passive and these can be at hospital settings, public places or in individual homes. Such hydrotherapy, if properly programmed can promote the physical activity amongst the obese in Malaysia. Current research on the use of active and passive hydrotherapy for obesity treatment was carried out. Subjects o...

Small Medium Enterprises’ Resources and the Development of Innovation in Malaysia

More recent research has shifted attention from tangible to intangible resources as it perceived to be more important from a strategic point of view, since they bring together more frequently the requirements necessary for producing sustainable advantage: to be valuable, rare and difficult to imitate and replace by competitors (Barney 1991; Hitt et al. 2001).In view of the fact that there has been a dramatic increase in Malaysia SMEs development, this research reviews the SME resources and its contribution to innovation development. In the context of Malaysia manufacturing companies, reputational resources have been found given the highest impact on the product innovation performance compared to other factors.Survey was distributed randomly to the business owners and managers who work in various sizes of manufacturing firms.The response rate was 48% resulted from the personally administered questionnaire are considered highly favorable.