J. Barton Cunningham

The diffusion of Internet banking among Singapore consumers

Internet banking is a form of self‐service technology, costing millions of dollars, which leading retail banks have made available in the recent past. An understanding of why users are more accepting of Internet banking services should help bank managers implement this self‐service technology. This study identifies eight characteristics which influenced the rate of adoption. Two of these characteristics, namely accessibility and confidentiality, are new to the literature. The results show that adopters of Internet banking perceive the service to be more convenient, less complex, more compatible to them and more suited to those who are PC proficient. Adopters were also found to be more financially innovative. The perceptions that adopters had about social desirability, confidentiality, accessibility and economic benefits were viewed no differently when adopters were compared with non‐adopters.

Islamic banking: a study in Singapore

Establishes that, in Singapore, which has a minority of Muslims in its population, both Muslims and non‐Muslims are generally unaware of the culture of Islamic banking. Also the two separate groups have different attitudes towards the Islamic banking movement, with the degree of difference depending on the nature of the respective matter put to them. For example, when asked what they would do if an Islamic bank did not make sufficient profits to make a distribution in any one year, 62.1 per cent of Muslims said they would keep their deposits within the Islamic banking movement, while 66.5 per cent of non‐Muslims said they would withdraw their deposits. In relation to bank selection criteria, there was general accord as between Muslims and non‐Muslims on the rating of the various criteria. Five significant differences were noted, the most relating to “being paid higher interest on savings”. The desire to be paid higher interest was far stronger with non‐Muslims.

Trust and the Design of Work Complementary Constructs in Satisfaction and Performance

The article presents results that indicate that trust and job design are complementary concepts in understanding outcomes like intention to quit and satisfaction. We conceptualized a workers beliefs that a supervisor can be trusted as being composed of three main elements - beliefs in the supervisors predictability, benevolence and fairness. This was motivated in part by a desire to conceptualize trust in a way that distinguished it from leader-member exchange (LMX) quality. The capacity of this measure of trust to predict self-reported outcomes was then compared with a jobs motivational potential score, as a way of testing the trust measures criterion validity. To do so, the results from two separate surveys were analysed. The first was based on the questionnaire responses of 535 employees in the telephone industry in the province of British Columbia; the second, of 230 service station employees from across Canada. In the studies reported here, supervisor relationships accounted for a significant amount of the variance on a variety of criterion measures. The results also suggested that perceptions of trust act independently of job design factors in affecting the outcome variables of absence, intention to quit, satisfaction and performance. In addition, the results indicated trust to be as important as job design factors in predicting outcomes.

Consumer switching behavior in the Asian banking market

This study seeks to identify the types of incidents which cause consumers to switch between banks, the weighting of each incident on the switching decision, whether single or multiple incidents influence switching decisions, and the extent to which switchers explain the problems they have faced prior to exiting. The key findings show that bank switching is strongly influenced by three types of incident: service failures, pricing and inconvenience, with pricing being more influential. Seventy‐five percent of bank switching is caused by more than one incident, and some 7 percent of respondents said they had spoken to bank staff in the period before exiting. The implications of these findings are presented.

Singapore’s undergraduates: how they choose which bank to patronise

Undergraduates constitute an attractive segment of customers for retail banks in many countries of the world, including Singapore. This study, using a sample of Singapore’s undergraduates, sets out to establish a ranking of the various dimensions which influence their bank selection decision and seeks to determine how homogeneous undergraduates are in relation to their selection decision. Seven bank selection dimensions were identified, the most important being undergraduates should “feel secure”, while the least important dimension was “third party influences”. Responses between those “attending engineering courses and non‐engineering courses” were compared, as were those between “males and females” and “single and multiple bank users”. More significant differences were found when engineering undergraduates were compared with non‐engineering undergraduates. Irrespective of these differences, the sequencing of the seven selection dimensions was invariably in the same order.

Implementing change in public sector organizations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the importance of various change principles in assisting change in three public sector organizations.Design/methodology/approach – The researchers carried out interviews and used focus groups in assessing the principles and strategies which would be more useful.Findings – The interview and focus group results in three public sector organizations suggest that forming a guiding coalition might be one of the most important principles to observe.Research limitations/implications – The research data used for illustration are based on case evidence and the anecdotal interpretation of change in three settings. The paper does not claim to offer a scientific conclusion.Practical implications – The goal is to encourage a discussion on whether or not certain principles or strategies should be more important.Originality/value – The paper reviews the literature on change and reviews these principles in real experiences. Much of the other literature is conceptual.

Rebus puzzles as insight problems.

Research on insight—the phenomenon of suddenly solving an apparently intransigent problem—has been hampered because stimulus problems have been few, ad hoc, heterogeneous, and difficult to solve. Responding to the need for a larger pool of problems of a similar type and of varying level of difficulty, we report an experiment testing the validity of rebuses as insight problems. A rebus combines verbal and visual clues to a common phrase, such as PAINS (“growing pains”). Solving a rebus requires breaking implicit assumptions of normal reading, similar to the restructuring required in insight. We hypothesized that, the more implicit assumptions are involved, the more difficult the solution. The results of a two-part experiment supported the hypothesis, with participants solving more problems involving one assumption than they did problems involving two or more. Also, rebus performance correlated significantly with self-rated insight and with scores on remote associates, but not with general verbal ability. The findings suggest that rebus puzzles may be a useful source of theoretically grounded insight problems.

Factors in absenteeism and presenteeism: life events and health events

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship of stressful life events and health related events with sickness absenteeism and presenteeism (attending work while ill or injured).Design/methodology/approach – A web‐based survey was conducted within a public service organization which had just undergone a significant downsizing, where the workforce was reduced by over 30 per cent.Findings – The findings indicated that stressful life events were significantly associated with both presenteeism and absenteeism, to the same degree.Research limitations/implications – These results extend previous research in suggesting that employees are substituting presenteeism for absenteeism. However, different health risks (chronic conditions vs needing counselling support) were more likely to predict absenteeism than presenteeism.Originality/value – By supporting a substitution hypothesis, the present study suggests that both presenteeism and absenteeism are important measures of employee health an...

Skills for managing human resources in a complex environment: the perceptions of human resource managers in Singapore

This paper analyses some of the difficulties that human resource (HR) managers have in responding to problems of labour turnover and labour shortages.It provides a brief overview of the complex environments in which Singaporean HR managers operate. This paper suggests that, when the roles of management and personnel are ambiguous or when there is tremendous change, line managers and executives take over some of the functions of HR managers, a practice which is seen as a problem for HR managers. However, content analysis of interviews with HR managers shows that this encroachment becomes a problem only when the HR managers lack the skills necessary to perform their duties competently. Thus, it is suggested that HR managers should adopt an HRM approach which focuses on roles and skills necessary to manage ambiguity. In this respect, a more inclusive model should involve roles such as: reconciliation, recruitment and retention, employee relations, planning and internal management.

Feelings and interpretations during an organization’s death

An organization’s death exhibits many of the same feelings and reactions that humans experience with the loss of a loved one. People are forced to disconnect from established relationships and to reconnect with others. This disconnecting and reconnecting involves stages of anticipation or uncertainty, confirmation or recognition of the need for change, action, and adjustment. Describes an observational study of an organization which exhibits the feelings and reactions during different stages of an organization’s death. Three propositions explain how people cope during these stages: (i) Those who are able to take positive action have a more pronounced sense of their own ability to control their own destinies (internal locus of control) and a realistic feeling of invulnerability. (ii) The beliefs and illusions about an organization’s pending termination may be created and nourished by very little information, rumours and preconceived beliefs. (iii) Some people, who were more receptive to feedback, have some very realistic beliefs about their future and were very capable of adjusting their “paradigms” of how to respond to their future. The painful feelings of disconnecting might be assisted by feedback and support, while reconnecting to new organizations might depend on one’s attitudes and beliefs.