Ossi Pesämaa

Adventure tourist destination choice in Tanzania

It is said an adventure is an experience and experience is a part of expectations. Yet as adventure tourists expect unique experiences, certain ingredients of services (degree of satisfaction) affect their deeper needs to become attached to a place. Are such needs developed over time at a new destination? This paper suggests tourist behaviours and preferences towards destination choice change over time. The proposed model suggests that tourists’ expectations and motivation at early stages of planning affect satisfaction and level of perceived constraints, and these further predict place identity and dependence at the end of travel. As much as satisfaction arises from concrete services such as food and transportation services, constrained activities are expected to have a negativeconsequence on expectations and motivations. Since this paper is based on international adventure tourists, typically willing to take on calculated risks during their visits to Tanzania, we expect many of these hypothesised gaps to diminish as tourists become mature and aware of services offered at the destination. To test awareness and familiarity, we add different proxies for maturity (i.e. late stage of stay, repeat visitors and loyalty intentions) and awareness (i.e. tourists with escape motives) of services provided at the specific destination.

The Impact of Social Networking and Learning Orientation on Performance

ABSTRACT Organizational learning orientation and social networking have been recognized as drivers of innovativeness and performance. The authors’ study extends existing research on these concepts in several ways. First, they posit that innovativeness mediates the effects of social networking and learning orientation on performance. Second, they propose that environmental munificence moderates the hypothesized relationships. Third, data for the study were collected in Pakistan, which represents a novel and as-yet-unexplored context for this type of research. A structural equation model based on 176 small firms in Pakistan supported most of the hypothesized relationships.

Antecedents and Consequences of Innovativeness

Innovativeness is an organizational trait that leads to innovations. Organizations with high levels of innovativeness develop and renew products and processes and abandon obsolete ones. While potentially contributing to long term growth and profitability, utilizing innovativeness can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. This paper examines a contingency-theory-based model centering on organizational innovativeness, its internal and external antecedents, and its performance outcomes. It assessed the role of a learning-orientation as a moderator of the relationships in the model. The model is tested by data from 395 strategic business units (SBU) in Israel’s healthcare industry. Innovativeness has added importance in the healthcare industry, because many innovations are expensive, take a long time to license and train, and require extensive organizational support. We find that overall, and, especially for high learning-oriented organizations, innovativeness mediates the impacts of risk-taking, creativity, and competitor orientation (internal characteristics), and environmental munificence (external characteristic) on performance. In contrast, innovativeness mediates only the impacts of risk-taking and creativity on performance in low learning-oriented SBUs.