Articles
Publication Date: 2025
International Journal of Business Excellence (17560055)37(4)pp. 506-523
This study was conducted to explain the necessity of designing a coaching model in the workplace. Semi-structured interviews, purposeful sampling, and conventional data analysis were used in this qualitative study. The participants and informants included 22 experts and managers in Isfahan’s Mobarakeh Steel Company (MSC). The data were analysed in three stages, namely, open coding, axial coding, and selective coding, which resulted in the emergence of six core categories: 1) phenomenon; 2) causal conditions; 3) context; 4) intervening conditions; 5) strategies; 6) consequences. Standard training according to educational principles is one of the coaches’ requirements and an essential condition for coaching process efficiency. Therefore, it is necessary that a scientific and functional guide be used for coordinating and integrating the coaching process. Copyright © 2025 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
Publication Date: 2024
International Journal of Business Innovation and Research (17510252)33(2)pp. 215-235
The current study aimed to design the leadership model for knowledge-oriented enterprises in Isfahan province via the mixed-research methodology and the use of the grounded theory in qualitative section. To this end, a group of primary themes was collected during a coding process and some categories were extracted besides performing open interviews with 17 senior managers of knowledge-based enterprises and academic experts. Then, the link between these categories was explained in the form of causal conditions, axial phenomenon, underlying conditions, intervening conditions, and strategies and consequences in the framework of coding paradigm and a theory was created. In the quantitative section, the governing relations and benefits of all major factors of the proposed qualitative model were evaluated and confirmed via structural equation modelling by means of AMOS software. © 2024 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.. All rights reserved.
Publication Date: 2023
International Journal of Procurement Management (17538432)16(4)pp. 478-498
One of the effective components of organisational health is cheerful spirit, and positive emotional relationship that is emerged as confidence, trust, empathy, and friendship among the employees. Humour in the workplace is one type of humorous relationship that can lead to such relationships that decreases inter-organisational conflicts and enhances job motivation. Therefore, it is important to explore humour’s relationship with organisational health. This study aims to explore the relationship between humour in the workplace and organisational health. It is applicable from the objective aspect and descriptive field from the methodological aspect. The hypotheses were analysed using a correlational method in a specific time interval. The statistical population included employees of Isfahan Steel Company. Simple random sampling was employed and the research sample was determined to equal to 250 persons according to Morgan’s table. The results indicate that there is an acceptable level of relationship between humour in the workplace and organisational health. Among the dimensions of humour, affiliative humour and aggressive humour have the highest relationship with organisational health, respectively. Copyright © 2023 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
Publication Date: 2022
Management Decision (00251747)60(5)pp. 1257-1295
Purpose: Even the smartest organizations believe that “good enough is never good enough.” Highly intelligent people may be able to do important things individually; still, it is their accumulated brainpower that allows them to do great things. Collective intelligence means when a group of people do things that seem intelligent. On the other hand, when intelligent people are gathered or hired in an organization, they tend toward collective stupidity and slow-wittedness. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to develop a model of the factors affecting and affected by collective stupidity. Design/methodology/approach: This study was conducted using a mixed-method approach and in two phases: qualitative and quantitative. First, in the qualitative phase and in order to achieve new findings, semi-structured interviews with experts from 12 knowledge-based companies were used to design a conceptual model and formulate the hypotheses. At the end of the qualitative phase, the conceptual model and relationships between variables were drawn. Then, in the quantitative phase, by running structural equation modeling, the antecedents and consequences of collective stupidity derived from the qualitative phase findings were analyzed and the research hypotheses were tested in 110 industrial knowledge-based companies. Findings: The results of the qualitative phase revealed that individual, group and organizational factors were the antecedents of collective stupidity, with individual factors having three dimensions, collective ones including two dimensions and organizational ones focusing on the characteristics of managers/companies. It was also found that collective stupidity had individual consequences in three dimensions and organizational consequences in five dimensions; and one-sidedness, non-strategic thinking, organizational injustice and weakness in the management of key personnel were extracted as mediators. The results of the quantitative phase confirmed the research model and showed that individual factors and organizational consequences had the lowest (0.037) and highest (1.084) effect sizes on collective stupidity, respectively. Research limitations/implications: The study of the phenomenon in a particular context and the difficulty of generalizing the findings to other situations, the small size of the study population due to the disproportionate number of experts to the total staff in the qualitative phase, and the limited participation of experts due to the negative nature of the issue in the quantitative phase. Taking advantage of the diversity of experts' mental abilities through equipping the organization with tools for recognizing collective stupidity, improving collective decision-making, enhancing the efficiency of think tanks and organizational prosperity in the age of knowledge economy, preventing damage to the body of knowledge of the company and reducing social loafing can be the main operational implications of this study. Originality/value: Using a mixed-method approach for analyzing the antecedents and consequences of collective stupidity in this study and examining such a phenomenon in a knowledge-based organizational context and its implementation in a developing country can be among the innovations of the present research. By following a few studies conducted in this field in addition to the organizational pathology of the phenomenon using a fundamental method, this study obtained deep results on how to make the maximum use of experts’ capacities. This was to the extent that in all of the three sections, i.e. the antecedents and consequences of collective stupidity, a new factor emerged. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.
