The call centre industry is gaining momentum in the retail sector, which can be attributed to the fact that many companies use call centre agents to communicate with the end users of their products. A major challenge facing retail companies is finding the right employees for their call centres, so that these people are able to perform according to their natural abilities and acquired skills. The South African retail company under study uses the Clerical Test Battery (CTB2) to screen candidates for its call centre. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the CTB2 numeracy subtest scores and work performance scores of employees in this call centre. The literature review examines the use of psychometric instruments in general, and then focuses on the use of the CTB2 in South African contexts. The objective of the current study was to evaluate the validity of the numeracy subtest when used as part of the selection process for call centre candidates. A quantitative research approach was employed to analyse the raw data, which was already available in the company’s database. The two datasets used were the CTB2 numeracy subtest scores and the work performance scores of 300 call centre agents. The correlation between these two sets of scores was analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software (version 17). No statistically significant relationship emerged between the two research variables. Therefore, it may not be appropriate to use the CTB2 numeracy subtest to screen call centre candidates. The findings of this study suggest that the CTB2 should not be used in isolation when assessing call centre candidates. Face-to-face interviews should form an important part of the decision-making process, and the use of additional instruments to measure general cognitive aptitude and skills such as perceptual speed and accuracy is recommended. The dissertation concludes by outlining the limitations of the study and giving some suggestions for future research in this field. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Psychology / unrestricted

Influential person Abstract The theme of this thesis is a legal understanding of the term 'influential person' which entered the Czech legal system due to significant changes in private law, especially when the Act no. 90/2012 Coll., on Business Corporations and Cooperatives and the Act no. 89/2012 Coll., Civil code came into effect. The thesis is primarily focused on identifying and analyzing the particularities of the term, its contribution to the law of business corporations and also its use in legal practice. The thesis relies on the methodology of analyzing the valid legal enactment of influence in comparison to its evolution, legal practice and scholarly literature. The thesis is divided into five chapters in total. The first chapter introduces the term corporate group as a sign of economic concentration, and subsequently the specifics and forms of corporate groups are being discussed. The next part briefly describes the evolution and basic scheme of legal enactment of corporate groups in the Czech Republic, especially the changes in the Act no. 513/1991 Coll., Commercial code and the local sources involved in the enactment. Furthermore it also explores the legal enactment of corporate groups according to the European Union. The third chapter deals with the valid legal enactment of influence according...

Context: Data is at the heart of any information system. Choosing the appropriate database and its operation is a major decision for any company and choosing from the pool of different options can can feel overwhelming. In this thesis we take a look at the main factors to consider when making your decision, to help you with the whole process. This thesis will explore the selection, prioritization and considerations when choosing a database. It is aimed at exploring the recent uptake and impact of NoSQL in companies and analyze the results of the literature and empirical study. Aim and Objectives: Our aim is to investigate the recent uptakeand continued use of NoSQL databases in software development companies. It is imperative to know how companies are choosing to adopt the right technology for their application. The objective is to provide instructions for companies on how to choose the right DB for their needs and what to consider. Method: Interviews are conducted to find out the process/approach that practitioners employ when choosing the database technology. Then an analysis of the considerations and their priority is conducted using a questionnaire. The focus is on the considerations, meaning factors to consider when choosing a database. Results: The result of the interviews show that infrastructure is the most essential consideration when choosing a DB, and the survey questionnaire show that consistency is the most essential consideration. Conclusions: The result suggests that there are several essential considerations when choosing a database. Furthermore, we conclude that the challenges of adopting NoSQL technology may be the following: only provide eventual consistency, which can impact availability and performance, reliability, the challenges of transitioning, keeping track, lacking data integrity, handling of complex queries, and security and privacy risks.

Introduction Strategic property management aims at balancing the question of how the needed space is to be secured, maintained, increased or disposed of in a cost effective manner under a mixture of decisions and actions. In recent years, the interest in building maintenance has increased as more and more of the housing stock built after the Second World War is in need of major renovation.  For example, approximately 1 million dwellings were constructed in Sweden in the period 1960-1970. Currently there is growing concern about the expected huge cost of maintaining this aging housing stock especially in the portfolio under municipal ownership. Private housing companies have been shown to report lower maintenance costs than those in the public sector but which are the factors that can explain the apparent differences? During the last decade there has also been a growing trend of governments diversifying themselves of their properties and/or outsourcing the property management. A question of interest is whether it is advantageous to do so and if the maintenance management differs substantially between the government sector and the industrial sector which is seen as business oriented and with a production centred maintenance strategy. In a number of industries there has been a paradigm shift in maintenance whereby the focus is no longer only on availability but reliability and cost effectiveness. New maintenance strategies and policies such as reliability centred maintenance have seen the light of day though without winning ground within property management. Shouldn’t building maintenance be handled in the same way? This licentiate thesis focuses on the strategic management of housing properties under public and private ownership as well as the management of special purpose properties in the government and industrial sectors in relation to the ongoing discussion about neglected maintenance. The purpose is to contribute to the process of cost efficient and effective maintenance both in the housing sector and in the management of special purpose properties through underscoring the factors that lead to differences in the maintenance levels in the different categories. Method The questions above are analysed through a theoretical part that discusses the concept of maintenance and strategies in building maintenance in relation to other industries. The thesis also contains an empirical part that is based on a survey in the form of a questionnaire on housing maintenance and an econometric analysis of the maintenance costs contained in the financial reports of the municipal and private housing companies as well as a questionnaire on among others how state and county governments as well as industrial companies have secured the availability and management of their special purpose properties. The thesis consists of four papers the first two of which are co-authored with Hans Lind. It starts by demarcating the concept of maintenance in the context of standard investment theory followed in paper 2 by a discussion of the term “maintenance strategy” and some stylized facts concerning building maintenance in Sweden. Maintenance strategies and approaches used in some other industries are presented as a background to an analysis of why building maintenance is different. The various factors that affect the maintenance costs reported within the housing sector are surveyed and analysed in paper 3 before the results from a survey on management of special purpose properties in the state and county governments as well industry sector are presented in paper 4. A questionnaire was used to get a broader material about aspects that were difficult to observe directly, including views about underlying factors. Results From the perspective of investment theory everything that is usually classified as maintenance is also an investment. The concept of maintenance can in a number of situations be taken to be unnecessary. A review of strategies from other industries reveals a focus on systematic data collection and cost analysis before action is taken and a move away from time scheduled maintenance to acting on the condition of the object. However building maintenance contains a substantial degree of corrective maintenance with a high degree of opportunistic maintenance and detailed maintenance planning is not ideal due to constantly changing needs and demands. An important result is from the surveys and econometric analysis which indicate that the ownership category has a significant effect of approx. 35 per cent on the maintenance costs reported by the housing companies. Furthermore a major factor affecting the cost level in the housing companies is the influence of external factors such as pressure from the media and politicians. The degree of special property ownership in the surveyed companies is high and the probability of the leasing market increasing in the coming five years is very low. According to the respondents there is very little neglected maintenance in the industry in contrast to the government sector especially in the counties. Furthermore, the maintenance plans in the public sector were shorter than those in the private sector. Discussion The outstanding result from the surveys is that classification of activities as maintenance or investments in both housing and special purpose properties differs in that the public sector companies lean more towards maintenance than investment in their accounting and have a higher degree of adherence to laid maintenance plans. The distinct difference in the pay-back duration used by the government sector as compared to that in the industry sector in effect lowers the effectiveness of the government sector as the lower required rate of return allows the government sector to have more activities that appear to be profitable.  Maybe the problem to worry about should not be that of neglected maintenance in this sector but that of unprofitable maintenance that should not be carried out. This might also just explain why more activities are classified and dealt with as investments by the industry and not by the county or state companies or the municipal housing companies. Conclusion There are strong arguments for saying that building maintenance rationally differs from the kind of maintenance and maintenance planning that could be observed in some of the other industries and the concept of maintenance is much more suitable in a world where there are smaller changes and where it is believed to be possible to know long in advance what is rational to do. The divergence in classification of activities even within the same category and company revealed by the two surveys is problematic as it complicates comparison of activities and services provided as well as benchmarking and it should be given appropriate attention by the managers. This goes to show the great need to use the same well defined concepts in order to benchmark and develop more efficient maintenance management strategies. Future research Though each building is unique the goal should be to develop a model that is rational given the specific uncertainties that characterise a building and the institutional system in which decisions are made. The limited size of the sample and the lack of transparency and uniformity in the financial reports constrain the research efforts in this study. However research is needed towards a clearer and more transparent classification of maintenance activities with the purpose of not only reducing the gap between the reported maintenance costs of the companies but also increasing the comparability in the branch. This will help to isolate and possibly limit the external influence in the management of the companies especially in the municipal housing sector.

This thesis examines innovation and design processes in small established companies. There is a great interest in this area yet paradoxically the area is under-researched, since most innovation research is done on large companies. The research questions are: How do small established companies carry out their innovation and design processes? and How does the context and novelty of the process and product affect the same processes? The thesis is built on three research papers that used the research method of multiple case studies of different small established companies. The innovation and design processes found were highly context dependent and were facilitated by committed resources, a creative climate, vision, low family involvement, delegated power and authority, and linkages to external actors such as customers and users. Both experimental cyclical and linear structured design processes were found. The choice of structure is explained by the relative product and process novelty experienced by those developing the product innovation. Linear design processes worked within a low relative novelty situation and cyclical design processes worked no matter the relative novelty. The innovation and design processes found were informal, with a low usage of formal systematic design methods, except in the case of design processes for software. The use of formal systematic methods in small companies seems not always to be efficient, because many of the problems the methods are designed to solve are not present. Customers and users were found to play a large and important role in the innovation and design processes found and gave continuous feedback during the design processes. Innovation processes were found to be intertwined, yielding synergy effects, but it was common that resources were taken from the innovation processes for acute problems that threatened the cash flow. In sum, small established companies have the natural prerequisites to take advantage of lead-user inventions and cyclical design processes. Scarce resources were found to be the main factor hindering innovation, but the examined companies practiced several approaches to increase their resources or use existing scarce resources more efficiently in their innovation and design processes. Examples of these approaches include adopting lead-user inventions and reducing formality in the innovation and design processes.

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / The problem identified is the poor management and control of production, which includes direct consequences with regard to quality, planning of operations and work method; generating mainly penalties for non-fulfillment of orders, increased operating costs and lost opportunity cost that negatively affect the efficiency of the production process of concrete posts and accessories in a SME company. The implementation of an improvement model is proposed applying the Lean Manufacturing philosophy; whose application is focused on improving 3 main waste in the production system: defects, inventory and waiting time. The proposals of the study generated a reduction in the percentage of defects in the company by 6.46%, 9.50% in the case of penalties for non-compliance with orders, 34.67% in the cycle time and a 21% increase in the OEE of the machines.

This research study is aimed at finding empirical evidence to support a finding from an initial study that corporate governance disclosure is linked with financial performance for JSE listed companies. The study made use of a scorecard previously designed for the initial study to rate the governance disclosure of the various companies. 74 companies from the eight major sectors of the JSE were selected for the sample and financial data for the review period was extracted from MacGregor BFA. Governance was rated based on annual reports and any other information within the public domain. The financial performance measures used were, CAGR using opening and closing share prices, price to book and price/earnings ratio. Using mean disclosure scores, two portfolios were created to compare financial performance, the high and low disclosure portfolios. A simple correlation analysis was then conducted to assess the relationship of governance disclosure with the three different financial measures. The findings indicate a negative correlation between governance disclosure and returns whilst a positive correlat ion is established between governance and firm valuations. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

The research problem of this project is to investigate if, and how, Birkinshaw and Bouquet‟s model of subsidiary attention seeking by means of weight and voice needs to be modified for MNC subsidiaries operating in emerging markets. The qualitative research technique used for this research was the multiple-case study method. Key findings are that weight is moderated by institutional environments and voice by national culture in emerging markets. Recommendations are made to assist managers of subsidiaries in increasing weight and voice in emerging markets in order to gain more attention from Corporate Headquarters. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Tourists seldom experience a destination with just one company, yet they often encounter a destination as a coherent entity. This results from the effort of different stakeholders who work together to develop a destination, despite often being competitors. These efforts make the tourism industry fertile for coopetitive relationships.  The high presence of coopetition has inspired researchers to study this phenomenon in the tourism sector. There is a solid academic understanding of the rationales behind coopetition and the factors influencing the level of coopetition within a destination. However, despite the academic interest, there is only limited research dedicated to the impacts of coopetition on destination development. This study responds to this shortcoming and investigates the impacts of coopetition between accommodation companies on the destination development of Saaremaa, Estonia. Given the exploratory nature of this study, a qualitative case study approach focusing on collecting original data required from primary sources has been used as the research method. The qualitative research is carried out via semi-structured interviews with two sources of data. The interviews were conducted with six representatives of accommodation companies and one representative of the local DMO. The study results provide supporting evidence that coopetitive relationships between accommodation companies have several impacts on the destination development of Saaremaa. Namely, these relations are impacting the economic development and strengthening the image of Saaremaa. Furthermore, the results show that coopetition increases the diversity and the quality of offered products and services. However, given the case study approach and the size of the research, caution is required in interpreting the study's results, especially when applying the results to other destinations.

The purpose of this study was to identify whether firms that implement and develop core competencies perform significantly better than firms that do not. A model of core competency implementation and development in restaurant firms was developed and tested in three casual dining restaurant firms. The amount of co-alignment in the core competency process was compared to financial performance. Results indicated that firms that had a greater amount of alignment performed better. The highest performance was evidenced in the firm that not only had internal alignment but that appeared to have competencies that are also critical to success in the restaurant industry. / Ph. D.