Strategic Human Resource Management and Employment Relations : An International Perspective

he theoretical roots for the study of human resource management (HRM) in organisations have existed in the Western contexts for over a century when seminal ideas of influential management thinkers such as Taylor, Drucker and McGregor were in prevalence. Earlier conceptualisations of work and employment adopted a different (pluralist) emphases and focused on terms such as labour welfare, labour relations, personnel management and industrial relations to name a few. One could argue, this view reflected contemporary developments in the field of HRM, albeit with different ideological and philosophical focus that have been in operation for several centuries. For example, in India, work practices were influenced by the ancient ideas of Chanakya (also referred to as Kautilya), whose pioneering work on Arthashastra was regarded as a treatise in the field of economics, politics, military strategy and governance. This seminal work had also developed ideas of organisation and administration in the fourth century BC. Indeed, one only needs to turn back and look at the practices of one of the world’s oldest multinational corporation–the erstwhile East India Company, which was founded in the early 1600 in India by the British to pursue trade with the East Indies. Even though it ended up trading, in the main, in the Indian subcontinent, its operations spanned across several borders

Factors Influencing Enterprise Training: Evidence From New Zealand

Information gleaned from the 2003 New Zealand Skills and Training Survey, conducted as a part of a joint study by Business New Zealand and Industry Training Federation and supported by the New Zealand Department of Labour's Future of Work Contestable Fund, are used to assess, within the New Zealand context, the relative impact various factors generally known to influence provision of training in o ther countries. For the purposes of this paper, factors suggested by academic literature as likely determinants of training are grouped under two broad categories: enterprise characteristics and employee demographics. Measures of these influences are specified as independent variables in linear and logistic regressions used to derive estimates of the extent to which each factor affects various aspects of skills development and training in New Zealand enterprises. Indices of training volume and training diversity, which gauge the nature and extent of training in these organizations, are employed as dependent variables in these regressions. Results of this analysis suggest, among other things, that firm size and casualisation of workforce are the most significant factors affecting the provision of training by New Zealand employers

INHIBITION OF PYOCYANIN PRODUCTION IN PSEUDOMONAS AERUGINOSA BY NATURAL ANTIMICROBIAL COMPOUNDS FROM HERBAL EXTRACTS

Objective: P. aeruginosa produces a range of metabolites including pyocyanin that enhance its ability to resist antibiotics and becomes capable of surviving adverse conditions.Method: In this report, eight plants (extracted with five solvents) were screened for antibacterial activity against P. aeruginosa by microbroth dilution method. Afterward tested for inhibition of pyocyanin in presence and absence of plant extracts.Result: Among these D. muricata and S. quitoenes exhibited good antibacterial potential. Inhibition of pyocyanin is identified as a potential anti-virulence strategy. Therefore, acetone extract of six plants exhibited MIC ≤3.125mg/ml and methanol extract of three plants exhibited MIC ≤6.25mg/ml were used to check pyocyanin inhibition in P. aeruginosa. In acetone extracts, significant pyocyanin inhibition was found in I. pestigirdis and C. colocynthis. In methanol extracts, C. colocynthis and D. muricata showed considerable pyocyanin inhibition.Conclusion: Overall result indicates that the best antimicrobial compound (growth inhibitor) may not be best inhibitor of pyocyanin biosynthesis or vice-versa. Moreover, I. pestigirdis, C. colocynthis and D. muricata seems to contain compounds which inhibit the growth of bacteria as well as the biosynthesis of pyocyanin.Â

Learning Visual Locomotion with Cross-Modal Supervision

In this work, we show how to learn a visual walking policy that only uses a monocular RGB camera and proprioception. Since simulating RGB is hard, we necessarily have to learn vision in the real world. We start with a blind walking policy trained in simulation. This policy can traverse some terrains in the real world but often struggles since it lacks knowledge of the upcoming geometry. This can be resolved with the use of vision. We train a visual module in the real world to predict the upcoming terrain with our proposed algorithm Cross-Modal Supervision (CMS). CMS uses time-shifted proprioception to supervise vision and allows the policy to continually improve with more real-world experience. We evaluate our vision-based walking policy over a diverse set of terrains including stairs (up to 19cm high), slippery slopes (inclination of 35 degrees), curbs and tall steps (up to 20cm), and complex discrete terrains. We achieve this performance with less than 30 minutes of real-world data. Finally, we show that our policy can adapt to shifts in the visual field with a limited amount of real-world experience. Video results and code at https://antonilo.github.io/vision_locomotion/.Comment: Learning to walk from pixels in the real world by using proprioception as supervision. Project page for videos and code: https://antonilo.github.io/vision_locomotion

Leadership styles and employee creativity: the interactive impact of online knowledge sharing and organizational innovation

Purpose: This study examines the differences in the impact of three leadership styles (transactional, transformational, and creative) on intra-organizational online knowledge sharing and employee creativity. Specifically, we use self-determination theory (SDT) to examine the impact of these three leadership styles on four aspects of online knowledge sharing (knowledge donating, knowledge collecting, lurking, and active lurking) and the moderating role of organizational innovation on these relationships. Methodology: Data collected from 361 employees of B2B organizations in Vietnam support all our hypotheses. Structural equation modelling was used for data analysis. Novelty/Originality: This paper extends the current knowledge management research on online knowledge sharing by studying two new behaviors (lurking and active lurking), linking diverse leadership styles to these behaviors and employee creativity, and exploring the moderating role of organizational innovation. Our findings shed light on the complexity of the relationship between leadership and online knowledge sharing. This study also provides useful implications for practitioners to help them choose the most appropriate leadership style for their digitalization process to ensure optimal outcomes. Findings: Transformational, transactional, and creative leadership were found to affect online knowledge sharing, in which creative leadership had the strongest effect. Online knowledge sharing was found to mediate the impact of three types of leadership on employee creativity. The results also showed that organizational innovation moderates the influence of leadership on online knowledge sharing