THE IMPACT OF EMPLOYEE COMPETENCE ON ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY: THE MEDIATING ROLE OF IT ALIGNMENT

Scholars have proposed that IT enables organizational agility by extending the reach and richness of firm knowledge and processes. However, this relationship is still open to debate. Based on the dynamic capabilities perspective, this paper proposes a model to investigate how employee competence (i.e., IT competence of business people and business competence of IT professionals) affects organizational agility through IT alignment. Data analysis results show that IT alignment fully mediates the influence of IT competence of business people and partially mediates the influence of business competence of IT professionals on organizational agility. In addition, the two kinds of competence are also positively interacting with each other to enhance IT alignment. We summarize with implications and suggestions for future research

Synthesis and catalysis of chemically reduced metal–metalloid amorphous alloys

This is the published version. Copyright 2012 Royal Society of ChemistryAmorphous alloys structurally deviate from crystalline materials in that they possess unique short-range ordered and long-range disordered atomic arrangement. They are important catalytic materials due to their unique chemical and structural properties including broadly adjustable composition, structural homogeneity, and high concentration of coordinatively unsaturated sites. As chemically reduced metal–metalloid amorphous alloys exhibit excellent catalytic performance in applications such as efficient chemical production, energy conversion, and environmental remediation, there is an intense surge in interest in using them as catalytic materials. This critical review summarizes the progress in the study of the metal–metalloid amorphous alloy catalysts, mainly in recent decades, with special focus on their synthetic strategies and catalytic applications in petrochemical, fine chemical, energy, and environmental relevant reactions. The review is intended to be a valuable resource to researchers interested in these exciting catalytic materials. We concluded the review with some perspectives on the challenges and opportunities about the future developments of metal–metalloid amorphous alloy catalysts

Performance evaluation and quota allocation for multiple undesirable outputs based on the uniform frontier

International audienceThe zero sum gains data envelopment analysis (ZSG-DEA) models and thecorresponding uniform frontier method are widely applied for performance evaluationand resource/quota allocation in practice. Nevertheless, assuming variablereturns-to-scale (VRS) and a situation with multiple ZSG inputs/outputs, the existingZSG-DEA models may have no feasible solution for some efficient decision makingunits (DMUs) and hence the uniform frontier cannot always be determined. In this study,two improved ZSG-DEA models are proposed, one assuming constant returns-to-scale(CRS) and the other VRS. Then, a general iterative algorithm is developed forresource/quota allocation based on the uniform frontier. We prove that the proposedmethod can always allocate multiple resources/quotas under both CRS and VRSassumptions, which extends the existing uniform frontier method research. Anapplication to environmental performance evaluation and quota allocation for 30administrative regions in China is presented to elucidate the main ideas