What is the Impact of Eliminating Performance Ratings?

[Excerpt] Ratingless performance management became trendy in recent years when companies found that traditional performance ratings cost huge amounts of money and time without significant positive impact on performance. However, simply eliminating performance ratings cannot achieve desirable results. In this paper, we summarize the research surrounding ratingless performance management and present some alternatives to the traditional methods

What are Best Practices to Define a Common Understanding of What is Expected of Companies\u27 Leaders, and How is this Understanding Structured?

[Excerpt] Today, companies need to have strong and meaningful leadership drive their business. A critical component of strong leadership involves identifying the competencies and behaviors that enable leaders to succeed. This is primarily accomplished by implementing a leadership competency model (LCM), which has benefits but is often ineffectively utilized. Knowing which leadership competencies are key for global companies and how companies are implementing LCMs is critical for success in developing strong effective leaders to influence their teams and the overall business

Learner’s Dialect Use by EFL Instructors: A Study of Junior High School Teachers in a Minority Area of China

The use of learners’ L1 (first language) in the EFL classroom has been widely discussed in the literature. However, the use of local dialects has received less attention. Thus, this study investigates the use of Enshi dialect in EFL classroom in junior high schools in order to explore how teachers deploy the learners’ own dialect in EFL classroom and its effect. The Enshi dialect which is a variant of Mandarin is frequently used in daily life in Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with 15 teachers who adopt Enshi dialect in EFL classroom teaching in junior high schools in 8 minority villages in Enshi. The results indicate that occasional dialect use does exist in EFL classroom teaching for junior high school students in ethnic minority areas. In addition, four main benefits are revealed when learners use dialects in EFL classes. Teaching English by using dialect helps students to improve the mastery of English grammar, distinguish pronunciation, understand the meaning of English words, phrases and sentences, and enliven the classroom atmosphere. The research also shows that the effective use of learners’ dialects in the EFL classroom plays positive roles in English learning

Reconceptualising knowledge seeking in knowledge management: towards a knowledge seeking process model

Promoting knowledge sharing has long been regarded as a very important aspect of the management of knowledge. However, knowledge sharing has its challenges due to the special nature of knowledge. Based on this, the researcher argues that it is knowledge seeking rather than knowledge sharing that plays a crucial role in knowledge management. However, there is no clear definition for knowledge seeking in existing literature. In the few studies of knowledge seeking research, knowledge has been viewed as a noun and as such knowledge seeking has been seen as no different to information seeking. The aim of this research has been to explore the knowledge seeking process in the workplace in order to conceptualise knowledge seeking by developing a theoretical model. A review of the literature concerning knowledge seeking has been conducted in order to clarify the concept of knowledge seeking. From the interpretivist’s perspective, a qualitative research approach has been taken, in which sense-making theory is employed as a methodological guide. Time-line interviews were carried out with construction engineers in China to collect primary data, and Template analysis was utilized. Based on the literature, this thesis defined knowledge seeking as a learning process, which consists of three major themes: experiential learning, information seeking and problem solving, based on which a preliminary framework was developed. Twenty six engineers were successfully interviewed. The findings from the data confirmed the links between the themes. Further codes were also identified to develop a final template, which evolved to a theoretical model illustrating the knowledge seeking process in the workplace. By promoting knowledge seeking rather than knowledge sharing, this research contributed innovatory insight into existing KM research. The new concept of knowledge seeking and the theoretical model developed thereafter contribute to knowledge by providing a theoretical framework for further research in this area. The specific combination of time-line interviews and template analysis has demonstrated good results in this research. Collecting primary data from China, this research applied Western theories onto engineers within a Chinese context, which has contributed to KM research in China. These contributions will result in many practical implications for KM practices

A Model of Trade with Ricardian Comparative Advantage and Intra-sectoral Firm Heterogeneity

In this paper, we merge the heterogenous firm trade model of Melitz (2003) with the Ricardian model of Dornbusch, Fisher and Samuelson (DFS 1977) to explain how the pattern of international specialization and trade is determined by the interaction of comparative advantage, economies of scale, country sizes and trade barriers. The model is able to capture the existence of inter-industry trade and intra-industry trade in a single unified framework. It explains how trade openness affects the pattern of international specialization and trade. It generalizes Melitz’s firm selection effect in the face of trade liberalization to a setting where the patterns of inter-industry trade and intra-industry are endogenous. Although opening to trade is unambiguously welfare-improving in both countries, trade liberalization can lead to an counter-Melitz effect in the larger country if it is insufficiently competitive in the sectors where it has the strongest comparative disadvantage but still produces. In this case, the operating productivity cutoff is lowered while the exporting cutoff increases in the face of trade liberalization. This is because the intersectoral resource allocation (IRA) effect dominates the Melitz effect in these sectors. Consequently, the larger country can lose from trade liberalization. Some hypotheses related to firms’ exporting behavior across sectors upon opening up to trade and upon trade liberalization are also derived. Analyses of firm-level data of Chinese manufacturing sectors confirm these hypotheses.inter-industry trade, intra-industry trade, heterogeneous firms, trade liberalization