Satisfaction of hotel professionals study of the relationships with personal and organizational variables

Tourism on a global scale has become one of the main drivers of the economy and of economic activities. It is one of the sectors that has the highest growth rates globally (BPI, 2016). In this context, hospitality is one of the main tourism products and probably one of the largest industries in the world. Therefore, the understanding of the factors that directly or indirectly cause the employee to be satisfied may have implications for the entire process of service delivery, return of the tourist (loyalty), as well as on the sustainable and healthy growth of the hotel units. Based on this information, and in the existence of a large number of published studies with several variables in the scope of the organizations in general, we carried out four studies with very specific sequential objectives. The first two studies carried out were a systematic review of the literature and had the specific purpose of making an evaluation of what has been published in terms of tourism variables and satisfaction with work itself. These were followed by two other empirical studies, with the specific aim of creating practical and functional models that would be of value to hotel managers and directors, as well as to human resources departments. We intended to create two models that could be implemented in the hotel work environment and that would substantially improve workers' satisfaction and productivity, translating into a win-win strategy for both managers and hotel employees. In general the results of the studies show the importance of studying the variable satisfaction with work within Algarve hotel workers and also create two empirical models that can be used by directors and managers of hotel units and human resources departments, with the objective to increase workers´ satisfaction, motivation, and engagement. Subsequently, the implications of the results are discussed

Espaços e Paisagens : Antiguidade Clássica e Heranças Contemporâneas

Estudam-se os testemunhos arqueológicos resultantes da desagregação da cidade romana de Ammaia

Multi-agent model predictive control for transport phenomena processes

Throughout the last decades, control systems theory has thrived, promoting new areas of development, especially for chemical and biological process engineering. Production processes are becoming more and more complex and researchers, academics and industry professionals dedicate more time in order to keep up-to-date with the increasing complexity and nonlinearity. Developing control architectures and incorporating novel control techniques as a way to overcome optimization problems is the main focus for all people involved. Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) has been one of the main responses from academia for the exponential growth of process complexity and fast growing scale. Prediction algorithms are the response to manage closed-loop stability and optimize results. Adaptation mechanisms are nowadays seen as a natural extension of prediction methodologies in order to tackle uncertainty in distributed parameter systems (DPS), governed by partial differential equations (PDE). Parameters observers and Lyapunov adaptation laws are also tools for the systems in study. Stability and stabilization conditions, being implicitly or explicitly incorporated in the NMPC formulation, by means of pointwise min-norm techniques, are also being used and combined as a way to improve control performance, robustness and reduce computational effort or maintain it low, without degrading control action. With the above assumptions, centralized (or single agent) or decentralized and distributed Model Predictive Control (MPC) architectures (also called multi-agent) have been applied to a series of nonlinear distributed parameters systems with transport phenomena, such as bioreactors, water delivery canals and heat exchangers to show the importance and success of these control techniques

The Transport-Ticket System in Brazil for Urban Public Transport

The transport-ticket system in Brazil for urban public transport was implanted on 1987, in the big cities. By the system, the employers must to supply their employees with sufficient amount of tickets, to facilitate their diary translation from home to office. Since their implantation, the system facilitates the maintenance of the urban public transport quality and permits the normal fulfilment of the urban economic activity. Meanwhile, the system means a large allowance, from the firms and employers to the urban bus companies, partially compensated by the income tax depression. The article analyse just the effects, not properly beneficial, of this transport - ticket system functioning for the small and medium size firms.Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies. Faculty of Economics and Business. The University of Sydne

Emotional Intelligence in management and leadership literature – a bibliometric analysis

Several organizations value technical competences of their employees, but it is not enough to differentiate them. So, market distinguishes organizational staff with social and behavioural skills, such emotional intelligence, to improve organizational performance. During the recent years, emotional intelligence has gained a great relevance in terms of management and leadership research, in different contexts. This research aims to provide a literature review about emotional intelligence in management and leadership context and identify suggestions for future research. To achieve that purpose, we used a bibliometric analysis methodology, specifically a co-citation analysis, with support of VOSviewer software. The articles used in this research were obtained from Web of Science database and published between 1980 and 2018. As main contributions of this study, we intend to identify the emotional intelligence clusters that result of management and leadership literature, make aware researchers and managers to this subject relevance, and show the research trends about the emotional intelligence as basis for a set of soft skills that improve the individual and organizational performance.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Propagating fine-grained topic labels in news snippets

We propose an unsupervised method for propagating automatically extracted fine-grained topic labels among news items to improve their topic description for subsequent text classification procedure. This method compares vector representations of news items and assigns to each news item the label of its closest neighbour with a different topic label. Results obtained show that high precision can be achieved in propagating the top ranked topic label, and that 2-gram and 3-gram feature representations optimize the precision

Impacto do marketing e orientação para o mercado na performance económico-financeira nas PME do interior norte de Portugal

A temática do grau de orientação para o mercado (OM) do meio empresarial tem suscitado grande interesse, ocupando lugar de destaque ao nível da investigação em marketing. Este artigo pretende contribuir para o tema, incluindo os resultados de uma investigação sobre o marketing, a intensidade competitiva, a turbulência de mercado e o grau de OM como factores condicionantes da performance económico-financeira de uma amostra de 87 micro e pequenas e médias empresas localizadas em áreas rurais e pouco desenvolvidas. Na análise dos resultados do inquérito aplicado, verificou-se que, ao nível da OM, a recolha de informação de mercado afecta positivamente alguns indicadores de performance e que a divulgação interna dessa informação tem um efeito contrário. Por outro lado, o desempenho económico-financeiro é superior em condições de maior turbulência de mercado e há uma relação negativa entre a intensidade competitiva e a rotação do activo das empresas

The effects of marketing and market orientation on economical and financial performance in portuguese SME

The market orientation (MO) degree has been studied for scientific and academic community, occupying actually a prominent place at the marketing research field. In a stakeholder’s value creation perspective and in highly competitive environments, the development of a customer and market-oriented culture may represent the frontier to the companies’ survival, specially micro and medium enterprises (SMEs). This paper includes the results of an empirical research about marketing, market orientation degree and environmental variables such as competitive intensity and market turbulence as factors that can influence the economic and financial performance of Portuguese micro and small companies located in a rural area. The results indicate that: (a) marketing is seen by these companies as an accessory, not deserving an attention materialized in practical actions that can be considered like strategic, (b) at market orientation level, the market information affects positively some performance indicators, (c) and economical and financial performance is superior in conditions of highly market turbulence and there is a negative relationship between competitive intensity and the companies ratio turnover/total assets

Evaluation of the Antioxidant Activity of New Coumarin Derivatives by Cyclic Voltammetry

Free radicals, species with one or more unpaired electrons are produced in normal or pathological cell metabolism, from xenobiotics, or trough ionizing radiation. Electron acceptors such as molecular oxygen react easily with free radicals, to become radicals themselves. Oxygen free radicals or reactive oxygen species (ROS) such as superoxide anion radicals (O2 .-), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), hydroxy radicals (.OH), and singlet oxygen (1O2) are continuously generated in cells exposed to an aerobic environment, and have been associated with the genesis of tumors as well as age-dependent diseases such atherosclerosis, arthritis, and neurodegenerative disorders. In this context, the chemopreventive role of antioxidants present in consumable fruits, vegetables, and beverages has received considerable attention and has been a growing interest in finding novel antioxidants in order to meet the requirements of pharmaceutical industries [1]. Several analytical methods have been used to evaluate the activity of antioxidant compounds, such as the cyclic voltammetry[2] and the 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl radical (DPPH) assay[3]. In this work the antioxidant activity of two new synthetic coumarin derivatives, 3-bromo-6,7-dihydroxycoumarin and 6,7-dihydroxy-3-[(E)-2-phenylethenyl]coumarin, is evaluated by cyclic voltammetry. The anodic peak potentials were measured and compared to their antioxidant activities measured by the DPPH radical assay. The voltammetric experiments were carried out at pH 7.0 (phosphate buffer) in order to resemble the conditions of DPPH assays. Both voltammetric and DPPH assay data were compared with data obtained for 6,7-di-hydroxycoumarin and quercetin, with high antioxidant activity. The structure–activity relationships of the synthesized coumarins as potential antioxidants was investigated in order to understand how the different 3-substitutions affect the antioxidant activity of the 6,7-dihydroxycoumarin