The effects of technostress creators and organizational commitment among school teachers / Narehan Hassan … [et al.]

In the fast-paced world, information is retrieved and stored efficiently using IT technologies. Due to the constant change and advancement in technology, technostress has become a critical issue in many organizations especially for those who are IT illiterate. This scenario is especially true for school teachers in Malaysia where students’ information is stored and retrieved using a database system and posted online for quick accessibility of files and student management. However, for those who are not IT-skilled, this type of work demand can influence both the employee’s motivation and work commitment. School teachers in Malaysia are found to be overworked and most had to take home their work, especially in updating students’ information. The changing work demands and the need to perform both teaching and administrative duties have resulted in teachers facing a stressful working environment. This is especially true for senior teachers, whose IT skill is often lagging compared to their younger counterparts; hence the term technostress is coined -- not only to teachers but to those who are lacking in IT-related skills. Teachers’ commitment is of utmost importance to produce better workforce for the future. Hence, this study was conducted to examine both the relationship and the effects of techno-stress creators and organizational commitment among school teachers. This study was carried out at six schools in Selangor involving 173 school teachers. The findings revealed that two dimensions of techno-stress creators which were techno-uncertainty and techno-insecurity had positive and significant influence on organizational commitment while all other three elements of techno-stress creators which were techno-overload, techno invasion and techno complexity did not predict teachers’ organizational commitment. The findings also revealed that certain amount of techno-stress can enhance the level of teachers’ commitment

The effect of perceived service recovery justice on customer loyalty: role of customer affection as moderator in Malaysian telecommunication industry / Siti Aisyah Yaakob … [et al.]

Customer loyalty has been the goal of service providers including telecommunication companies. They need to make sure that they can retain their customers as long as possible. Service recovery is one of the aspects that should be focused on as telecommunication services tend to receive a lot of complaints from the users. The ability of service providers to handle and solve all the problems appropriately will provide justice to their customers. Previous studies found the link between customer affection and loyalty which indicates its importance to strengthen the emotional tie between customers and companies after service recovery. Therefore, this study is intended to examine the moderating effect of customer affection on the link between service justice and customer loyalty. An analysis of 100 data using multiple regression analysis revealed that procedural justice is significant to influence customer loyalty. This finding indicates that telecommunication companies should pay attention on procedural justice in performing their service recovery. The results also found that customer affection does not significantly moderate the relationship between service justice and customer loyalty

Phase transformation, optical and emission performance of zinc silicate glass-ceramics phosphor derived from the ZnO–B2O3–SLS glass system

A new transparent zinc silicate glass-ceramic was derived from the 55ZnO–5B2O3–40SLS glass system via a controlled heat-treatment method. The precursor glass sample was placed through the heat-treatment process at different temperatures to study the progress in phase transformation, optical performance and emission intensity of the zinc silicate glass-ceramics. For this project, material characterization was measured through several tests using densimeter and linear shrinkage measurement, X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared reflection (FTIR), ultraviolet–visible (UV–Vis) and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. The density and linear shrinkage measurements show that the density of the particular glass-ceramic samples increases with the progression of heating temperature. The XRD analysis displays the result in which the zinc silicate crystal starts to grow after the sample was treated at 700 °C. In addition, the FTIR spectra indicated that the crystallization of the zinc silicate phase occurred with the appearance of SiO4, ZnO4 and Si-O-Zn bands. UV–visible exhibited the small changes when the value for the optical band gap decreased from 3.867 to 3.423 eV, influenced by the temperature applied to the sample. Furthermore, the PL spectroscopy showed an enhancement of broad green emission at 534 nm upon the increased heat-treatment temperature. Thus, it can be concluded there is the progression of crystal growth as the heat-treatment temperature increased; three emission peaks appeared at 529, 570 and 682 nm for the green, yellow and red emissions, respectively