Organizational Culture and Motivation in the Public Sector. The Case of the City of Zografou

AbstractIn an era of increasingly diminishing public funding for local government organizations, motivating public employees is becoming a nearly impossible mission, with managers searching for non-monetary reward practices, to maintain or even increase motivation and performance of their subordinates. The purpose of this study is to investigate the motivational dynamics of the employees of a public sector organization and their relationship to its culture. The Competing Values Model was employed to diagnose the organizational culture and to illuminate the relationship of culture and motivation in the organization studied. The research has shown that the dominant culture type is Hierarchy (Bureaucracy) while motivation level was found to be low, demonstrating a negative association between the two variables. Also found was a positive relationship between the desired culture (clan) and motivation. The findings point to the need of a re-examination of the existing organizational culture by the local government and the creation of one that is closer to the one with greater motivating potentia

Consumer Responces to CSR in Greek Banking Sector: Does CSR Really Matter?

This paper focuses on investigating the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on consumers’ preferences and loyalty in the banking sector. The researchers examined the main concepts associated with CSR and how it is related with the choice and the retention of customers to a specific bank. 67 individuals participated in a qualitative research, which was conducted through semi-structured interviews. The purpose of the research was to analyze the extent to which CSR actions affect customers’ choice and loyalty to a bank. The main conclusions that emerged reveal that although the satisfaction and commitment, as well as the positive perception of consumers depends on the trust created by the banks, customers in Greece still believe that the CSR actions implemented by banks only contribute to increasing their organizational profits through the improved corporate reputation and recognition. It is thus evident that CSR does not have a significant impact on customers’ attraction and loyalty. This paper also identified that one of the major problems in the banking sector is the lack of public confidence in the way banks operate and the special role they play in modern societies

Maximin and maximal solutions for linear programming problems with possibilistic uncertainty

We consider linear programming problems with uncertain constraint coefficients described by intervals or, more generally, possi-bility distributions. The uncertainty is given a behavioral interpretation using coherent lower previsions from the theory of imprecise probabilities. We give a meaning to the linear programming problems by reformulating them as decision problems under such imprecise-probabilistic uncer-tainty. We provide expressions for and illustrations of the maximin and maximal solutions of these decision problems and present computational approaches for dealing with them

Transfer Learning in Information Criteria-based Feature Selection

This paper investigates the effectiveness of transfer learning based on Mallows' Cp. We propose a procedure that combines transfer learning with Mallows' Cp (TLCp) and prove that it outperforms the conventional Mallows' Cp criterion in terms of accuracy and stability. Our theoretical results indicate that, for any sample size in the target domain, the proposed TLCp estimator performs better than the Cp estimator by the mean squared error (MSE) metric in the case of orthogonal predictors, provided that i) the dissimilarity between the tasks from source domain and target domain is small, and ii) the procedure parameters (complexity penalties) are tuned according to certain explicit rules. Moreover, we show that our transfer learning framework can be extended to other feature selection criteria, such as the Bayesian information criterion. By analyzing the solution of the orthogonalized Cp, we identify an estimator that asymptotically approximates the solution of the Cp criterion in the case of non-orthogonal predictors. Similar results are obtained for the non-orthogonal TLCp. Finally, simulation studies and applications with real data demonstrate the usefulness of the TLCp scheme

A decomposition framework for gas network design

Gas networks are used to transport natural gas, which is an important resource for both residential and industrial customers throughout the world. The gas network design problem is a challenging nonlinear and non-convex optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a decomposition framework to solve this problem. In particular, we utilize a two-stage procedure that involves a convex reformulation of the original problem. We conduct experiments on a benchmark network to validate and analyze the performance of our framework