The term virtual organization is used to describe the organizations that are united with other organizations to benefit from the relative advantages of other organizations. These organizations are established based on different patterns to use information technology for building quick, cheap, and easy communications. Virtual organizations use effective and useful strategies to keep up with the rapid and fundamental changes in the new world. Information Technology (IT) is a facilitator that has made it possible to create virtual organizations. In these organizations, indicators such as the level of collaboration with partners, the rate of the implementation of IT and other issues such as how to work together based on mutual trust, how to choose partners and how to resolve disputes with partners are used to form the virtual teams to help determine the viability of the organizations. The virtual organization, as a fact, is the result of technological advancements and creativity in organizing firms to face with the turbulent environment and features of the post-industrial age. In today's world of business, virtual organizations are trying to benefit from knowledge-based employees, who have high flexibility and significant efficiency to respond to the needs of a turbulent market and to create significant competitive advantage. In order to benefit from such organizations, their managerial issues should be identified and organized in a good manner. This study examines the relationship between the degree of organization's virtualization and the organizational ability (employees). The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some experts and, using Pearson correlation test, examines the hypotheses of the survey. The results indicate that there was a significant difference between the degree of virtualization of organization and organizational ability.

Evaluation of the national entrepreneurship ecosystem is one of the most important measures that most countries are committed to. This study evaluates the entrepreneurship ecosystem of the coun-tries in accordance with the Global Entrepreneurship index (GEI) and based on the metafrontier Malmquist approach. The metafrontier Malmquist method helps to find the pattern of change for each country, to perform analyses dynamically, to identify the effects of technical and technology changes among the total changes (Malmquist), and to consider the region and level of the countries in analyses (metafrontier). The data Global Entrepreneurship index for 132 countries from 2016 to 2017 are derived from the reports of the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute. Results show that the productivity of the entrepreneurship ecosystem generally increased, but the deeper analysis indicates that this improvement was due to the technology improvement, not the technical efficiency improvement. Meanwhile, the North America region has had the best technical performance in the development of entrepreneurship ecosystem, and other areas, especially Latin America, and The Caribbean and South Asia have experienced a decline in technical efficiency. It was also found that East Asia, and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa and North America maintained a technology gap in the area of entrepreneurship ecosystems, and Latin America and The Caribbean and South Asia regions had the potential to develop technological standards. By analyzing the metafrontier, simple analysis of the entrepreneurship ecosystem performance was replaced with the deep analysis, and a more comprehensive view was achieved in this area.

This study aims to analyze the influence of word of mouth and university reputation on student decision to study at faculty of economics at the Universitas Islam Sumatera Utara (UISU), Indonesia. This research uses quantitative approach with explanatory research type. The sample size includes all 177 new university students of academic year 2015-2016 and processed statistically with multiple linier regression method. Results show that word of mouth does not positively influence on students’ decision to study. Otherwise, university reputation partially had a positive and significant effect on students’ decision to study. In addition, word of mouth and university reputation influence on students’ decision to study. This shows that prospective students do not consider word-of-mouth good and bad information of the UISU, but rather consider the university's reputation in choosing a place to study. UISU should do more professionally in fulfilling facilities and infrastructure and improving the quality of lecturers. Tight competition requires universities to always build a good reputation through new breakthroughs that can be a mainstay and have a high selling value. UISU is required to be more professional by prioritizing user satisfaction.

This research explores the impact of organizational culture on expatriate’s working performance at Universiti Malaysia Perlis. The factors that affect expatriate’s job performance are important in enabling expatriates to acquire essential competencies that allow them to complete their tasks in workplace. This research was a survey (questionnaires) method. Data were gathered from 150 respondents consist of expatriates who were academicians and non-academician of legal age 18 and above on random basis from several academic schools in UniMAP. The analysis of the study uses Mi-crosoft Excel and Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Software Version 16.0. The data were analyzed using descriptive analysis and multiple regression analysis. According to the results presented, language barriers and communication style were found to have significant effects on expatriate’s working performance. Therefore, from the results of two hypotheses tested there are meaningful relationships between language barriers and communication style toward expatriates working performance at Universiti Malaysia Perlis. This research has accumulated an empirical knowledge base which concentrates on coping behaviors for foreign staffs in higher education in-stitution contexts. The findings of this research will help the management of UniMAP understand the impact of organizational culture’s factors on expatriates working performance. The results of the present study showed that it could set up the right organizational culture and ultimately further improve the organization performance.

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) of Batik play strategic roles such as a substance, a mover, and a buffer of the nation’s economy and supporting the national economic growth sustain-ably. However, these SMEs have not been able to compete in both national and international levels. This is caused by the low rate of knowledge-creation. In line with this, this study aims to reveal how the knowledge-creation can create the competition atmosphere of the SMEs with the support from technology and entrepreneurship orientation. Additionally, the methodology employed in this study was explanatory survey design, with 286 Batik business units as sample. More specifically, the sampling technique to select the target area was non-probability in form of purposive sampling. The data were then analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Further, the result of this study reveals that knowledge-creation influences on creating the business competition atmosphere with the support of the technology and entrepreneurship and orientation. Based on the research finding, SMEs Batik finds it difficult to organize the collection of Explicit Knowledge into a more systematic media, due to the lack of media infrastructure to keep the knowledge. In addition, tech-nology adoption is not necessary for handmade batik by considering that handmade batik relies on personal skill.

Tourism has emerged as a major industry worldwide and a sector in many countries. This sector has experienced a rapid growth and has become a key driver for sustainable socioeconomic developments globally. However, tourism is also a vector of environmental degradation through the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG). Therefore, the aim of this study was to analyze the main factors that are affecting the tourism demand in ASEAN-5 countries. Using a panel of five ASEAN countries over a 44-year period and applying the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) approach, the empirical results have shown that the major determinants of tourism demand in these countries are income, trade, tourism price, and carbon dioxide emission. The results have also shown that the PMG performed better than the Mean Group (MG) estimator. This paper refers to the PMG estimator because it constrains the long run coefficients to be identical, but allows the short run coefficients and error variances to differ across groups. Income and trade appeared to exert significant positive impacts on tourism demand, whereas tourism price and carbon dioxide emissions have negative impacts on tourism demand in these ASEAN-5 countries. The results would be a good reference for policy makers in these specific countries.

Employees and financial well-being are two aspects that are closely related to each other, and have been deeply studied by researchers. Not only can financial well-being directly affect an individual, but it can also indirectly affect his/her organization as well as employer. Any level of financial employees’ well-being, either low or high, will change their job performance. Thus, the purpose of this study is to determine the level of financial well-being among manufacturing employees in Batu Pahat, as well as to test the relationships between determinants and financial well-being among manufacturing employees in Batu Pahat. In this study, seven research hypotheses were developed to examine seven determinants, including age, income, gender, education, current job position, in-come, and marital status which influence employees‘ financial well-being. In this study, 220 employees at the production level were selected randomly from a manufacturing company in Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia. Then, a questionnaire was distributed to the employees. The data obtained were analyzed quantitatively using SPSS version 22.0. The results of this study revealed that the level of financial well-being was moderate and all of the determinants were positively related to financial well-being among the manufacturing employees. This quantitative study is important to the manufacturing industry in Malaysia in order to gain insight on the correlation between financial well-being and its determinants.

This paper examines the extent to which gender influences on the practice of Entrepreneurial Orien-tation (EO) on Start-up Success. This study was conducted among Spin-off and Symbiosis Com-pany (SSC) from all sectors in Peninsular Malaysia. Despite the remarkable research on EO and Start-up firms, there is a missing link on how gender provides different perspectives of EO practic-es among SSC, especially in Malaysia. A total of 120 SSC was chosen and the results show that EO was statistically related to Start-up Success and unveiled the magnitude of change that gender possesses in improving the relationship between EO practice and Start-up Success. The major implication of this study presents the unique contribution of gender in motivating SSC owners to engage in EO. Also, the difference of gender perceptions in business provides a variety of untapped opportunities in terms of entrepreneurial-related practices as different gender perceived different needs and capabilities. Future research is suggested to explore this phenomenon more extensively and develop a comprehensive model for the gender analysis. In brief, the discussion in this paper would help to strengthen the body of knowledge on Entrepreneurship and act as a future reference on SSC, EO, and Start-up Success.

Occupational stress has been known as a major cause of safety and health issues among sales people in retail organizations. Despite this, numerous studies have indicated the importance of factors and outcomes of occupational stress in several occupations, a knowledge gap on occupational stress remains a hot topic of interest for academics and practitioners. This study aims to examine the workplace bullying as a factor and task performance as the outcome of occupational stress among salespeople in the retail industry in Malaysia. Questionnaires were distributed to salespeople in the large-scale retail organization. Data from 222 salespeople suggest that workplace bullying was positively related to occupational stress and in turn, it affects employee performance. These findings contribute to understanding how workplace bullying affects the occupational stress and how stress may affect the performance of salespeople. Implications were presented for employers and employees who should be viewed with caution, in turn, to reduce the occupational stress at the workplace.

The aim of this study was to analyze the effectiveness of the educational method so-called “Ban Ben Bon” on language learning and creativity of pre-school children. The study was a semi-experimental one and its statistical population included 198 children studying in the preschools of Shiraz, Iran. The sample group consisted of 30 preschool children which were selected randomly. The research tool included Torrance test of creative thinking and function test including 11 ques-tions for measuring the reading skill in preschool children. There were five preschools in Golestan town and six children were selected randomly from each five preschools. The children were asked to answer the questions of the function test, and the educating method of Ban Ben Bon was used for educating them. The results show that the educating method of Ban Ben Bon had significant ef-fect on language learning and reading but it had insignificant effect on the creativity of preschool children. Based on statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, it was found that among four ele-ments of creativity, including flexibility, innovation, expansion and fluidity, the method just had a significant effect on innovation.