This study attempts to examine the role of working capital management components on four commons which are distinctive dimensions of business investment performance in Malaysia. The analysis covers 431 listed companies for the period 2000-2017 post the Asian financial crisis. The four performance indicators are return on assets (to proxy book return on overall business assets), return on equity (to proxy book return on shareholders’ fund), Tobin’s Q (to proxy firm valuation) and stock performance (to proxy real shareholder wealth). Our results indicate that working capital components of receivables collection period, inventory conversion period, payables deferral period, overall cash conversion cycle, current ratio, quick ratio, and cash ratio have generally exhibited important relationships with investment performance before and after the 2007-2008 subprime crisis. We would like to highlight the very robust negative effect of receivables collection period and cash conversion cycle. In addition, it is worth noting the distinctive roles of cash conversion cycle components and working capital liquidity ratios. While overly high liquidity position is usually viewed as inefficiency and detrimental for profitability, our panel data analysis consistently show that a high liquid position is favourable if the impact of cash conversion cycle is well considered. Hence, it is crucial for managers to prioritize the importance of working capital requirements to enhance the value of investors.

Celebrities are individuals who are popular in public arena because of their physical attractiveness and trustworthiness. To take advantage of these components, marketers use celebrities for product promotion to create awareness and enhance the credibility of their advertisement. However, the use of celebrities to endorse consumer products by the Nigerian telecommunication industry led to huge cost of acquiring physically attractive endorsers and lack of celebrity trust because customers perceived that the celebrities were paid to feature in the brand and not necessarily, they believed in the brand. This study, therefore, examined the effect of celebrity physical attractiveness and trustworthiness on consumer purchase intentions of selected telecommunication in Nigeria. Survey design was employed and a target population of 519 students was used in the study. Random sampling technique was adopted to select the sample size and a well-structured questionnaire was adopted for the study. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the constructs ranged between 0.71 and 0.85. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (Structural equation modeling). Findings from the study reveal that celebrity physical attractiveness had positive effect on consumer purchase intention of selected telecommunications companies in Nigeria (P=0.000, R²= 0.533). Celebrity trustworthiness had positive and significant effect on consumer purchase intention of selected telecommunication companies in Nigeria (P=0.000, R²= 0.314). The study concludes that celebrity endorsement components were jointly important in explaining the changes in the consumer purchase intentions of selected telecommunications companies in Nigeria. The study recommends that telecommunications companies should focus on the recruitment of physical attractiveness and trustworthiness whose images align with theirs for endorsement purpose.

Human resource management is the key component for every organization. The empowerment of human resource is a strategic decision which in return affects the organizational productivity. The purpose of the present study is to examine the impact of HR empowerment through information technology, cultural dimensions and organizational knowledge with their impact on Muhammadiyah higher education productivity in Indonesia. To address this objective, a questionnaire was developed as a core instrument to collect primary data from the employees of Muhammadiyah higher education. A final sample of 138 respondents was collected for applying the structural equation modelling (SEM) approach with the factor analyses. Additionally, validity of the questionnaire was observed through three measures; namely Cronbach’s alpha, average variance extracted and composite reliability. Findings through structural equation modelling approach specify that all three dimensions of HR empowerment have shown their positive and significant influences on Muhammadiyah higher education productivity. However, this study is limited by various perspective. First, data is collected from Indonesia through employees of Muhammadiyah higher education only with limited generalizability of the findings. Second, the study has not discussed the combine effects of human resource empowerment on the overall productivity of Muhammadiyah higher education but with individual dimensions like cultural, information technology and knowledge factors. The findings can be meaningful to boost the performance and productivity of higher education while understanding its structural relationship between human resource development.

As operating the business in the economy, all enterprises are interested in the business efficiency. Business efficiency is not only a measure of organizational performance and business management but also it is a vital issue for businesses operations. That is why defining the factors affecting business performance in enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises accounted for more than 80 percentage of the enterprises in Vietnam plays a very important role in helping business managers find solutions to improve the business efficiency. This paper is conducted to determine the factors affecting the business performance of these groups of businesses from the perspective of business managers and the business. This study is based on a survey from 100 business managers and 400 small and medium enterprises in Vietnam. Through the EFA analysis tool, we found some similarities in terms of the groups of factors affecting the business performance in small and medium enterprises in Vietnam between the perspective of business managers and perspective of the enterprises. Both the surveyed groups defined that there were three factor groups influencing the business efficiency: (1) group of institutional, policy and infrastructure factors, (2) group of factors associated with enterprises and (3) group of factors related to the environment outside the enterprise.

The purpose of this research is to analyze the relationship between intellectual capital and financial performance of eleven Islamic banks in Indonesia over the period 2013-2016, using the value-added intellectual capital model, utilizing panel data with seemingly unrelated regression analysis. The results of this research indicate that structural capital efficiency had a significant influence on return on assets, and asset growth. Thus, for Islamic banks in Indonesia, all non-human assets, including the standard operating procedures, storage of all data, structural procedures, governance and policies for decision-making had significant effects on return on assets, and asset growth. Islamic banks in Indonesia can achieve competitive advantages in terms of return on assets, and asset growth, because they have positive value added reflected in intellectual capital value consisting of human capital efficiency, structural capital efficiency and capital employee efficiency.

This paper aims to develop an integrated model designed to predict and explain a customer behavior intention use of s-commerce based on the concepts of customer experience (CE) and expectation confirmation model (ECM). This paper proposes a comprehensive model to synthesize the essence of CE and ECM to describe customer behavior intention use of s-commerce. The participants are from 311 users of s-commerce as the final sample. Structural equation modeling is applied to demonstrate the stability of the proposed model and the results of hypotheses testing. This paper finds that costumer experience significantly influenced perceived usefulness, expectation and satisfaction, while the perceived usefulness and expectation simultaneously influenced customer satisfaction. Expectation also significantly influences motivator of perceived usefulness. Meanwhile perceived usefulness and satisfaction both significantly influence behavior intention use of s-commerce directly. There are some limitations in this study which should be improved in the future. Extended ECM is evaluated in a country setting, which limits generalizations.

The interpersonal competences and good relationship among employees are directly linked to the team effectiveness and indirectly to the higher productivity at the workplace. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify interpersonal needs of Arab business students by using Fundamental Inter-personal Relations Orientation-Behaviour instrument (FIRO-B). The study is based on the survey of 192 business students in the UAE. The results have also revealed that the gender and academic level of participants had an influence on their interpersonal needs. The study has shown that it is essential to have different approaches towards students on the bases of their interpersonal needs and, by doing so, to try to enhance their interpersonal and communication skills. Moreover, the gender and academic level of students should be considered when organizing training in the improvement of students’ soft skills.

Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) has become a prominent theory in describing the relationship between attitude and behaviour. TPB utilizes attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control to predict ―intention‖. Studies of similar topics concentrating on non-Muslim consumers as respondents particularly exploring in their repurchase intention on Halal food are uncommon. Therefore, this study attempts to demonstrate the TPB in exploring the non-Muslim consumer repurchase intention of halal food products. Data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire survey of 415 non-Muslim consumers in Malaysia. The result of Structural Equation Analyses indicate that non-Muslim consumers’ attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control toward halal food product positively influenced their intention to repurchase halal food. The conclusions and several recommendations for future research consideration are presented in the final section.

Knowledge Management (KM) is the process of system identification, acquisition and transfer of information and knowledge that people can use to create for perfect competition. KM is considered as an intellectual property of opinions in favour of social orientation and it is created in organizations through social relationships. The definition of KM highlights that it could be considered as closely related to the theory and practice, and is a highly interdisciplinary field of multi-disciplinary. The purpose of this paper is associated with the knowledge management in general and uses survey in Vietnam companies and universities to analysis the role of knowledge management for business development. The authors collected data from 300 companies and universities in Hanoi, Danang, Ho ChiMinh and Can Tho cities. The descriptive statistics, Cronbach Alpha test, Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modelling methods were used in this paper. The results indicate that KM had a positive impact on the efficiency of the business organizations. The study also shows that there was a big difference on the effect of KM on organizational effectiveness in terms of SMEs and large enterprises.

This article evaluates the factors affecting the use of management accounting in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Hanoi, Vietnam. The factors include: Production and business characteris-tics; Competitiveness; Business strategy; CEO of awareness management; Human resource quality. The study is conducted on 238 SMEs in Hanoi and the results show that CEO’s awareness of management accounting had the strongest impact on the ability to apply management accounting of enterprises while competition level factor had the weakest effect. At the same time, the study also examines the significant role of mediating factor of firm size on the relationship between the charac-teristics of the production and business process and the application of management accounting, age and professional qualifications. The results indicate that enterprise size plays a significant role on regulating the impact of business characteristics of enterprises on management accounting applica-tion. For smaller enterprises, management accounting is less used and vice versa. Next, the younger the managers are, the higher the impact of their awareness on management accounting application, which means management accounting will be used more if managers are younger.