Editorial

Citation

Moutinho, L. and Huarng Huang, K. (2010), "Editorial", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 5 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jm2.2010.29705aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Modelling in Management, Volume 5, Issue 1

Time really goes by … The Journal of Modelling in Management ( JMIM ) has been in existence for five years now and this is the first issue of Volume 5! Thanks for all the support from everyone associated with the journal.

In this issue, we cover modelling in areas as diverse as industry competitive structure, organisational citizen behaviour, customer scoring workforce scheduling and uncertainty.

Various scholars have proposed the concept of strategic groups to capture the strategic heterogeneity existing amongst firms within a designated industry. Thus, significant variability in firm strategies does not exist for firms within the same strategic group, but exist for firms occupying different strategic groups within an industry. Given that different strategic groups often do not exhibit performance differences, more recent scholars have proposed the notion of performance groups where significant performance differences do not exist for firms within the same performance group, but exist across performance groups. Unfortunately, it has been found that performance groups may not exhibit significant differences in strategy. Wayne S. DeSarbo, Peter Ebbes, Duncan K.H. Fong and Charles C. Snow’s primary objective is to integrate these ideas and explicitly derive strategic/performance groups, which exhibit differences with respect multidimensional scaling model) for the analysis of two-way strategic and performance data which simultaneously perform multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. They devise an efficient alternating least-squares procedure that estimates conditionally globally optimum estimates of the model parameters within each iterate in analytic, closed-form expressions. They deploy this bilinear multidimensional scaling methodology in the context of strategic/performance group estimation using archival data for public banks in the NY-NJ-PA tri-state area.

For over 20 years, the organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) has occupied an important space in the organisation theory literature. From Barnard’s (1938) willingness to cooperate, the academy has moved towards Katz and Kahn’s (1966) spontaneous behaviours, until Organ (1988, p. 4) exposes the definition shared by most literature: “individual behaviour that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognised by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate, promotes the effective functioning of the organisation”.

In Enrico Sevi’s study of OCBs determinants and consequences, the academy has almost exclusively assembled on positive factors. Indeed, the widely accepted definition (Organ, 1988, p. 4) has a formal defect when the behaviour effects “that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organisation”, are included in the definition itself, without the verification of empirical research (Van Dyne et al., 1995; Podsakoff et al., 2000). Consequently, the studies following Organ’s definition suffered from an inclination only toward the positive aspects. Only in the last years, did some authors shown that this behaviour can have negative antecedents because OCB can be imposed by supervisors as compulsory behaviour (Vigoda-Gadot, 2006, 2007). There can also be negative effects because overwork can decrease the quality of completed assignments or because in order to help colleagues, one’s charges are skipped (Podsakoff et al., 2000; Bolino et al., 2004). The article by Sevi attempts to settle this debate focusing on the analysis of OCBs effects on groups where a drop in effort occurs. The basic assumption is that, helping with members who withhold efforts may result to a decrease of effectiveness. According to this, H1 is defined: OCB’s positive effects are not predetermined as a conceptual assumption. These effects depend on the group characteristics, where in some cases they increase the performance, and in others worsen it.

The purpose of the paper by Cataldo Zuccaro is to discuss and assess the structural characteristics (conceptual utility) of the most popular classification and predictive techniques employed in customer relationship management and customer scoring and to evaluate their classification and predictive precision.

A sample of customers’ credit rating and socio-demographic profiles are employed to evaluate the analytic and classification properties of discriminant analysis, binary logistic regression, artificial neural networks, C5 algorithm and regression trees employing CHAID.

With regards to interpretability and the conceptual utility of the parameters generated by the five techniques, logistic regression provides easily interpretable parameters through its logit. The logits can be interpreted in the same way as regression slopes. In addition, the logits can be converted to odds providing a common sense evaluation of the relative importance of each independent variable. The technique provides robust statistical tests to evaluate the model parameters.

Most treatments of complex classification procedures have been undertaken idiosyncratically, that is evaluating only one technique and in most cases with relatively large samples. This study evaluates and compares the conceptual utility and predictive precision of five different classification techniques on a moderate sample size and provides clear guidelines in technique selection when undertaking customer scoring and classification.

Rafael Pastor and Albert Corominas propose a bicriteria integer programming model for hierarchical workforce scheduling in which the first criterion is the cost and the second is the suitability of task assignment to individual employees. The model is based on the integer programming formulation for the hierarchical workforce-scheduling problem developed by Seçkiner et al. (2007), which extends the model proposed by Billionnet (1999). The principal hypothesis of this study is that, although an employee is capable of performing several different tasks with equal efficiency, the type of task to which he/she is assigned affects the overall suitability of the assignment configuration. Therefore, cost-minimising solutions should also optimise task assignment when possible. The author considers real cases and confirm that this approach to the problem is appropriate for dealing with common situations in personnel management. The proposed model is applied to the example problem of Seçkiner et al. (2007) and the results are compared with Seçkiner et al.’s model results.

Composite indicators have been developed for measuring performance in different fields. However, uncertainty of ranking itself is considered critical in such ranking problems. Leonidas A. Zampetakis and Vassilils Moustakis summarize a methodology based on Bayesian latent variable measurement modelling. The proposed methods have been demonstrated by using data from a World Banks’ project. The methodology enables the quantification of model structure uncertainty through comparisons among competing models, using both an information theoretic approach and a Bayesian approach. In addition, it estimates the degree of uncertainty in the rankings of alternatives. Overall, the methodology provides a useful tool to gain greater insights into the nature of the problems.

Quite a myriad of theme and research setting. Also, a huge diversity of modelling approaches and techniques. Enjoy!

Thanks once again, for all the support given to JMIM in its first four years!

Luiz Moutinho, Kun Huarng Huang