Search

BACKGROUND: Employee satisfaction, employee engagement and turnover intention have always been hot issues in the study of sustainable human resource management. Understanding the relationship among the three is critical for both researchers and human resource practitioners. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to distinguish the effects of employee satisfaction on employee engagement and turnover intentions, and explore the mediating roles of employee engagement and the moderating effects of position level. METHODS: Structural equation modelling and questionnaire. RESULTS: Pay satisfaction, satisfaction with supervisor, satisfaction with work itself, and satisfaction with promotion have positive impacts on employee engagement significantly. Pay satisfaction, satisfaction with supervisor, satisfaction with promotion, satisfaction with co-workers have negative impacts on turnover intention. Employee engagement has a negative impact on turnover intention. Employee engagement partially mediates the relationships between satisfaction with supervisor and turnover intention as well as satisfaction with promotion and turnover intention. The moderating roles of position level between satisfaction with supervisor, satisfaction with co-workers and turnover intention have been supported by data. CONCLUSIONS: This paper validates the relationship among employee satisfaction, employee engagement and turnover intention, and the moderating role of position level systematically. Some suggestions are provided for practitioners in the area of human resource management.

The product quality issues of online shopping have not been effectively solved with the rapid development of electronic commerce in China. Faced with the quality issues of online shopping, the main entities, such as online platforms and online sellers, should cooperate to control and assure compliant quality. The adverse selection of buyers caused by information asymmetry and the moral hazard of sellers aggravated by bilateral markets make the quality management of online shopping have a high degree of uncertainty and complexity. This study constructs an evolutionary game model to discuss the dynamic process of the quality behaviours of members and analyse the key triggers of the evolutionary directions in online shopping. By using numerical simulation analysis, the influences of government supervision intensities on the evolution trend of members’ quality behaviours are analysed with various risk attitude combinations in various cases. The current research finds that (1) the decrease of the quality control cost and the increase of the government’s benchmark fine are conducive to increasing the platform’s controlling probability; (2) the decrease of the proportion of rent and the increase of sellers’ fraud cost and the government’s benchmark fines are conducive to increasing the seller’s compliance probability; (3) when both the platform and seller are unwilling to make efforts for quality assurance, risk-seeking members make the seller gradually choose to provide compliant products; and (4) when the members are all risk-seeking, strengthening government supervision will help promote the transition of members’ behavioural choices in a benign direction. This paper enriches the theoretical research studies on both online product quality control and government-led social governance system of quality. Suggestions for government supervision and e-commerce entities are also provided for quality assurance and improvement.

Great changes are taking place, and now is the right time to reflect on the quality philosophy. This research firstly reviewed the quality theories and practices according to the timeline, thus sum...

Based on reverse thinking, this research defines the concept of the ‘ISO 9001 effectiveness gap’ for the first time and establishes the ISO 9001 effectiveness gap model. A research study was carrie...

As increasing numbers of customers pay attention to product and service sustainability when shopping online, more and more firms in the online market engage in promoting perceived sustainability to establish close customer relationships. Prior studies implied the effects of perceived sustainability on transactional customer relationships, however, the role of perceived sustainability in influencing nontransactional customer relationships has received little attention. Drawing on existing conceptual models, this study aimed at exploring the effects of perceived sustainability on rational and emotional customer engagement (CE) in the online shopping environment. The data were collected through a questionnaire survey in China. Using the partial least squares (PLS) approach-based structural equation modeling (SEM) method, the authors found that perceived sustainability positively affects the two CE orientations through influencing short- and long-term transactional attitudes (satisfaction and commitment). A strong interrelationship between rational and emotional CE was also found. This is the first study presenting empirical evidence of the effects of perceived sustainability on nontransactional customer relationships from the rational and emotional perspectives. It also provides critical implications for online sellers in designing engagement programs.

High-speed railways adopt continuous welded rail to maintain the smoothness and continuity of the rail surface. However, the welded joint became one of the weakest parts. In order to clear the characteristics and mechanical properties of the new reinforced device, a dynamic three-dimensional vehicle-reinforced device-track coupling model is established. The mechanical characteristics of the track structure under high-speed train load were simulated and analyzed. After installing the new reinforced device, the dynamic response and service life of the track structure are obviously improved compared with the unreinforced rail. When the train speed is 300 km/h, the dynamic bending stress at the bottom of rail is reduced by 26.90%, the vertical and lateral acceleration of the rail are reduced by 42.78% and 21.56%, the vertical and lateral displacement of the rail are reduced by 6.36% and 8.67%, and the theoretical service life of the rail is greatly extended.

Insulated rail joints (IRJs) are widely used in heavy-haul lines, owing to they are safety critical components of track circuit. However, the IRJs breaks the continuity of the rail, making rail more vulnerable to damage under the long-term wheel-rail interaction. In order to study the performance of IRJs, field investigation and tests were carried out at new IRJ and damaged IRJ. At the same time, a 3D coupling model of heavy haul train-IRJ was established for the further analysis. The result shows that in regards to rail-surface regularity, the new IRJ and the damaged IRJ exhibits convex joint and concave joint respectively. IRJs will gradually turn to concave and dipped in the vicinity of end-post under long-term wheel-rail impact. Since there is a vertical rail displacement difference on both sides of the end-post between the two IRJs, causing the wheel-rail interaction has two different impact modes, of which one is downward height difference impact and the other is upward height difference impact. In normal speed, the impact caused by the damaged IRJ is larger than the new IRJ does and it leads to a severer damage to the whole track. The displacement of sleeper at the damaged IRJ is 7.6 times larger than at the new IRJ due to the void between the sleeper and the ballast. The transfer function of displacement from rail to sleeper at the new IRJ is between 0 and 0.4, while the damaged IRJ is between 0.42 and 6.1. The transfer function can be used as a vital index to evaluate the IRJ service state. With the increase of speed, the displacement of rail and sleeper at the two IRJs increases correspondingly. For the sake of decreasing the occurrence of fatigue damage and plastic deformation of rail and plate as much as possible, the maximum depth of concave should be reined within 0.55 mm.

The Fe 3 O 4 @MOF composite with a microspheric core and a porous metal-organic framework (MOF HKUST-1) shell has been successfully synthesized utilizing a versatile Layer-by-Layer (LBL) assembly method. The structure was identified by X-ray diffraction (XRD), and the morphology was investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques. The Fe 3 O 4 @MOF composite exhibited outstanding electrochemical properties when it was used as an anode material for lithium ion batteries (LIBs). After 100 discharge-charge cycles at a current density of 100 mA g −1 , the reversible capacity of Fe 3 O 4 @MOF could maintain ∼1002 mAh g −1 , which was much higher than that of the bare Fe 3 O 4 counterpart (696 mAh g −1 ). Moreover, load the current density as high as 2 A g −1 (after 70 cycles at the current density step increased from 0.1 to 2 A g −1 ), it still delivered a reversible capacity of ∼429 mAh g −1 . The results demonstrate that the cycling stability of Fe 3 O 4 as an anode could be significantly improved by coating Cu 3 (1,3,5-benzenetricarboxylate) 2 (HKUST-1). This strategy may offer new route to prepare other composite materials using different particles and suitable Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for LIBs application.

The rectangular microtubes array of perchlorinated copper phthalocyanines (Cl16CuPc), were synthesized by physical vapor deposition technique without using any template or catalyst. The synthesis process of the tubular structure is very simple, easy to control, and a little raw material is used. The morphology and crystal structure of the obtained samples were analyzed by means of scanning and transmission electron microscopy (SEM and TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The microtubes have an entire hollow interior, open ends with rectangular cross-section, a large interior of 1.4–1.8 μm width, and the thin walls of 80–100 nm. The obtained products exhibit excellent crystalline nature, high chemical and thermodynamic stability, excellent biocompatibility, as well as innocuity. It is believed that these well-defined microtubular structures of an organic material will be used as active materials for solar cells, nanodevices for field emission apparatus, microchannels for biochip and microvessel for drug delivery.

This paper presents a combination of ELMAN and SOM neural networks in order to enhance the prediction precision. A new method of training and predicting of samples is developed. In this method, the training and predicting are divided into two steps, clustering at first and then training and predicting the samples at the clustered areas. As examples, this method is applied to weather broadcasting and disaster prediction. Simulation results show that this method can enhance the ability of local generalization of the network. The prediction precision of combined network presented in this paper is higher than that with normal BP network or just one of ELMAN or SOM network.