Search

Emerging challenges and opportunities from business environments keep organizations embedded in volatility and unpredictability. Acknowledging the increasing need for organization flexibility, this study examined the influence of human resource flexibility on the performance of selected deposit money banks in Nigeria. To achieve this objective, the variables were operationalized, and models specified. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. Data were gathered from primary sources, and study hypotheses were tested using the Multiple Regression Technique. The findings showed that all the factors used to proxy functional flexibility, except relational flexibility, had a significant effect on customer loyalty; and that functional flexibility significantly affects customer loyalty. The study also found numerical flexibility to influence service innovation positively and significantly in the selected Banks. Based on these findings, the study recommended that in order to achieve a higher level of flexibility in these banks, managers should put in place coordination mechanisms towards generating new forms of collective human capital through the combination of individual capabilities of employees, in addition to maintaining other aspects of their employees' functional flexibility; and that managers should minimize the application of fixed-term contract employments and focus more on contracting external specialists who will introduce fresh ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Future wireless communication networks will be largely characterized by small cell deployments, typically on the order of 200 meters of radius/cell, at most. Meanwhile, recent studies show that base stations (BS) account for about 80 to 95 % of the total network power. This simply implies that more energy will be consumed in the future wireless network since small cell means massive deployment of BS. This phenomenon makes energy-efficient (EE) control a central issue of critical consideration in the design of future wireless networks. This paper proposes and investigates (the performance of) two different energy-saving approaches namely, adaptive-sleep sectorization (AS), adaptive hybrid partitioning schemes (AH) for small cellular networks using smart antenna technique. We formulated a generic base-model for the above-mentioned schemes and applied the spatial Poisson process to reduce the system complexity and to improve flexibility in the beam angle reconfiguration of the adaptive antenna, also known as a smart antenna (SA). The SA uses the scalable algorithms to track active users in different segments/sectors of the microcell, making the proposed schemes capable of targeting specific users or groups of users in periods of sparse traffic, and capable of performing optimally when the network is highly congested. The capabilities of the proposed smart/adaptive antenna approaches can be easily adapted and integrated into the massive MIMO for future deployment. Rigorous numerical analysis at different orders of sectorization shows that among the proposed schemes, the AH strategy outperforms the AS in terms of energy saving by about 52 %. Generally, the proposed schemes have demonstrated the ability to significantly increase the power consumption efficiency of micro base stations for future generation cellular systems, over the traditional design methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]