Improving productivity: theory and application to Australian hospitals. This project aims to improve existing methods for analysing productivity and efficiency of organisations. The new methods will be applied to Australian hospitals, to analyse their productivity and efficiency, identify the best-practices and their determinants and recommend improvements and necessary reforms. The high level of healthcare costs in Australia, about 5 percent of gross domestic product, as well as their rapid and ....Improving productivity: theory and application to Australian hospitals. This project aims to improve existing methods for analysing productivity and efficiency of organisations. The new methods will be applied to Australian hospitals, to analyse their productivity and efficiency, identify the best-practices and their determinants and recommend improvements and necessary reforms. The high level of healthcare costs in Australia, about 5 percent of gross domestic product, as well as their rapid and accelerating growth, imply that application of methods developed through this project may save billions of dollars and, more importantly, thousands of lives. An expected outcome of this project will be superior theoretical and practical methods for analysing productivity and efficiency of economic systems, to enhance understanding of the potential for improvements and of the necessary reforms.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE160100548
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$298,000.00
Summary
Conceptualizing and Measuring Digital Service Quality. The project aims to understand customer quality perceptions of digital services, and the factors, such as customer's own skill-levels, that help people to optimise their experiences. Public and private organisations are pushing customers from face-to-face to digital service and self-service models, sometimes offering no alternatives (eg many travel visas can only be obtained online). E-commerce research suggests up to 80 per cent of service ....Conceptualizing and Measuring Digital Service Quality. The project aims to understand customer quality perceptions of digital services, and the factors, such as customer's own skill-levels, that help people to optimise their experiences. Public and private organisations are pushing customers from face-to-face to digital service and self-service models, sometimes offering no alternatives (eg many travel visas can only be obtained online). E-commerce research suggests up to 80 per cent of service users will sometimes struggle with online transactions. In the worst case, people may be excluded from accessing important services. Insights from this research are expected to help public and private organisations to deliver high-quality digital services that empower service users.Read moreRead less
Employee voice in Australia: the impact of employee participation arrangements on organisational performance and employee well-being. Given the extent of union decline in Australia, there is a need to update policy to reflect the new reality of low unionisation. This project will examine what alternative arrangements exist and their economic and social consequences. It focuses on the employee impacts and employer impacts of these arrangements and will inform current policy debates.
Facilitating workplace change: Redefining the role of industrial tribunals in Australia. Amendments to the Fair Work Act 2009 passed in 2013 have the potential to re-define the role of Australia’s national workplace relations tribunal, the Fair Work Commission, by requiring it to promote cooperative and productive workplace relations. This project aims to identify an innovative model of tribunal intervention that meets these new imperatives through case studies from the Hunter region of NSW, whe ....Facilitating workplace change: Redefining the role of industrial tribunals in Australia. Amendments to the Fair Work Act 2009 passed in 2013 have the potential to re-define the role of Australia’s national workplace relations tribunal, the Fair Work Commission, by requiring it to promote cooperative and productive workplace relations. This project aims to identify an innovative model of tribunal intervention that meets these new imperatives through case studies from the Hunter region of NSW, where tribunal members have for two decades been working proactively with managers, employees and their representatives in major construction projects and large public sector organisations to achieve cooperative and effective workplace change. Read moreRead less
Identity and intimacy in a virtual world: designing meaningful, responsible and effective virtual work. This project will help to bring theories of work design into the twenty-first century by acknowledging the important role of electronic communication reliance and being in remote locations for determining work outcomes, and offering concrete alternatives, including building identity and intimacy, to manage virtual work to leverage benefits and mitigate costs.
Effects of offshored advanced manufacturing on productivity, and growth. Offshoring can reduce production costs, but it can also reduce cutting-edge advanced manufacturing capability and skilled manufacturing workforce, and reduce future growth. Lack of appropriate data has made it difficult to measure these effects for firms and industries. Using uniquely available data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and newly developed methods, this project aims to provide new measures of firm level ....Effects of offshored advanced manufacturing on productivity, and growth. Offshoring can reduce production costs, but it can also reduce cutting-edge advanced manufacturing capability and skilled manufacturing workforce, and reduce future growth. Lack of appropriate data has made it difficult to measure these effects for firms and industries. Using uniquely available data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and newly developed methods, this project aims to provide new measures of firm level offshoring activity and advanced manufacturing capability onshore and offshore. The project expects to generate new knowledge on the impact of offshored advanced manufacturing on productivity, growth, product innovation, and skilled labour. The findings should provide significant new industry and policy relevant insightsRead moreRead less
To use or not to use financial incentives for motivation and performance. For decades, compensation experts have advocated for the use of financial incentives to motivate work performance, yet organisations keep encountering performance issues caused by these incentives. Using agency, expectancy, and self-determination theory to inform a meta-analysis and a series of experiments, this research will help uncover the most important motivational mechanisms that explain how financial incentives infl ....To use or not to use financial incentives for motivation and performance. For decades, compensation experts have advocated for the use of financial incentives to motivate work performance, yet organisations keep encountering performance issues caused by these incentives. Using agency, expectancy, and self-determination theory to inform a meta-analysis and a series of experiments, this research will help uncover the most important motivational mechanisms that explain how financial incentives influence different types of performance. Given that compensation accounts for an important proportion of an organisation's operating expenses and that employee engagement is on the decline around the world, this research will provide a strong empirical basis to develop more effective compensation systems.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE120100501
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$375,000.00
Summary
The Advising Boards, corporate risk-taking and firm performance. Corporate governance, in particular the role of corporate boards, has been at the centre of recent regulatory reforms. To advance our understanding on the advising role of boards, this project examines boardroom social connections, entrepreneur directors, and how the advising boards contribute to corporate risk management and firm performance.
Human Resource Management (HRM) outsourcing and shared services: analysing changing approaches to HRM. Many public sector organisations have established centralised shared services centres or outsourced their Human Resource Management (HRM) to try to cut costs and improve performance. This project will investigate the many implications of such developments for Australian public-sector organisations, their managers and their employees.
Managing anger responses to perceptions of unfair managerial treatment. Workers' experience of anger at work can be distracting and result in lower performance, which contributes to lower productivity in the Australian economy. This project seeks to understand this phenomenon and offer solutions for minimising the impact of anger at work for both individuals and workgroups.