The mediating effect of rewarding on the relationship between employee involvement and job satisfaction

Employee support provides enormous benefits to help sustain a competitive advantage, respond to changes more quickly than competitors, and position the organization ahead of others. Awareness of this fact triggers organizations to prepare new motivational programs and practices. Employee involvement and rewards are among the many ways to achieve employee job satisfaction and motivational needs. Employee involvement entails giving employees an opportunity to influence decisions and actions regarding their jobs. Furthermore, rewards have the potential to prompt employees to act in line with organizational goals. This study aims to examine the relationship between employee involvement and job satisfaction based on the mediation effect of rewarding. Four hundred employees from the financial sector responded to a questionnaire. The relationship between employee involvement and job satisfaction was tested using hierarchical linear regression analysis. Results revealed that rewarding does mediate the relationship between employee involvement and job satisfaction. Organizations that give priority to employee needs and motivational processes should take both employee involvement and rewarding into consideration.     

Understanding factors affecting e-reverse auction use: An integrative approach

Using electronic-reverse auction (e-reverse auction) offers many advantages to companies such as price reduction, decrease in cycle time, standardization, and transparency in purchasing process. Despite its great advantages, some users do not want to use e-reverse auction technology for the procurement of products or services. This study aims to understand factors affecting e-reverse auction usage in companies by integrating three important theories. Key constructs of technology acceptance model (TAM), theory of planned behavior (TPB), and innovation diffusion theory (IDT) are integrated to explain behavioral intention to use and actual use of e-reverse auction. Using LISREL 8.54, data collected from 156 employees working in the procurement department of companies in 40 different countries were used to test the proposed research model. Results indicated that, 76% of employees’ intention to use e-reverse auction is explained by subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and perceived usefulness. Among them, subjective norms have the strongest effect. Besides, actual use of e-reverse auction is directly predicted by behavioral intention to use. We conclude with managerial implications and recommendations for possible future research.     

Complexity results for the horizontal bar packing problem

This paper deals with the packing of a grid by horizontal bars while respecting given orthogonal projections and several constraints of distance between the consecutive bars. We show that packing under a maximal or uniform distance is an NP-complete problem. We also give a polynomial time algorithm to solve the packing problem under a minimal distance.     

Training size optimization with reduced complexity in cell-free massive MIMO system

Training sequence is used in multiple antenna systems to estimate channel state information and mitigate channel distortion between transmitter and receiver. However, the training sequence or pilot must be limited to a certain size in order to reduce the impact of overhead loss due to limited channel coherence length in mobile users. In this paper, we proposed to use training size optimization in cell-free massive MIMO system. In addition, we proposed and compared the performance of different training size optimization algorithms, namely exhaustive search optimization, bisection optimization and min–max optimization, with each method has different level of calculation complexities. The results showed that in general, all of the 3 training length optimization methods improved the downlink rate compared to the conventional pilot length method. We also showed that the training optimization methods are more effective when the coherence length is small or the number of users is very large. In the case of large number of users or small coherence length, the exhaustive search has the best median downlink rate, followed closely by min–max optimum and finally the bisection method. Even though the exhaustive search optimization has the best downlink rate, we showed that the proposed reduce optimization complexity methods has significantly less calculation complexity. In addition, the median downlink rate performance of min–max optimization method is only slightly less than that of the exhaustive search method for various number of users and coherence length.

     

Assessment of wheelchair skills based on analysis of driving style

In this paper, we propose a learning assessment method based on the analysis of learner’s behavioural style. This method was first applied for wheel-chair driving tasks because it is simple and risk-free, but unusual for users. Seven classic performance indicators based on joystick control were used to characterise the users’ driving style. We assumed that the learning effectiveness of the users can be evaluated by comparing their driving style with the reference ones, which could be extracted from experienced users. The evaluation was carried out for six novice users and eight experienced users. The users were asked to carry out several typical driving tasks for seven trials at first. The fuzzy C-means clustering method was used with the data of the experienced users to obtain the reference driving styles. Next, an evaluation was performed for novice users by comparing their driving styles with the reference ones. The results showed that, for all of the experienced users, their driving styles could be classified into two reference types. In addition, there was no significant difference in their driving styles from one trial to another, even for a user with disabilities, which means that their driving style was stable. On the other hand, novice users had switching behaviours during the learning phase; however, after eight additional trials, each novice user’s driving style converged to one of the two identified reference types, meaning that the novice users could achieve a stable performance after learning, which was also validated by an expert therapist.     

Zeolite beta catalysts for n-C7 hydroisomerization

Zeolite β with Si/2Al ratios of 60, 100, and 200 were synthesized using tetraethlammonium hydroxide (TEAOH) as the structure-directing agent (SDA) in the absence of alkali metal cations. Pt, Pd and Pt-Pd catalysts supported on the zeolite β samples were studied in n-heptane (n-C7) hydroisomerization. The Pt/β catalysts showed a higher catalytic activity than the Pd/β catalysts. For the Pt/β with a Si/2Al ratio of 100, its n-C7 conversion and selectivity of C7 isomers were observed to be 87.06% and 75.48% respectively at 250^∘C. The activity of n-C7 conversion was stable for at least 82 h. However, the selectivity of C7 isomers was gradually decreased with the reaction time. Experimental data also showed that the addition of Pd to catalyst Pt/β enhanced the n-C7 conversion, but lowered the selectivity of C7 isomers. Pd catalyst was also observed to minimize the formation of aromatics in comparison with Pt catalyst.     

Zeolite beta catalysts for n-C7 hydroisomerization

Zeolite β with Si/2Al ratios of 60, 100, and 200 were synthesized using tetraethlammonium hydroxide (TEAOH) as the structure-directing agent (SDA) in the absence of alkali metal cations. Pt, Pd and Pt-Pd catalysts supported on the zeolite β samples were studied in n-heptane (n-C7) hydroisomerization. The Pt/β catalysts showed a higher catalytic activity than the Pd/β catalysts. For the Pt/β with a Si/2Al ratio of 100, its n-C7 conversion and selectivity of C7 isomers were observed to be 87.06% and 75.48% respectively at 250^°C. The activity of n-C7 conversion was stable for at least 82 h. However, the selectivity of C7 isomers was gradually decreased with the reaction time. Experimental data also showed that the addition of Pd to catalyst Pt/β enhanced the n-C7 conversion, but lowered the selectivity of C7 isomers. Pd catalyst was also observed to minimize the formation of aromatics in comparison with Pt catalyst.     

ROMP‐based boron nitride composites

The present work focuses on the investigation of the thermal and dielectric properties of composites obtained by surface‐modified hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and ring‐opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) based polymer. A new kind of high performance composites was developed based on using amino silane functionalized hBN (AS‐hBN) and bromine functional group possessing homo and copolymers synthesized via ROMP pathway. Aminosilane capped boron nitride (BN) and bromine bearing polymer backbone enhance the interaction between filler and the polymer chains. The effects of surface‐modified BN (AS‐hBN) and its content on the dielectric properties, and thermal resistance of composites, are systematically investigated and discussed. The resultant composites possess high electrical break over voltages. While all of the ROMP‐based films exhibit low ?′ value in a wide frequency range, in the case of the composite with 20% AS‐hBN and poly(bromooxanorbornene‐co‐cyclooctadiene) (ROMP‐BN‐6) displays very low dielectric constants in around 1.5 up to 1 MHz at 20 °C. This value is significantly lower than that of common polymer dielectrics, which is usually in the range of 3–6. Besides the lowest dielectric constant of ROMP‐BN‐6, it has also the smallest dielectric loss tangent even at high temperatures. Tan δ of ROMP‐BN‐6 is 0.003 and 0.0067 at 10 Hz–1 MHz at 20 °C, respectively. Thermal stability of polymers was also improved by introducing surface‐modified hBN. Polymers bearing 20% AS‐hBN are highly thermally stable up to ～350 °C and gave 25% char yield at 800 °C. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2018 , 135, 45658.     

Application of Soft Actuation to Bilateral Control and Haptic Reproduction

International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems - The main research topic of this paper is to apply the sliding mode based soft actuation to smooth transition between position, force, and...