Search results

Although the hospitality sector is considered the most active and profitable sector in the Egyptian economy, it suffers from the non-stop immigration of skilled manpower and the high rates of labor turnover. One of the apparent solutions for this problem that could be implemented is empowering Egyptian females to play an active role in the success of this sector. Females faced many obstacles while working in hospitality, including prevailing social perception, the culture of shame, the traditional negative view of feminine hoteliers, long working hours and the shift system, which led to weak females' desire to enroll in the hospitality field. The study aims to determine how empowering Egyptian women in the hospitality industry affects staff turnover.

To achieve the aim of the study, a sample of four- and five-star resorts in Red Sea, Egypt, was under study. A self-administrated questionnaire was addressed to female hotel employees, and 140 forms were statistically analyzed in addition to 14 semi-structured interviews with hospitality experts.

The study recommends that hotels should start re-tailoring policies to activate Egyptian females' role in reducing the high rate of hospitality labor turnover through increasing their work engagement (WENG) (as a mediator) by adopting a decent work environment and motivating them to get promoted to hold senior positions.

In spite of some noteworthy contributions, the authors would like to point out certain shortcomings. The sample was homogeneous, consisting of female hotels employees in Egypt, but the findings are generalizable to other Arabian communities. Nonetheless, the authors feel that they have supplied some suggestive evidence, even for the most careful reader who wants to further study these elements of working attitudes in the hotel business.

According to the authors' knowledge, this study is among the few studies covering females' reluctance to continue working in the hospitality field.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between the spread of extremist thoughts and the weak economic and social factors surrounding it. There are higher chances of better understanding of this relationship on Egypt’s borders more than its center. Achieving development and stability leads to creating a preventive environment to extremist thoughts existence and spread, in addition to preventing its transformation into terrorism.

The study depends on an analytical methodology to examine the validity of the research hypothesis through two basic steps. The first step depends on describing the geographical, demographical, economic, social, political and security aspects of North Sinai. The second step is a prospective approach to build a strategy that helps in achieving development and accordingly a comprehensive confront for the opportunities of extremist thought spreading in North Sinai.

The study concludes that Egypt is well aware of the dimensions of encountering extremist thoughts and has adopted a comprehensive approach in achieving this. It has already started the paces of this confrontation in general, with some specificity in North Sinai Governorate that observed lately increased activities by extremists and terrorist groups. The proposed strategy is a set of policies that can help the country achieve its goals against extremism and terrorism.

The study covers a time frame that starts from 2014, which is considered the beginning of a new phase for the Egyptian state. The study relies on the field of strategic studies and it focuses on North Sinai Governorate.

The study has a scientific importance because it presents a proposal for a comprehensive strategy to encounter extremist thoughts, which adds value to the literature of the study of extremism. The current study makes its contributions in some directions, such as reviewing the contents of this extremist thought or the juristic comment on it, the impacts of the spread of extremist thoughts, the role of the official media in disseminating extremist thoughts or standing up to it. In terms of application, the study presents a proposal with many policies in various fields to counter extremist ideology. These proposals are implementable in North Sinai Governorate as well as other frontier governorates.

Knowledge and application of energy management during the life cycle of construction projects are lacking. The purpose of this paper is to identify and investigate the key barriers that are faced by contracting firms in the implementation of energy management during building construction projects focussing on construction plants, as they are considered as the major energy users on site.

A questionnaire survey was employed and distributed using stratified random sampling to 100 contracting companies operating in the Gaza Strip. The collected data were analysed using the Statistical Programme for the Social Sciences (SPSS; Version 22) to identify the number of components that could represent the 31 identified barriers.

From the factor analysis, the barriers were clustered into four factors: economic and financial (which accounted for the largest percentage of variance), knowledge and information, legal and contractual, and organisational and management. This indicates that economic and financial aspects are the most important barrier impeding the implementation of energy management; local contractors should seriously consider this issue when making decisions about energy management during project construction. In addition, the lack of energy-management codes and lack of governmental support are significant obstacles to the implementation of energy management on construction sites.

Although the objective of this study was achieved, there were some study limitations. This study is limited to the perceptions and geographical boundaries (i.e. the self-governing territory of Gaza Strip in Palestine as a developing country), therefore, it cannot be generalised. However, it could form the basis for useful comparison in the future. A future study may be carried out with a much larger sample size to validate the conclusions of this study. Triangulation research methods could also be employed in future research in order minimise the bias and validate the conclusion. Further study regarding energy management throughout the whole life cycle of the development is recommended.

This paper has highlighted a number of barriers to efficient energy management during the project construction phase. It is critical for local regulators to take note of the economic and financial barriers to facilitate a more energy-conscious society where incentives (could be via tendering preferences) can encourage both clients and contractors to proactively conserve energy during construction. As for the contractual barriers, the local government should lead by example in including “energy consumption” as a leading indicator for evaluating project performance.

This study also provides practical knowledge for stakeholders so that they can develop effective methods to overcome the identified barriers to attain higher levels of sustainable energy management. This study can contribute to knowledge in the developing countries context concerning energy management and conservation in construction projects.

Productivity is a worldwide problem and efforts have been made over the last three decades or so to explore ways to increase the rate of productivity on construction sites. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the state of the art in productivity research and to present the findings of a survey into the factors that can impair productivity on site.

A literature review is structured under five general headings: pre-construction activities; activities during construction; managerial and leadership issues; motivational factors; and organizational factors. In total, 46 determinants were extracted from the above headings and were assessed by 36 main contractors.

The literature review revealed that while there has been an advancement in developing techniques and tools to improving productivity on site, more need to be done to invest in technology and innovation. The interview survey indicated that factors associated with pre-construction activities, namely, the “experience of the selected site and project managers,” “design errors,” “buildability of the design,” “project planning,” “communication,” “ leadership style” and “procurement method” as the most critical factors influencing site productivity. Other highly ranked factors are “mismanagement of material” and “the work environment.”

The survey is based on main contractors and thus not generalized to cover other sectors of the building team such as designers and engineers.

Outcome of this research can be used to provide professionals and contractors guidance for focussing, acting upon and controlling the most significant factors perceived to influence the construction labor productivity (CLP) on site.

First, reviewed the state of the art and trends in construction productivity research. Second, primary survey with industry experts to rank the relative importance of factors that can influence CLP on site.

Building upon the results of a critical review of previous studies, the purpose of this paper is to present a framework to enhance the reliability of the theoretical model for international benchmarking of labour productivity (TMIBLP) method for construction project activities. The next part of the paper presents the results of implementing the proposed framework for construction activities in the Iranian construction industry.

This paper draws upon a critical review of the literature to highlight the drawbacks of the previous studies concerning implementing TMIBLP within the construction industry. Identifying these shortcomings, the authors propose a framework for construction projects, which presents the procedure for deploying TMIBLP for construction activities in a reliable manner. The final section of the paper demonstrates the empirical implementation of the proposed framework within the Iranian construction industry.

The primary contributions of the paper include: identifying the drawbacks of previous studies within the construction context, the framework that would lead construction managers towards more reliable implementation of benchmarking for construction projects, and determining the baseline of erecting steel structures in a developing country.

A practical implementation of the TMIBLP method was presented to address the lack of research in Iran and to show the feasibility of using the framework developed. The authors investigated the daily labour productivity for the activity of structural steel erection for six projects in Tehran in order to determine the values of the baseline productivity for each project. Accordingly, the disruption index, performance ratio and project management index as the project benchmarks were calculated for all six projects.

Underlining the necessity of implementing methods such as TMIBLP, this study outlines the outcomes of the first study on the benchmarking of construction activities deploying the proposed framework and using the data on erecting steel structures from six construction projects in Iran. The discussions provide guidelines for construction project managers regarding benchmarking labour productivity. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research opportunities.

Innovation has become a necessity for the information technology (IT) sector, especially during COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how knowledge sharing affects employees’ innovative work behavior (IWB). Specifically, the study examined occupational self-efficacy (as mediating mechanism) and entrepreneurial leadership (as boundary condition) to encourage IWB.

The study used social media platforms to collect data from 270 employees working in the IT sector through “google forms” on convenience basis between March and August, 2021. The study applied structural equation modeling in two stages to examine the measurement model (for uni-dimensionality) and the structural model (for hypotheses testing).

The study noted that knowledge sharing positively affects employees’ IWB and occupational self-efficacy positively explains this association. In addition, employees’ perception of entrepreneurial leadership strengthens the association between knowledge sharing and IWB.

The study collected data from a developing country during COVID-19 by using a cross-sectional design that may restrict causality. However, the findings suggest the management not only encourages knowledge sharing environment but also engages employees in various training that motivate them to experiment with new ideas and techniques.

This study extends the existing literature on knowledge sharing and IWB by exploring occupational self-efficacy as mediating mechanism and entrepreneurial leadership as a boundary condition.