Do high-involvement management practices enhance employees' innovative behavior?

This thesis studies the connection between High-Involvement Management (HIM) practices and employees' innovative behavior. Opportunity-enhancing, ability-enhancing, and motivation-enhancing HIM practices' connection to the probability for expressing innovative behavior is studied quantitatively using a probit regression and propensity score matching with an extensive set of control variables. Data is obtained from the Finnish MEADOW survey, which contains more than 1000 combined employer-employee observations. The main finding in the thesis is that opportunity-enhancing and ability-enhancing practices are associated with innovative behavior: In the scale of 0-10, a one-point increase in the aggregate score of the practices is associated with a statistically significant 3.4%-point and 1.3%-point average increase in the probability for innovative behavior for opportunity-enhancing and ability-enhancing practices, respectively. For motivation-enhancing practices, such association is not found. In addition, propensity score matching reveals that bundling the different practice types is associated with an increase in the probability for innovative behavior, but the association is smaller than the single practice types' combined association. Motivation-enhancing practices show slightly positive, yet insignificant association when not combined with other practices, while ability-enhancing practices show larger associations in magnitude when combined with other practices. The results are aligned with the vast majority of prior theoretical and empirical studies, and provide interesting future research topics, especially considering the effect of non-monetary incentives, which could not be investigated with the data used in the study, and the potential trade-off between productivity and innovativeness. Prior studies have suggested HIM practices to have a positive association with productivity, and it would be interesting to find out if productivity and innovativeness are complementary, substitutes, or independent of each other

Surge of Peripheral Arginine Vasopressin in a Rat Model of Birth Asphyxia

Mammalian birth is accompanied by a period of obligatory asphyxia, which consists of hypoxia (drop in blood O-2 levels) and hypercapnia (elevation of blood CO2 levels). Prolonged, complicated birth can extend the asphyxic period, leading to a pathophysiological situation, and in humans, to the diagnosis of clinical birth asphyxia, the main cause of hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). The neuroendocrine component of birth asphyxia, in particular the increase in circulating levels of arginine vasopressin (AVP), has been extensively studied in humans. Here we show for the first time that normal rat birth is also accompanied by an AVP surge, and that the fetal AVP surge is further enhanced in a model of birth asphyxia, based on exposing 6-day old rat pups to a gas mixture containing 4% O-2 and 20% CO2 for 45 min. Instead of AVP, which is highly unstable with a short plasma half-life, we measured the levels of copeptin, the C-terminal part of prepro-AVP that is biochemically much more stable. In our animal model, the bulk of AVP/copeptin release occurred at the beginning of asphyxia (mean 7.8 nM after 15 min of asphyxia), but some release was still ongoing even 90 min after the end of the 45 min experimental asphyxia (mean 1.2 nM). Notably, the highest copeptin levels were measured after hypoxia alone (mean 14.1 nM at 45 min), whereas copeptin levels were low during hypercapnia alone (mean 2.7 nM at 45 min), indicating that the hypoxia component of asphyxia is responsible for the increase in AVP/copeptin release. Alternating the O-2 level between 5 and 9% (CO2 at 20%) with 5 min intervals to mimic intermittent asphyxia during prolonged labor resulted in a slower but quantitatively similar rise in copeptin (peak of 8.3 nM at 30 min). Finally, we demonstrate that our rat model satisfies the standard acid-base criteria for birth asphyxia diagnosis, namely a drop in blood pH below 7.0 and the formation of a negative base excess exceeding -11.2 mmol/l. The mechanistic insights from our work validate the use of the present rodent model in preclinical work on birth asphyxia.Peer reviewe

The Role of Radio-Frequency Identification in the Sustainable Digital Transformation of the Supply Chain

Sustainability and digital transformation have been two leading themes for businesses as they have updated operating systems in the 2020s. This study focuses on using radio-frequency identification (RFID) to provide visibility in the sustainable digital transformation (SDT) of the supply chain. The purpose is to expose the roles and the levels of value creation that RFID takes. The theoretical background stems from Industry 4.0 (I40), which stresses the role of specific technologies in driving business renewal. The study comprises a Europewide survey among 685 business and supply chain leaders, and four case studies with 86 days of floor-level operations tracking, 36 interviews, five round tables, and in-depth data from five organizations. The dissertation reveals that data-capturing practices used are still partly immature and influenced by narrow industry-specific standards. Data quality is a challenge in several industries due to the lack of advanced practices fitting with the product and supply chain structures. The study argues that RFID has a role as an enabler, driver, and connector in SDT. Its key benefits are automation, itemization, and data generation to the SCM, which supports sustainable business configuration, improved customer value, and building future-proof organizations by responding to regulatory and customer pressures and resource shortages. However, feasible use cases of RFID remain limited due to a lack of universal application and reading methods across product and packaging types. It is argued that the strategic role of supply chain visibility (SCV) has been understood by a few leading global firms, which have succeeded in building data-driven organizations e.g., in consumer-packaged goods industry. Within the SCV research community, the focus has been on inter-firm relationships in the supply chain domain, neglecting the cross-functional intrafirm aspect that is needed in a companywide digital transformation. The top-management influence is invaluable in setting the cross-functional agenda for SDT and internal data sharing and utilization. Through the stakeholder theory, it is argued that while RFID has become a standard in certain industries, the traditional view of innovation diffusion across markets should be replaced with models emphasizing co-existing technology landscapes. This would also support business model conversations, which are present in I40 but have attracted less attention in supply chain 4.0 research focusing on the performance aspect