PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of innovation on the relationship between organizational culture and firm performance.Design/methodology/approachData for the study were collected through a survey from 154 branches of ten prominent banks in Turkey and responses were analyzed to assess the relationships between organizational culture, firm performance and organizational innovation.FindingsThe findings reveal that in the banking sector, although organizational culture and innovation have a direct and positive effect on the firm performance dimensions, organizational culture was found to have an insignificant regression coefficient on the dimensions of firm performance in the presence of organizational innovations.Practical implicationsThese findings provide useful insights for organizations, particularly in the banking industry, seeking to be competitive and responsive to environmental changes by successfully introducing innovations. Conclusions emphasize that mechanisms to encourage and foster an innovative culture in the organization are likely to facilitate the introduction, adoption and diffusion of innovations which, in turn, is likely to result in achievement of superior firm performance.Originality/valueOrganizational culture has been studied in the literature as one of the characteristics impacting the firm's performance. But there is a paucity of research which models and empirically studies the relationship between organizational culture and the firm performance. In addition, several researchers have studied organizational innovation as a driver of firm performance but fewer researchers have studied organizational innovations as being impacted by organizational culture. In this study, the paper examines the relationship between organizational culture and firm performance and the role of organizational innovation in this relationship. This research makes an important contribution to the existing literature by empirically examining the relationship between organizational culture, innovations and firm performance.

Gene co-expression networks capture biologically important patterns in gene expression data, enabling functional analyses of genes, discovery of biomarkers, and interpretation of genetic variants. Most network analyses to date have been limited to assessing correlation between total gene expression levels in a single tissue or small sets of tissues. Here, we built networks that additionally capture the regulation of relative isoform abundance and splicing, along with tissue-specific connections unique to each of a diverse set of tissues. We used the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project v6 RNA sequencing data across 50 tissues and 449 individuals. First, we developed a framework called Transcriptome-Wide Networks (TWNs) for combining total expression and relative isoform levels into a single sparse network, capturing the interplay between the regulation of splicing and transcription. We built TWNs for 16 tissues and found that hubs in these networks were strongly enriched for splicing and RNA binding genes, demonstrating their utility in unraveling regulation of splicing in the human transcriptome. Next, we used a Bayesian biclustering model that identifies network edges unique to a single tissue to reconstruct Tissue-Specific Networks (TSNs) for 26 distinct tissues and 10 groups of related tissues. Finally, we found genetic variants associated with pairs of adjacent nodes in our networks, supporting the estimated network structures and identifying 20 genetic variants with distant regulatory impact on transcription and splicing. Our networks provide an improved understanding of the complex relationships of the human transcriptome across tissues.

The purpose of this research is to investigate factors impacting internet buying in three cultures: USA, India, and Jordan. While several consumer characteristics impacting internet buying have been studied in previous research, there has been relatively little research which studies the factors across national cultures. Internet buying and commerce has a global reach and several corporations count on global markets for expansion and growth. As a result, it is critical to understand the particular nature of differences in consumer characteristics impacting internet buying in different countries and cultures. This paper reports on an empirical study, which tests the impact of consumer characteristics uncertainty avoidance and perceived risk on internet buying. Data was collected and analyzed from USA, Jordan, and India. Results indicate that in cultures where uncertainty avoidance is high, perceived risk with internet, buying is also high, and this impacts internet buying negatively. Cultures where perceived risk is high, it impacts internet buying negatively. Results provide practical implications to web based vendors on consumer characterize that should be taken into account when marketing online in different cultures. Results also provide valuable insights into the nature of internet buying and the factors that limit internet-buying acceptance across cultures.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of factors of environmental uncertainty on the innovativeness of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Innovativeness is widely accepted as an important characteristic for firm competitiveness and it has been studied by both researchers as well as business managers. Environmental uncertainty is a measure of the complexity of changing external forces faced by an organisation and it crucially impacts the responses of organisations in order to stay competitive. Based on approaches in existing literature, this study conceptualises environmental uncertainty comprised three separate dimensions — competitive intensity, market/demand turbulence, technological turbulence. Data for the study were collected from 156 SMEs in Turkey. SMEs are regarded as an important ingredient in the economic growth of nations and especially so in developing nations such as Turkey. The findings of the study reveal that market/demand turbulence and technological turbulence have a positive effect on the innovativeness of SMEs. Interestingly and contrary to popular belief, competitive intensity was not found to have significant effect on an SME's innovativeness. The implication of the results from this research is that the degree of organisational innovativeness for SMEs tends to increase and therefore should be supported in environments with greater technological and market/demand turbulence. This research makes an important contribution to the developing body of innovation literature and provides directions for managers and researchers in influencing innovativeness of firms.

The purpose of this study is to identify and present the key organizational characteristics of innovativeness which will provide an organization a better assessment of their readiness for innovation. An extensive examination of the existing literature was performed to identify the gaps in research on innovativeness, and to generate candidate characteristics for assessing an organization's readiness for innovation. The research employed focus groups with managers and professionals in an exploratory study as the first step in developing a measure for assessing characteristics for organizational innovativeness. A content analysis of the results revealed five underlying characteristics for organizational innovativeness. The most frequently cited characteristics were innovative organizational culture, structure and climate. This was followed by leadership and management style that support innovation, organizational support to innovate and change, creative human capital, and learning orientation and knowledge management respectively. These results are consistent with the existing literature in this area. Our results provide an important contribution to the developing body of innovation literature, and provide implications for organizations interested in assessing their readiness to innovate.