Exploring cross-cultural variations in perceived soft skills among business students: A comparative analysis between Jordan and Hungary

The increasing turmoil in the external organizational setting or business environment has focused attention on capabilities and resources as the primary source of competitive advantage. Obviously, this statement points to the application of the resource-based view (RBV) of organizational management. Nevertheless, what constitutes RBV remains an illusion in many quarters of organizational management, as scholars have managed to put up their personal ideas, and managed to converge on phenomenon-driven theories, in addition to RBV. This paper reviews the concepts of RBV in light of knowledge management to highlight some critical pitfalls that might have eluded the research community on the subject matter of RBV. To this end, this paper’s educational value lies in the fact that it simplifies the concept of RBV to the new researcher in a fashion that is capable of appealing to his or her level. A cross-sectional qualitative research approach was employed in an effort aimed at understanding the role of RBV in creating a sustainable competitive advantage and key competencies. A total of 20 relevant articles were searched from different databases and search engines, including Scopus, EBSCO, ABI Inform, IEEE, PubMed, Science Direct, SABINET, IEEE, Bing, Science Direct, and Google Scholar. The findings indicate that RBV plays an important role and assists organizations not only create, nurture, and maintain competitive advantage, but also understand the collective resources needed to compete favorably in a globalized and highly competitive market. With expert knowledge workers at its core to provide support for knowledge creation, sharing, and utilization, the RBV principles discussed in this paper promise to guarantee a methodological step geared towards the achievement of competitive advantage. It, therefore, makes an incremental contribution to the RBV to attain modest improvement in organizational settings.

Performance management (PM) is a common practice used by organizations to assess and manage employees’ work. Much of PM research is closely related to management practices. Corporations in the public and nonprofit sector continuously develop PM programs to ensure the sustainability of their organizations.
The study aims to analyze the impact of strategic human resources planning on the organizational performance of Jordanian public shareholding companies for senior management and functional unit managers (human resources, marketing, finance, and accounting). The researchers surveyed all the public shareholding companies registered with the Jordan Securities Commission (JSC) in 2019, wherein they found that only 60 companies applied strategic planning and human resources planning (HRP) together. Two hundred and twenty questionnaires were distributed in 52 companies surveyed, and 203 were adopted for statistical analysis. Several statistical methods were used, most notably the multiple regression analysis. The researchers found out a statistically significant impact of the strategic human resources planning (integration of HRP and strategic planning; strategic participation) on organizational performance. The results showed that adopting the strategic HRP dimensions leads to an increase in an organization’s overall productivity, employee satisfaction and reputation, as well as reduced operating costs. HR managers must understand the effectiveness of strategically designed HR practices across functions.

The improvement of global Internet access and the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated mass testing of online teaching methods, have forwarded the competition between higher education institutions from the regional level and the struggle for the rich student into the competition for students in all countries. The paper aims to determine the influence of the rating of higher education institutions on the interest of Internet users by conducting a comparative analysis of the popularity of the official names of higher education institutions in search queries in Ukraine and Poland. To do this, a comparative analysis of the change in the interest in leading higher education institutions in Ukraine and Poland in search queries in the Google search engine is carried out. The analysis is performed using the Google Trends web application. As a result, it is found that a high position of the university in the national ranking does not guarantee more search queries about it on the Internet by both national Internet users and users from the neighboring country. In general, Internet users continue to be most interested in universities located in their region at the time of the search.