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In the contemporary economic reality, which is based on relations, the role of trust both in the intra- and inter-organisational context is growing in importance. Impersonal trust is characterized by considerable durability and forms a solid framework for developing interpersonal trust. In consequence, many researchers’ attention is drawn towards practices aimed at the development of such trust. The goal of the paper is to analyse potential relations between the degree of impersonal trust and innovative culture and, in particular, to operationalise the variables, i.e. determine the dimensions of impersonal trust and innovative culture, estimate the impact of the individual dimensions of the former onto those of the latter. The survey was conducted in Poland among 630 employees of large and mediumsized enterprises. Verification of the theoretical model was performed based on structural equation modeling. The research led to the identification of dependencies between the particular dimensions of impersonal trust and innovative culture, confirming the importance of impersonal trust in the process of shaping organisational culture. Impersonal trust was recognized as a separate construct which determines the nature of innovative culture. Feeling of security has special significance at workplace because guarantees stability, durability and openness in relations, enhances creativity of staff and gives them freedom to try non-conventional solutions to problems. Organisational assurance, i.e. a conviction about the clarity of rules and principles, open communication and making staff feel they are included in organisational processes, has a weaker impact on the dimensions of innovative culture when compared to feeling of security.

The objective of this study is to propose a trustworthy, valid and consistent methodological approach for measuring the efficiency of a logistics platform, where an entire country constitutes a logistic platform. Traditional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is found to be an appropriate tool – if its weaknesses are eliminated. DEA results are highly influenced by the choice of appropriate inputs and outputs variables, but the method itself does not provide guidance for their identification. The authors therefore propose to integrate traditional DEA by combining the Delphi technique with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, which will assist in identifying proper, consistent input/output variables, evaluated by their relevance. The proposed framework allows the performance evaluation of the selected platform’s element or elements. It is thus a useful decision support tool for enterprises (private, public, both) that are managing logistics platforms and trying to improve their productivity in order to sustain or improve their position on the competitive market. This methodology allows comparative efficiency analyses to be estimated for similar countries. The presented methodology on one hand enables tailor-made solutions, but on the other hand is very general, and, with minor adjustments, can be applied by a variety of firms and industries. It can be applied in private sector firms in production and service industries, to analyse the relative performance of diverse logistics and non-logistics services, and in public profit or non-profit organisations.

Due to the low level of quality of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) data set, studies devoted to matching the LFS data with data from alternative sources are frequent. In this paper, we propose a novel method of complementing data gaps on wages in the Labour Force Survey data set. The method is based on estimataing the parameters of the multilevel model explaining wages on the basis of the Structure of Earnings Survey (SES) data set. In such a way, we identify the impact of individual characteristics and enterprise-level features on wages. We also find evidence of random differences between the wages of workers from different professional groups. The relative importance of consecutive groups of variables is evaluated on the basis of the estimates of the parameters of the full model and reduced models. The results of the estimation of the parameters are in line with expectations. The estimates of parameters and predictions of random effects are used in order to calculate the theoretical wages of individuals who do not report wages in the Labour Force Survey. When the predicted wages are compared with the observed ones, some discrepancies are observed. Rationales for these discrepancies are provided. Therefore, the use of a correction factor is proposed. Correction factors are provided for different features of workers and different features of enterprises. The use of the microeconometric multilevel model, as well as the correction factor, leads to reasonable wage estimates of workers not reporting them in the Labour Force Survey. The proposed method may be used in order to complement data gaps on wages for other EU countries.

The paper focuses on a relatively new and prospective application of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) in the employee performance assessment. In the paper, a novel DEA approach is proposed for evaluating the performance of call centre agents, based on their relative efficiency. Since call centres handle a majority of customer-company interactions, performance of call centre agents largely influences the future success or failure of a company. To ensure the quality of customer service, permanent evaluation of call centre agents’ performance is essential. The proposed DEA model consisting of two input variables (wage and working time) and five output variables (quick-answer calls proportion, customer satisfaction, net first contact resolution, call quality and inbound contact handle time) has been tested on 55 call centre agents working at the call centre of one of the largest telecommunications operators in the Slovak Republic. After measuring the performance of each agent, based on the DEA models, the call centre agents’ performance was evaluated in the DEA matrix format. As a result, the call centre agents were divided into four groups: Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks and Poor Dogs. Finally, based on the proposed approach, recommendations for call centre managers on how to improve or maintain the performance of each of these groups were drawn. The proposed approach provides a practical framework for call centre managers to assess the performance of the agents, and to plan and také steps to improve the quality of call centre services.

The paper is an analysis of foreign trade of the post-Soviet countries conducted for years 2000 and 2015. The aims of the research were thus twofold: to examine the bilateral trade scheme for the selected countries and to attempt to explore relations between competitiveness and thus the position of the agricultural commodity aggregates. The UN COMTRADE database was used. In the monitored countries, there is continuous growth of the commodity aggregate 0 – Food and live animals, which is strongly influenced by the commodity sub-aggregates 02 – Dairy products and bird eggs, S3-04 – Cereals and cereal preparations. The first phase entailed calculations of individual indicators of mutual trade (RCA, LFI, GLI and coverage of import). Subsequently, the indicators were used as input variables for further analyses. Using RCA and LFI indexes, the commodity aggregates were classified into 4 quadrants according to their position within the comparative advantage and competitiveness. Using a cluster analysis (based on Euclidian distance and Ward’s method), individual commodity aggregates for the monitored countries were divided into groups based on the values of GLI, LFI and coverage of import. The groups were subsequently characterized for individual countries. Based on the conducted analyses, it can be stated that hypothesis 0 about the non-existence of significant changes within the group structure does not reflect the reality. Between 2000 and 2015, substantial changes occurred in terms of dividing the commodity aggregates into groups based on their common characteristics with regard to foreign trade. In addition, the diversity within foreign trade decreased between 2000 and 2015, and more commodity aggregates attain values around or below the average of a given aggregate. When assessing the intraindustry trade, it can be stated that some commodity aggregates can be regarded as important only with regard to Azerbaijan, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. In these countries, this phenomenon is most frequently evident in the commodity aggregates Beverages or Vegetables and fruit.

The performance of the economy should generally reflect the performance of stock markets. Production increases, prices rise, and companies’ profits increase if the economy grows. And the shares should naturally make the profits (which means among other things, higher dividends) even more attractive. But is that really true? The aim of the article is to find out the relationship between the development of stock markets and the economic growth in Visegrad Group countries (V4). The subject of the survey is both the long-term relationship and the short-term relationship in the course of economic cycles. The article uses the tools of time series econometrics, especially VECMs, including corresponding diagnostics, Granger causality and block erogeneity. The relationships between the variables examined vary from country to country. The long-term relationship between the development of stock markets and the economic growth was confirmed in Slovakia and Hungary. It was confirmed that the GDP growth rate influenced the growth rate of stock indices in all V4 countries. The opposite relationship (the stock index growth rate influences the GDP growth rate) was not confirmed only in the Czech Republic. Quarterly data for the period from 2005/Q1 to 2018/Q4 was used for the analysis. This period was selected because all of the V4 countries have been members of the European Union since 2004. The EViews software version 9 was used for the calculations. Variables used in this research are: the GDP, the stock Exchange index of the country and stock trading volume. The PX, SAX, BUX and WIG20 stock indices are considered to be the crucial representatives of individual stock markets in this work.

In their response to the necessity to meet the demands of customers, the enterprises are forced to reduce the time of order delivery. Today, almost every enterprise has its own warehouse facilities or outsources warehouse processes. Therefore, the contemporary warehouses play a significant role in production and service networks. The maintenance of high efficiency of warehouse processes determines the competitive functioning of enterprises. Continuous progress in this area sets the pace for these changes. Nevertheless, despite of the desire to reduce costs while increasing the efficiency of the warehouse process, you cannot forget about employees. In addition to efficiency and the level of generated costs, a warehouse employee is one of the factors that not only affects the shape of the logistics system in an enterprise, but also affects all links in the supply chain. This study is intended to research the impact of technological and organizational innovation implemented in the warehousing process on the efficiency of picking processes and staff workload on picking stations. The research was performed with warehouse simulation models developed in FlexSlim 3D Simulation Software. The simulated warehouses represent the warehouses in B2C (Business to Customer) logistics. They are about the layout of bag-type warehouse and the size and shape of the assortment varies. The size of storage zone is the same for all three warehouses. In these warehouses the assortment is arranged randomly. For each model, several simulations have been performed. The conducted research has shown that the results of technological and organizational innovation implemented in the warehousing process should be in general evaluated positively. Both the warehouse productivity and the picking process efficiency increased. The staff workload decreased, which is reflected in greater work comfort for a man and which supports implementation of control activities. However, it should be noted that implementation of the technological and organizational innovation in the warehousing processes adopted in various enterprises changes the labor market, thus it is possible that some problems with maintaining current employment levels will occur.

Unemployment has a number of negative, economic, social and psychological effects on unemployed people and their families. Lowered household income leads to a constrained fulfilment of individual and collective needs, which has a significant impact on the quality of life and perceived health condition of the unemployed. The aim of this study is the identification of relationships between the quality of life and socio-economic status of unemployed persons. The study was carried out among 403 registered unemployed persons (246 women, 157 men) from Wrocław, Poland. The main method used in the study was the diagnostic questionnaire survey. Respondents’ quality of life was assessed using the World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL-BREF) questionnaire, and their socio-economic status with author’s own S-ESQ questionnaire. Arithmetic means and standard deviation were calculated. Correlations between respondents’ quality of life and socio-economic status were checked with the Kruskal-Wallis oneway analysis of variance and Dunn’s post-hoc tests. The ex-ante level of statistical signifikance was set at α < 0.05. The mean health-related quality of life score of the unemployed respondents under study was higher than the mean perceived health condition score. As for the four quality of life domains, the respondents reported the highest scores in the social domain and psychological domain, followed by the physical and environmental domains. The analysis of mean scores of overall quality of life of the unemployed revealed statistically significant differences between groups of jobless Wrocław residents with regard to such factors as age, number of household members, and per capita income. Respondents’ age, education, marital status, persons per household, per capital income, and having savings were also significant differentiating factors of perceived health condition. The results of the study can be significant for public health policies in Poland and other countries at a similar level of economic development.

“Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM)” is an expert based field which is working based on real data and experts’ opinions. So many studies have been doing based on MADM methods which they usually use qualitative data based on experts’ ideas. Decisions based on the experts’ opinion shall be carefully designed to cope the real problems uncertainty. This uncertainty will be even more intricate if combining the problem with the ambiguity of the future study. Prospective MADM is a future based type of MADM field which is concentrating on decision making and policy making about the future. Prospective MADM (PMADM) can have both explorative and descriptive paradigms in the studies but it will more useful to be applied for strategic planning. In this regard, experts’ role would be even more challenging because one/some possible future/futures will be partially designed based on their opinions. Future and prediction always complicates the decision environment, especially methodologies founded on experts’ judgement. Considering experts’ preferences, attitude, and background, they may be a major source of inaccurate results. Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) is well-known “Futures Studies” method which is qualitative and usually is supporting other methods such as “Backcasting” and “Scenario Planning”. CLA has a deep point of view to the subjects to support a future with all those changes which are necessary for the main goal/goals. In this study, this idea will be proposed that CLA can be added to PMADM outline to decrease the risk of unsuitable decisions for the future and for this aim a case study about energy and CO2 consumption in policy making level proposed and a hybrid MADM method based on BWM-CoCoSo applied in the PMADM outline for the procedure.

The paper notices troublesome aspects of compiling industry statistics for the purpose of inter-enterprise comparison in corporate financial analysis. Whilst making a caveat that this issue is unbeknownst to practitioners and underrated by theorists, the goal of the paper is two-fold. For one thing, the paper demonstrates that financial ratios are inclined to frequency distributions characteristic of power-law (fat) tails and their typical shape precludes a simple treatment. For the other, the paper explores different approaches to compiling industry statistics by considering trimming and winsorizing cleansing protocols, and by confronting trimmed, winsorized as well as quantile measures of central tendency. The issues are empirically illustrated on data for a great number of Slovak construction enterprises for two years, 2009 and 2018. The empirical distribution of eight financial ratios is studied for troublesome features such as asymmetry and power-law (fat) tails that hamper usefulness of traditional descriptive measures of location without considering different possibilities of handling atypical values (such as infinite and outlying values). The confrontation of diverse approaches suggests a plausible route to compiling industry statistics that consists in reporting a 25% trimmed mean alongside 25% and 75% quantiles, all applied to trimmed data (i.e. data after discarding infinite values). The paper also highlights the sorely unnoticed fact that the key ratio of financial analysis, return on equity, may easily attain non-sense values and these should be removed prior to compiling financial analysis; otherwise, industry statistics is biased upward regardless of what measure of central tendency is made use of.

The paper studies a new point of view and the approach to profit as an inherent part of business finance as well as a symbol of every healthy economy. The fundamental function of the profit is a stimulus; it means initial motivator of the business activity. The profit provides core resources for survival at the business start and after the stabilization, it is the synonym for progress. The aim of this paper is to detect significant change-points in times series of EBITDA during the analysed period in every country of the Visegrad Group to recognize the progress years in the monotonic development. We use a method of homogeneity test of time series that delivers significant robust results. We observe the variable EBITDA to eliminate different tax, interest and depreciation policies of these emerging countries. The original research of this article is based on empirical results of business profits of the sample of 3,853 enterprises covered by the broad theoretical review. Firstly, we identify missing values; and detect the outliers by Z-score and Grubbs test. EBITDA of 1,058 Slovak enterprises, 688 Czech enterprises, 1,376 Polish enterprises and 731 Hungarian enterprises is analysed during the period from 2010 to 2018. We eliminate the inconsistent observations and construct average values of EBITDA. Secondly, we prove normality by Jarque-Bera test, and support it by Shapiro-Wilk test, Anderson-Darling test, Lilliefors test to deliver reliable results. Thirdly, we find an independency of distribution that confirm randomness by the Box-Pierce test. And finally, we identify the years that affect heterogeneity of EBITDA in the countries of the Visegrad Four. We uncover some really surprising results. For all countries in the Visegrad Four, the year 2013 is detected as a change-point at a significance level of 0.05. This significant year shifts EBITDA between two homogeneous series with corresponding central lines and recognizes the similar annual development within the groups. In addition, we discuss the results to the areas and factors affecting the business risk. The adjustable area represented by the business dynamism has no significant impact on the development of EBITDA. The uncontrollable macroeconomic factors such as a GDP, unemployment rate, inflation rate, average monthly gross wage, and Ease of doing business index demonstrate the same development of Slovak, Czech, Polish and Hungarian enterprises. We connect our gained results to the undisputed influence of these factors and its derived components on monotonic development of EBITDA. Despite the fact, that the countries are not economically interconnected as they used to be in the past, in has to be underlined that their mutual relations are still very narrow and close and that might be the reason, why identical results are achieved in the countries with divergent development.

Customers today can find the same assortments in a number of retail stores and through the Internet, thus effective store management has become a critical basis for developing strategic advantages. The aim of this research is to identify whether customer satisfaction measured by means of mystery shopping and the results of communication with the public on a company’s Facebook profile assessed by quantitative analysis influence the performance of the selected companies. The evaluation of customer satisfaction and loyalty follows the older pilot study and is newly supplemented by an analysis of communication with customers using social media such as Facebook. The company’s performance is evaluated through the financial ratios (ROA, ROE and ATO) based on accounting data available in the Magnusweb database. The research is focused on selected companies from the electronics and communication equipment retail industry in the Czech Republic and is unique from that point of view because it analyses communication with customers not only in retail shops but concurrently on their profiles for Facebook. The findings show how it is possible to assess the level of customer-oriented communication in retail shops and also the level of communication with customers on the social network. Retailers are increasing their focus on customers’ experience in their shops and on social media sites. The research contributes to a better understanding of marketing in retail and on social media in the selected industry.

The main aim of this article is to research the relationship between youth unemployment and self-employment in the EU and categorise particular EU countries as the countries with youth self-employment driven by push factors or pull factors. It has been revealed that statistically significant relationships between unemployment and self-employment among young people from the 28 EU countries, in only 7 countries have been identified. Of these, Greece, Italy and Cyprus, the unemployment rate among young people would decrease if national governments were to reduce unemployment through self-employment support measures. In other countries such as Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Malta, it would be inappropriate to reduce unemployment through support for self-employment. In other EU countries, fighting youth unemployment requires addressing other labor market issues, such as the reluctance of businesses to employ unqualified or low-skilled young people, reducing the chances of reducing the tax burden when hiring young people, making flexible use of education opportunities with employment. The fact was confirmed that is inappropriate for all countries (in this case EU countries) to apply universal strategies to combat unemployment, because by means of theories and pilot studies on the establishment of statistically significant relationships, it is possible to avoid mistakes by directing support to the needs of target groups.