Enrico Ciavolino

Although successful entrepreneurship education (EE) is possible through the most effective way to manage teachable skills and competencies, there is no universal pedagogical recipe to teach entrepreneurship. This paper attempts to identify the most appropriate teaching methods and addresses the paucity of entrepreneurial outcomes on university experiences in EE. Using a survey of students at a Naples University, it attempts to advance our understanding of an entrepreneurship education program...

Research on job crafting is increasing nowadays. Job crafting has been studied in terms of a mediator variable useful to improve positive organizational behaviors, and it has crucial theoretical and practical implications. In order to facilitate its measurement in large surveys, in different settings, we aimed to develop a brief 12-item version, the Job Crafting Scale-Short Form (JCS-SF)...

SUMMARY The aim of the paper is to define a new concept of global measure for the Passenger Satisfaction (PS), conceived as second-order latent variables (Henseler and Chin, 2010), and a new estimation approach to its measurement. This idea arises from theoretical and methodological limits of the existent models in correctly capturing the construct of satisfaction and the relationships with its subdimensions. The two main approaches to the estimation of higher-order constructs through the Partial Least Squares Path Modeling (PLS-PM) are presented: the so called Repeated Indicators and the Two-Step approaches. Some criticisms of these methodologies are highlighted and a solution to the issue of the identification of formative second-order constructs is suggested through the adoption of a Hybrid Two-Step approach for solving the presented PS case study. Three ways of modeling PS are then compared: a Base Model, where PS is measured as a traditional first-order construct, and two second-order models estimated, respectively, through the Repeated Indicators and the Hybrid Two-Step. Results are discussed. Keywords: Passenger Satisfaction, Second Order Latent Variables, Partial Least Squares Path Modeling, Hybrid Two-Step Approach.

SUMMARY For several years it has become the practice of Public Administration quality assessment as part of the institutional activities carried out by offices to improve public services by monitoring the production process. The Ministry of Labour and Social Policies has adopted a system of ‘‘quality assessment’’ based on indicators selected as representative of the inspection carried out in decentralized offices. This scoring system – called Project Quality – is defined by three ‘‘synthetic indicators’’ determined periodically by the 92 Provincial Labour Directorates (in Italian: Direzioni Provinciali del Lavoro – DPL) operating in the country. It does indeed have a rating system that defines a ranking among the offices. This paper presents the results of the research in order to analytically describe the performance level with a different model and also suggesting the possible influence exerted by ‘‘local context variables’’, i.e., those relating to the geo-socio-economic differentials, in explaining the efficiency of inspection. The data are analyzed according to the variable inspection and local was formalized through a second-order structural equations model. Keywords: PLS Path-Modeling, Second Order Latent Variables, Performance Evaluation, Context Variables; Inspection Activity.