Asia Proceedings of Social Sciences

Faiza Saleem

Harnessing Digital Technology for Sustainable Growth in Southeast Asia: The Role of Trade Openness and Institutional Excellence

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The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasize the importance of harnessing innovation and technology to address pressing global challenges like poverty, inequality, climate change, and economic sustainability. Southeast Asia’s ASEAN countries have shown remarkable growth in GDP and the digital economy, but also face significant pollution issues. Despite these dynamics, research into ASEAN's sustainability remains limited. This study examines the impact of digital technology and digital service trade on sustainable development in ASEAN, with a focus on the moderating role of institutional quality. Using panel data from 10 ASEAN countries between 2005 and 2019, this study employs feasible generalized least squares and generalized estimating equations to examine the influence of institutional quality on sustainability. This study incorporates population size and industrial value added as control variables. The findings reveal that while digitalization alone does not ensure sustainability, digital service trade can pose risks unless supported by strong institutions. This research highlights the importance of institutional development in harnessing digital advancements for environmental and social progress. The study showed that enhancing institutional quality and aligning policies are crucial to transforming digital innovation and trade into sustainable and equitable growth across ASEAN.

Tayyaba Rafique Makhdoom, Rubina Hanif

Employee Resilience Dynamics in SMEs under Environmental Turbulence: A Conservation of Resources Theory Approach

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Workplaces are prone to challenges and adversities, and employees are evident to be the significant players in facing and overcoming challenges. Resilient employees cope with challenges and as a significant organizational resource they can contribute to survival and prosperity of organization. SMEs are deemed more vulnerable during a crisis due to limited resources and for sustaining in uncertain business environment SMEs should develop employee resilience. Conservation of Resource (COR) theory is a motivational-stress theory which holds that people strive to obtain, retain, and protect things they value, and threat to resources triggers stress and motivates behaviors to defend and accumulate them.  Literature about employee resilience highlights the role of authentic leader, perceived organizational support, and organizational identification in fostering employee resilience, while there is environmental turbulence that can interfere in employee resilience development, whereas employee resilience is associated with employee performance. This is a concept paper that analyzes employee resilience of SME employees in the lens of COR theory, in which authentic leadership is a social resource that results in a organizational resource i.e. perceived organizational support, which contributes in personal resource i.e. organizational identification, which results in employee resilience as another personal resource. Environmental turbulence is a primary source of stress because it threatens employee resilience, organizational identification and external resources, but employee resilience influence employees to bounce back and result in employee performance. The model will provide theoretical framework for empirical research, which will help in improving human resource practices and policies.

Sohail Abdul Rehman, Chaudhry Hamza Rashid

Punishment, Emotional Intelligence, and Leadership Skills Development: Constructive Discipline or  Counterproductive Stress

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The majority of leadership development in military-style educational institutions is a result of stringent methods of discipline and punishment. While punishment seeks to correct behavior and promote discipline, the effect of punishment on the development of leadership traits and emotional growth are debated. The aim of this study is to determine whether punishment has direct effect on the development of leadership traits or whether punishment acts through emotional intelligence, and whether emotional intelligence functions as a mediating variable with respect to punishment and leadership traits development.

The study when carried out entailed the survey of a total of 270 cadets from Pakistan’s Cadet Colleges in a cross sectional survey form, and used validated scales measuring punishment, emotional intelligence and leadership traits. The data collected were analyzed through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM), regarding direct, indirect and mediating effects.

Results indicate that punishment does not directly develop leadership traits, but that it does modify emotional intelligence in a positive direction through supervision, and development of emotional intelligence does subsequently develop leadership traits. Cadets with a higher emotional intelligence were able to translate punishment into reflective learning, resiliency and interpersonal skills, hence in this indirect way enabling them to have increased leadership traits. Thus, the importance of emotional intelligence in the function of punishment being either a constructive discipline medium or a means of stress is indicated. These results point to the importance of integrating emotionally intelligent concepts into discipline with regard to the literature on leadership skills development.