Today, we are not going to identify technical issues as we usually identified in our many previously published stories. This time we present a Web of Science and Scopus recognized business journal which publishes articles without any credible quality control. We can say that the Editors and Reviewers of this Clarivate Analytics (Emerging Sources Citation Index - ESCI) and Elsevier’s (Scopus) recognized so-called quality journal are not even able to correctly read the article and identify mistakes that could not be left unidentified even by an MBA student. The journal “Gadjah Mada International Journal of Business” is published by Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia which is a Scopus (Q3) and Clarivate’s ESCI listed journal. In addition to Scopus and ESCI, the journal is also indexed in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), ASEAN Citation Index (ASI), and EconLit by American Economic Association (AEA). The title of the article we are going to analyze is “Psychological Empowerment Link Using Employee Performance and Organizational Commitment on the Generation Gap: PLS-MGA Analysis”.

Besides the fact that proposed hypotheses (p.29, 30) don’t reflect the moderating role of “Generation” on the given relationships (Type-III error) which is essential in PLS-MGA based hypotheses testing and the arguments developed to propose the hypotheses were not Generation specific, we will highlight following text-related errors:

1. On page 31, the sub-heading “Research Design” is mentioned twice. Under first sub-heading, the Authors mention:

“As it is a robust data collection technique, cross-sectional methods were used to gather literature reviews on psychological empowerment, employee performance, organizational commitment, and survey questionnaires (Creswell 2009, 2014; Fauzi, Jamal & Mohd Sai¬foul 2014).”

Alas! It can be clearly seen that the Authors, Editors, and Reviewers don’t know that cross-sectional design is not a Literature Review technique. It is in fact a data collection technique.

Authors also mentioned that in addition to Quantitative, they also conducted interviews with the participants:

“Apart from that, an unstructured interview method was conducted to obtain feedback from the respondents about the findings of the quantitative study (the questionnaire). This feedback was used as additional information in explaining the practice of psychological empowerment in the context of the service management of an Islamic financial institution in Malaysia.”

Unfortunately, they provide no information on Interview Protocol Refinement (IPR) framework, credibility and reliability of interview questions, follow-up questions, coding process, theming process, interpretation etc. After reading this article, one can firmly believe that the Authors either don’t know how to conduct a Qualitative study or they forgot to report it. The surprising situation is, Editors and Reviewers were also too nescient to identify this big blunder.

2. Under the second “Research Design” sub-heading, the Authors presented the psychometric related information.

We wonder why Editors and Reviewers failed to catch this duplication of sub-heading. Isn’t it the duty of Editors to apply a bird's-eye view to identify such stern mistakes at desk level?

3. In the “Data Analysis” section (p. 33), the Authors only reported the details of the PLS-MGA analysis method. Surprisingly, the Authors completely missed to mention the Qualitative analysis method. The Authors clearly mention in Abstract:

“This research used questionnaires and in-depth interviews as the main procedures for collecting and obtaining data” (p. 23).

We wonder how the Authors missed to report Qualitative analysis method and Editors and Reviewers had not identified this major issue.

4. On page 34, under the sub-heading “Correlation Analysis”, the Authors presented factor loadings, AVEs, and CRs (measurement model), HTMT, and VIFs. Astonishingly, the Authors forgot to report “Correlation Matrix” which was the actual requirement that should be reported under the subject sub-heading. We wonder why Editors and Reviewers were unable to catch this significant blunder.

5. On page 40, it is reported “Table 8 shows the findings of the parametric test.” However, Table 8 presents PLS-MGA Test. Similarly, on page 41, the Authors mention “Table 9 shows the findings of the Welch-Satterthwait test.” In reality, Table 9 presents “Parametric Test” results and Welch-Satterthwait test is reported in Table 10. On the same page, the Authors mention:

“Table 10 shows that psychological empowerment in the analysis accounted for 48.5% of the variance in performance and 42.5% of the variance in organizational com¬mitment.”

We see that Table 10 doesn’t report the given variance. The reported variances are not given in any of the mentioned Tables.

In this article we didn’t analyze and dissect the given statistical figures, but you can observe that provided values in Table 8, 9, and 10 are almost similar. Is it possible to have cut-copy-paste values as given in these Tables?

Our readers may have observed that this article is full of blunders. This is a clear master crap piece produced by this Clarivate/Scopus recognized so-called high quality business journal. We wonder why universities, institutions, organizations, and higher education commissions only look at the indexing status of journals but overlook the actual quality of the articles produced by these predatory journals. The Editors, Reviewers, and the Publisher badly failed to conduct a desk and peer review as evident in this article.

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