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The phenomenon of global brands taking a stance on crucial, yet polarizing, socio-political issues, namely global brand activism, is rising. However, how consumer views on this practice are shaped when global branding elements are factored in remains unclear. Drawing from the functional theory of attitude formation, this study investigates the relationships of consumer characteristics (political ideology, consumer ethnocentrism) and brand factors (global brand attitudes and perceived motivation of global brand activists) with attitudes toward global brand activists.

Using a survey of a UK nationally representative sample (n = 439), we test our hypothesized model via structural equation modeling and mediation analysis.

Our findings reveal direct and indirect effects of political ideology on attitudes toward global brand activists (AttGBACTIVs). While consumer ethnocentrism and global brand attitudes do not directly drive AttGBACTIVs, they do influence them indirectly. Perceived motivation of global brand activists emerges as a key mechanism activating these effects and affecting AttGBACTIVs.

First, this study constitutes a novel examination of consumer views of brand activism through a global branding lens. Second, our investigation uniquely combines important determinants of brand activism outcomes with key international marketing factors (namely consumer ethnocentrism and global brand attitudes). Third, the concurrent exploration of individual and brand factors in our mediated model reveals the complex mechanisms through which attitudes toward global brand activists are formed.

Social networking sites (SNS) have become popular mediums for individuals to interact with others. However, despite the positive impact of SNS on people’s lives, cyberbullying has become prevalent. Due to this prevalence, substantial research has examined cyberbullying from the perspectives of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims, but little is known about SNS users’ confrontations with cyberbullying. The objectives of this study are to examine confrontation as a victim’s coping response, the effect of blockability affordance on victims’ protection motivation, the impact of a victim’s experiences with cyberbullying perpetration, and social desirability (SD) bias in the context of cyberbullying victimization.

This study examines the effect of blockability affordance on SNS users’ protection motivation. It also investigates the relationships among perceived threat, perceived coping efficacy, and use of confrontation. Furthermore, this investigation analyzes the effect of SNS users’ experiences as perpetrators on their decision to confront cyberbullies. Finally, this study assesses and controls SD bias in SNS users’ confrontation behavior. To test the research model, we used an online vignette study to collect 314 data points.

Blockability affordance, perceived threat, perceived coping efficacy, and cyberbullying perpetration experiences are essential factors in explaining use of confrontation. This study also finds SD bias in the context of cyberbullying victimization.

This is one of the first studies in information systems research to empirically examine the effect of blockability affordance in the context of cyberbullying.

This study aims to investigate the impact of green marketing strategy (GMS) and firms’ decision to invest in or divest from green marketing activities during a crisis on business performance.

The study collected survey data from 245 Greek firms during the 2015 Eurozone crisis to investigate the impact of GMS and green marketing investments on firm resilience during crisis. Time-lagged, objective performance data for a subset of these firms helped examine the impact of GMS on postcrisis financial performance.

Pursuing a GMS builds resilience, especially for companies that decided not to reduce resources allocated to green marketing activities during a recession. Beyond resilience, firms investing in GMS during the crisis experienced improved financial performance in the long run. Finally, this research proposes a typology of GMS responses during a crisis.

This study does not specify which types of green marketing activities lead to more investment or divestment during a crisis.

The study offers insights for allocating resources to green marketing during recessions. Supporting GMSs during unpredictable times is important to successfully navigate performance both during and after a crisis. Six crisis response profiles are offered: green-nonbelievers, dis-investors, reluctants and cautious-, opportunistic- and strategic-green investors.

The study proposes a balanced approach to environmental sustainability, marketing strategy and firm performance during a crisis.

The study argues that GMSs enable firms to survive a crisis and recover from financial shocks.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the link between external audit quality and integrated reporting (IR) quality in the Jordanian market, a developing market. Furthermore, the research model considers the mediating effect of earnings management practices and the moderating effect of board gender diversity. As a result, it intends to provide further empirical evidence in this area.

This research investigates its model using data from Jordanian services companies listed on the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) during the period 2013–2022. With 430 company-year observations, the current research’s sample includes all companies in the research population for which complete data were available during the period under investigation. Data relevant to the research setting were obtained from annual disclosures and the ASE's database.

The findings of this research show that audit firm size and audit firm specialty have a positive influence on IR quality, but audit firm tenure does not. External audit quality (as proxied by the size, specialty and turnover of the audit firm) had a negative impact on earnings management practices, while earnings management practices had a negative impact on IR quality. Additionally, the findings reveal that earnings management practices completely mediate the relationship between two external audit quality proxies (audit firm size and audit firm specialty) and IR quality. Furthermore, in terms of the moderating impact of board gender diversity, it is obvious that board gender diversity favorably moderates the relationships between all external audit quality proxies and IR quality.

Using agency theory and stakeholder theory, this investigation fills a gap in previous literature by adding scientific explanations and empirical evidence from the Jordanian market, a developing market, in the context of the impact of audit quality on IR quality, mediated by earnings management and moderated by board gender diversity.

This study explores the impact of ethical and authentic leadership on employees' workplace perceptions, focusing on organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB), trust in leader, commitment, employee voice and empowerment in independent hotels across two contrasting Global Leadership and Organizational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE) clusters: Germanic and Middle-Eastern clusters. It examines how national culture influences these relationships in the hospitality industry.

Data were collected from 1,678 employees in independent hotels in the Germanic European cluster (Germany and the Netherlands) and the Middle-Eastern cluster (Qatar and Turkey) using selective and snowball sampling techniques. Hypotheses were tested using two-stage structural equation modelling.

Ethical leadership significantly affects employee voice in Germany and the Netherlands but not in Qatar and Turkey. Authentic leadership positively influences employee voice in Qatar, Turkey and Germany but does not significantly impact trust in leader in any of the four countries. The study underscores the role of cultural dimensions, particularly power distance, in shaping these relationships.

This research contributes to the literature by investigating the effects of ethical and authentic leadership on key organisational variables in culturally diverse contexts within the hospitality industry. The findings highlight the necessity of considering national culture in leadership practices and suggest practical implications for independent hotels to adapt their leadership approaches to enhance employee outcomes. Future research should explore cultural dimensions as moderators in organisational relationships.

Employee expediency is a ubiquitous, unethical phenomenon in the workplace that is largely underresearched. Based on the tenets of conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study investigates the influence of excessive performance pressure on employees' expedient behaviour via moral disengagement. It further examines the moderating role of employees' moral identity in the relationship between performance pressure and employee expediency.

The data were collected using a multi-wave paper-and-pencil survey amongst 388 sales associates working in pharmaceutical manufacturing companies in Bangladesh. A series of hierarchical regression analyses and bootstrapping techniques of the PROCESS macro were conducted to test the hypotheses.

The findings reveal that performance pressure significantly and positively affects employees' expediency. Additionally, moral disengagement partially mediates the positive relationship between performance pressure and employee expediency. Furthermore, moral identity moderates the direct effect of performance pressure on moral disengagement and the indirect effect of performance pressure on employee expediency through moral disengagement.

Managers are advised to consider the compatibility of economic and moral principles when defining performance targets or evaluating staff performance, as immoral behaviours harm organisations in the long run. Additionally, managers should emphasise candidates with high levels of sensitive moral qualities, such as integrity and moral behaviour, and their abilities should be given preference when hiring new employees, e.g. moral reasoning.

This pioneering study investigates the underlying psychological mechanisms and moral characteristics to unravel the association between performance pressure and employee expediency using the lens of COR theory. The study identified the moral consequences of performance pressure and mitigating strategies to reduce employee expedient behaviour.

Different age groups display different shopping patterns in terms of how and where consumers buy products. During times of crisis, such behavioural differences become even more striking yet remain under-researched with respect to elderly consumers. This paper investigates the impact of age on retail-related behavioural changes and behavioural stability of elderly shoppers (in comparison to younger consumers) during a crisis.

The authors surveyed 643 Austrian consumers to assess the impact of perceived threat on behavioural change and the moderating effect of age groups. Based on findings from this survey, they subsequently conducted 51 semi-structured interviews to understand the causes of behavioural change and behavioural stability during a crisis.

Elderly shoppers display more stable shopping behaviour during a crisis compared to younger consumers, which is influenced by perceived threat related to the crisis. Such findings indicate that elderly shoppers reinforce their learnt and embedded shopping patterns. The causes of change and stability in behaviour include environmental and inter-personal factors.

Through the lens of social cognitive theory, protection motivation theory and dual process theory, this research contributes to an improved understanding of changes in shopping behaviour of elderly consumers, its antecedents and consequences during a time of crisis. The authors reveal reasons that lead to behavioural stability, hence the absence of change, in terms of shopping during a crisis. They further outline implications for retailers that might wish to better respond to shopping behaviours of the elderly.

This paper aims to investigate materiality judgement providing insights, critiques and future research paths in light of the open debate on the role of materiality in corporate financial disclosure, highlighting potential connections and implications with sustainability and intellectual capital (IC) reporting.

The research presents an overview of the analysis of financial materiality, including new stimuli from recent studies and regulatory requirements for financial and non-financial reporting. Accordingly, this study used a systematic literature review (SLR) based on a combination of content, text and bibliometric analysis of materiality in accounting research studies, collecting data from the Scopus database as one of the most relevant repositories.

The SLR identified four relevant research trends, concerning: (1) the relevance of materiality principles in corporate disclosure; (2) financial reporting practices and materiality; (3) theories and approaches in defining financial materiality and (4) the existence of quantitative and qualitative thresholds in the materiality judgement.

The results provide theoretical and practical implications when comprehending the development of the concept of financial materiality in financial statements and whether they can be appropriate in reporting IC as well. We identified future research paths.

From a practical perspective, this study is useful for companies implementing financial materiality based on stakeholder engagement and improving their transparency in financial and non-financial reporting practices.

The research investigates if the process for assessing materiality is in line with the expectations of all stakeholders involved in financial and non-financial reporting.

This research is the first to investigate the scientific basis and applicability of the concept of financial materiality to sustainability and IC reporting.

This research aims to determine to what extent corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions developed by bank entities in Spain improve the vulnerable customers' emotions and quality perception of the banking service. Consequently, this increases the quality of their relationship regarding satisfaction, trust and engagement.

Data from 734 vulnerable banking customers were analyzed through structural equations modeling (EQS 6.2) to test the relationships of the proposed variables.

Vulnerable customers' emotional disposition exerts a strong influence on their perceived service quality. The antecedent effect is concentrated primarily on the CSR towards the client, with a residual secondary weight on the CSR towards society. These positive service emotions are determinants of the outcome quality perceived by vulnerable customers, directly in terms of higher satisfaction and trust and indirectly through engagement.

This research contributes to understanding how financial service providers should adapt to the specific characteristics and needs of vulnerable clients by adopting a strategy of approach, personalization and humanization of the service that seems to move away from the actions implemented by the banking industry in recent years.

This study has adopted a theoretical and empirical perspective on the impact of CSR on service emotions and outcome quality of vulnerable banking customers. Moreover, banks can adopt a dual conception of CSR: a macro and external scope toward society and a micro and internal scope toward customers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors influencing the development of social media marketing strategy in an international context. We specifically look at the potential drivers and barriers throughout the social media marketing strategy development process and how cultural differences shape social media marketing strategy decision-making among firms in international markets.

The study is conducted with an inductive research approach involving in-depth interviews with 32 firms from Finland, China and Brazil. Using inductive data analysis, we identify both internal and external factors that drive and hinder the development of firms’ social media marketing strategies. Moreover, we explore the essential elements in social media marketing strategy development based on the key practices observed among these firms, which enables us to conduct a comparative analysis of how cultural values influence the development of social media marketing strategies.

Our findings underscore the importance of both internal (i.e. resources and capabilities) and external (i.e. market-level and country-level) factors that influence the development of social media marketing strategy. Our analysis also unveiled four key practices throughout the social media marketing strategy development process: social selling, content marketing, risk management and relationship management. Additionally, we identified three distinct mindsets regarding firms’ social media selling objectives across companies in the three countries.

The comparative approach provides novel insight into firms' international social media marketing strategy. Our proposed conceptual model shows the development process of social media marketing strategy in the international context. The research propositions highlight the role of cultural values and open up new avenues for future research.