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The aim of this study is to assess the mediating effect of source appearance (SA) and self-influencer congruence (SIC) on the relationship between visual content (VC) and customer engagement (CE) towards mobile advertisement.

This study uses a quantitative approach to test the proposed model based on the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) theory. The non-probability purposive sampling technique was used to collect data from Pakistani mobile users through a self-administered questionnaire.

The study results prove that VC alone cannot generate mobile users’ engagement. SA is the key in this regard, which has a relatively higher importance compared to SIC. Furthermore, the serial mediation effect of SA and SIC on CE shows that attractive sources are likely to induce higher SIC and subsequent CE.

The results reveal that without a pleasing SA and positive SIC, mobile users skip the ads by perceiving them to be irritating or interruptive. Mobile ads might cost relatively less, but the advertisers should understand the significance of the SA toward minimizing the mobile advertising skepticism.

Advertisers can enhance the user’s engagement on mobile devices by addressing both the SA and SIC in their VC. The combined effect of both the SA and SIC on CE has not been assessed before. Furthermore, this study has used the SOR mechanism to examine CE.

El objetivo general de esta investigación es evaluar el efecto mediador de la apariencia de la fuente (SA) y la congruencia del auto-influencer (SIC) en la relación entre el contenido visual (CV) y el compromiso del cliente (CE) hacia la publicidad móvil.

Este estudio utiliza un enfoque cuantitativo para probar el modelo propuesto basado en la teoría estímulo-organismo-respuesta (SOR). Se utilizó la técnica de muestreo intencional no probabilístico para recoger datos de usuarios de móviles paquistaníes mediante un cuestionario autoadministrado.

Nuestros resultados demuestran que el contenido visual por sí solo no puede generar el compromiso de los usuarios de móviles. La apariencia de la fuente es la clave a este respecto, que tiene una importancia relativamente mayor en comparación con la congruencia del auto-influencer. Además, el efecto de mediación en serie de SA y SIC en CE muestra que es probable que las fuentes atractivas induzcan un mayor SIC y el consiguiente compromiso del cliente.

Los resultados revelan que sin una SA agradable y una SIC positiva, los usuarios de móviles omiten los anuncios al percibirlos como irritantes o interruptores. Los anuncios para móviles pueden costar relativamente menos, pero los anunciantes deben comprender la importancia de la apariencia de la fuente para minimizar el escepticismo de la publicidad móvil.

Los anunciantes pueden mejorar la participación del usuario en los dispositivos móviles abordando tanto la AS como el SIC en sus contenidos visuales. Hasta ahora no se había evaluado el efecto combinado de la AS y el SIC en el CE. Además, este estudio ha utilizado el mecanismo del SOR para examinar el engagement del cliente.

本研究的总体目标是评估源外观（SA）和自我影响者一致性（SIC）对移动广告视觉内容（VC）和客户参与（CE）之间关系的中介效应。

本研究采用定量方法来检验基于刺激-有机体-反应（SOR）理论提出的模型。研究采用了非概率目的性抽样技术, 通过自填问卷的方式向巴基斯坦移动用户收集数据。

我们的研究结果证明, 仅靠视觉内容并不能引起移动用户的参与。在这方面, 源外观是关键, 与自我影响者一致性相比, 源外观的重要性相对更高。此外, SA 和 SIC 对 CE 的串联中介效应表明, 有吸引力的信息源可能会诱发更高的 SIC 和随后的客户参与。

研究结果表明, 如果没有令人愉悦的SA和积极的SIC, 移动用户就会认为广告具有刺激性或干扰性, 从而跳过广告。移动广告的成本可能相对较低, 但广告商应了解广告源外观对减少移动广告怀疑的重要性。

广告商可以通过在视觉内容中同时考虑广告联盟和广告投放中心这两个因素, 提高用户在移动设备上的参与度。之前从未有人评估过 “SA “和 “SIC “对消费者参与度的综合影响。此外, 本研究还使用了 SOR 机制来考察客户参与度。

As consumer debt can substantially impair subjective well-being, it is crucial for research to gain insights into how consumers can be motivated to improve financial planning. This paper aims to investigate how frontline employees in financial services can help consumers regulate their financial planning behaviors and how financial service providers can effectively support their frontline employees in this effort through leadership and organizational climate.

We incorporate regulatory focus theory and conservation of resource theory to develop a conceptual model that we test in a triadic study with a unique dataset collected from consumers, frontline employees, and managers in the banking sector.

We find that frontline employees must pay attention to the details of consumers’ needs and customize the service to those needs to trigger consumer promotion focus and stimulate consumers’ financial planning behaviors. Moreover, our results emphasize that the organization must act as an integrated entity. Thus, a manager’s servant leadership and an organizational climate of customer stewardship are crucial for frontline employees to transform consumers’ financial planning behaviors.

The study highlights frontline employees’ key role in motivating consumer financial planning behavior, offering a new perspective in transformative service research on enhancing financial well-being.

The findings provide financial service providers with actionable implications for enhancing consumers’ financial planning. This benefits both consumers and financial institutions, as customers with greater spending power can buy more financial products.

This study advances transformative service research on consumer financial planning behavior, which has largely focused on consumer-related or society-level variables, by exploring the role of frontline employees and organizational support in terms of leadership and climate.

This paper intervenes in the consequences of a myth propagated in academic discourse about the dancesport world, according to which half of the men in Latin dancesport are gay. I challenge two assumptions that surround this myth: that cisgender gay men do not contribute to the reification of the heteronormative gender binary, and that the dancesport scene is inclusive of gay people. These assumptions are based on a blatant lack of understanding of the position of gay men within the dancesport world – that is, the ways in which subjects are constituted through the effects of power.

This work is based on empirical research I conducted in the dancesport community, including ethnographic and autoethnographic fieldwork, extant documents (e.g. books, blogs, Judging Regulations) and interviews with experts and participants of the dancesport scene (2021/2022). To analyse the data, I relied on the principles of dispositive analysis, grounded theory and dance analysis.

I show that gay dancers have turned to assimilation as their only available strategy. I discuss the negative consequences of assimilation as a political strategy and how it impacted queer dancers – between invisibilisation, residual shame and a failure to challenge the heteronormative gender binary. This led gay dancers to rationalise and perpetrate harm based on the systems of oppression they had internalised.

I conclude the paper by highlighting a way beyond assimilation for queer dancers.

This paper addresses a critical gap in research on LGBT + inclusion in dancesport.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have led to significant transformations across industries and society, including the field of education. The integration of AI in educational settings has the potential to improve students' learning experience and support their individual competencies when paired with non-AI methods. Despite the growing importance of AI in modern education, there remains a noticeable research gap regarding its use in entrepreneurship education and the effects of Chatbots on students' entrepreneurial competencies. To address this gap, an exploratory study was conducted on undergraduate students who were tasked with using ChatGPT to improve their business model canvas.

The chosen methodology aligned with the research purpose, aiming to explore the relationship between Generative AI and competencies. Due to the novel nature of the research problem, an exploratory study was conducted using a mixed methods approach. A survey with open- and closed-ended questions was designed, and statistical and text analyses were performed to interpret data and test identified propositions.

The findings of this study indicate that ChatGPT can enhance the types of students' entrepreneurial competencies considered in this study: spotting opportunities, creativity, vision, valuing ideas and ethical and sustainable thinking. The results show that ChatGPT can be particularly helpful to improve the ability of students of valuing ideas.

Overall, this study highlights the potential of adopting ChatGPT in experiential learning methodologies for enhancing students' entrepreneurial competencies and improving their learning outcomes.

Virtual goods consumption has risen dramatically in recent years. Recognizing the benefits of virtual goods in generating revenue for online game companies, marketers strive to understand the motives behind virtual goods purchases. We investigated the direct and indirect effects of functional, emotional, and social values through player satisfaction on purchase intention toward virtual goods among online players.

In total, we surveyed 332 online game players utilizing a structured questionnaire. We employed a multi-analytic approach combining partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and necessary condition analysis (NCA) to examine the proposed relationships.

The findings show that all dimensions of value and player satisfaction significantly affect the intention to acquire virtual goods. However, social value does not exert a significant effect on player satisfaction. Moreover, we confirmed that player satisfaction mediates the relationships between functional value, emotional value, and purchase intention. Furthermore, NCA results indicated that all predictors in the model are necessary conditions of purchase intention for virtual goods.

These findings contribute to an enhanced understanding of purchase intentions among online game players from a symmetric (PLS-SEM) and asymmetric (NCA) perspective by proposing a multi-analytic approach.

Effective customer journey design (ECJD) is considered a key variable in customer experience management and an essential source of brand meaning and pro-brand behavior. Although previous research has confirmed its importance for driving brand attitudes and loyalty, the role of consumer-brand identification as a social identity-based influence in this relationship has not yet been discussed. Drawing on construal level and social identity theories, this paper aims to investigate whether effective journeys and the resulting overall journey experience are equally powerful in driving brand loyalty among customers with different levels of consumer-brand identification.

The present article develops and tests a research model using data from the European and US service sectors (N = 1,454) to investigate how and when ECJD affects service brand loyalty.

Across two cultural contexts, four service industries and 33 service brands, the results reveal that ECJD is a crucial driver of service brand loyalty for customers with low consumer-brand identification. Moreover, the findings show that different aspects of journey effectiveness positively impact the valence of customers’ experience related to those journeys – a process that is ultimately decisive for their brand loyalty.

This study is unique because it generates theoretical and practical knowledge by combining the literature streams of customer journey design, customer experience and branding. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that consumer-brand identification is a critical boundary condition to be considered in the relationship between ECJD and brand loyalty in services.

This study problematizes the prevailing normative and managerial-dominated view of self-initiated employee ambassadorship on social media from a power perspective. The aim is to provide a more nuanced and critical understanding of the negative aspects of this phenomenon.

The empirical material encompasses qualitative interviews with employees from 14 organizations and Foucault’s concept of disciplinary discursive power to analyze which and how discourses exert power over employee communication on social media and what role visibility plays in it.

This study indicates that employee ambassadors’ social media communication is governed by two discourses that create complex tensions, where ambassadors constantly must negotiate between self-branding requirements and an authenticity paradox. These tensions intensify through visibility on social media, where employees strategize and situationally silence their communication through self-monitoring and self-surveillance practices. Conclusively, the findings also outline the need for further critical research to offer a deeper understanding of power relations that influence the communication practices of organizational members.

The paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of self-initiated employee ambassadorship on social media and highlights disciplinary power relations that go beyond organizational borders.

The findings underscore that organizations need to address the critical aspects of self-initiated employee ambassadorship and act as facilitators to support employees in their navigation process.

This paper contributes a new critical power perspective on employee ambassadorship on social media.

An “open communication culture” in the workplace is considered a key contributor to high-quality interaction and providing means to address problems at work. We study how the ideals of “open communication” operate in healthcare.

We use discourse analysis to investigate the audio-recorded data from 14 workshop team discussions in older people services.

We found four imperatives concerning the interactional conduct of their colleagues in problematic situations that nursing professionals prefer: (1) Engage in direct communication and avoid making assumptions, (2) Address problems immediately, (3) Deal directly with the person involved in the matter and (4) Summon the courage to speak up. Through these imperatives, the nursing professionals invoke and draw upon the “open communication” discourse. Although these ideals were acknowledged as difficult to realize in practice and as leading to experiences of frustration, the need to comply with them was constructed as beyond doubt.

Workplace communication should be enhanced at a communal level, allowing those with less power to express their perspectives on shaping shared ideals of workplace interaction.

The expectation that an individual will simply “speak up” when they experience mistreatment by a colleague might be too much if the individual is already in a precarious position.

Drawing on media richness theory and a framework of interpersonal communication goals, this study investigates how and why the IT industry's top managers use communication media to achieve their interaction goals in e-leadership.

A qualitative research approach is applied to understand top managers' communication media use and interaction goals. The empirical data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 33 top managers from large IT companies and analysed using theory-guided thematic and ideal-type analyses.

Top managers were categorized into three types, based on their communication goals through face-to-face communication. Relationship-oriented top managers pursued relational and communal goals, whereas task-oriented ones wished to achieve instrumental and communal goals. Task- and relationship-oriented top managers pursued relational, instrumental, and communal goals. This study indicates that communal, instrumental, relational, and self-presentational goals influence managers' communication media selection.

This study brings new knowledge to the management communication research field. It expands the framework of interpersonal communication goals by identifying communal goals as a new category, in addition to existing instrumental, relational and self-presentational goals. This study suggests that media richness theory could be advanced by recognizing that a broader set of communication goals – including communal, instrumental, relational, and self-presentational – influences managers' communication media selection.

This paper draws on African anti-colonial thought and Black consciousness to propose critical conscious leadership (CCL) as a decolonising leadership approach appropriate for pursuing emancipation, social justice and innovation in a new African university.

I utilised the method of critical discourse analysis to study Ihron Rensburg’s language as he reflected on his leadership at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). The study engaged with Rensburg’s writings and texts on his account of leading the merger and transformation of UJ. The primary text draws from his book “Serving Higher Purposes” (2020).

Through the construction of CCL, the paper proposes alternative tenets for leading transformation towards a new African university. CCL grounds a decolonised and pluriversal new African university’s character premised on a consciously revitalised alternative thinking that will carry the communitarian spirit of Africa in knowledge production, dissemination and consumption in humanising all and serving the greater good. And it operates within the dialectical tensions of the social and economic purpose of higher education (HE), African and global relevance, African and Western paradigms, excellent performance and attainment of social justice.

The proposed CCL offers an alternative leadership approach that responds to the call to “Dethrone the Empire” by centring Blackness in HE leadership, which is crucial for authentic transformation and decolonisation.