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This study aims to examine the Arab practice of wasta (personal networks) and its potential interface with relationship marketing to enable firms to optimize their recruitment and retention of customers in societies where personal ties drive business relationships. It explores whether relationship marketing influences customer retention when a personal contact leaves.

Empirical data were gathered from 305 customers introduced to Egyptian small and medium-sized enterprises via wasta. Multiple-item scales were adopted, drawn from previous empirical studies. Quantitative analysis was used, including confirmatory factor analysis. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships posited.

Wasta plays a significant role in attracting customers, nurturing early relationships and enhancing relationship quality, but does not influence the retention of customers. Practicing relationship marketing post wasta can enhance customer loyalty, even if the business was developed through the wasta contact who left to join a rival firm.

Potential limitations arise from cultural differences in other Middle Eastern countries. Future studies could also validate the results in different sectors/industries and explore managers and employees’ perspectives.

Several recommendations emerge for managerial practitioners, including the use of wasta to attract business, but more significantly, the need for the effective use of relationship marketing to retain business. The study suggests that if relationship marketing is practiced well, customers are likely to remain loyal to the firm, even if the business was developed through a personal wasta relationship with an employee who subsequently moved to a competitor firm.

This study is the first to develop a unified model connecting the Eastern notion of wasta (personal ties) with relationship marketing. The study enhances the knowledge of wasta and relationship marketing. It is among the first to suggest that should employees with personal connections to customers leave to join a competing firm, there is still a strong likelihood that if relationship marketing is effectively practiced, then customers will remain loyal to the firm (rather than to the former employee).

This study aims to explore how and when negative workplace gossip damages hospitality employees’ career growth, based on social information processing (SIP) and social cognitive career theories.

The authors gathered data from 379 individuals working in Guangzhou’s hospitality industry with a multi-wave survey.

This research found that negative workplace gossip harms career growth by damaging one’s personal reputation, and concern for reputation plays a moderating role. In particular, employees displaying greater concern for reputation are more inclined to perceive a diminished personal reputation when exposed to negative workplace gossip, resulting in more negative assessments of their career growth prospects in their organization.

This study has some practical implications. It highlights the need to mitigate negative workplace gossip by fostering a harmonious work environment, implementing reputation-focused training programs and providing support to employees who are particularly concerned about their personal reputations.

This research contributes to the knowledge by empirically revealing the career consequences of negative workplace gossip, incorporating personal reputation and concern for reputation in the theoretical model and advancing research in the vocational and gossip domains. It also enriches SIP and social cognitive career theories while focusing on the hospitality industry.

Using equity theory, this study aims to examine the role of customer incivility in effecting service sabotage among hotel employees by recognizing the mediating role of revenge motivation and the moderating effect of emotion regulation.

A multi-wave, multi-source questionnaire survey was conducted with 291 employee–supervisor dyads at chain hotels in Shenzhen, China. Previously developed and validated measures for customer incivility, revenge motivation, emotion regulation and service sabotage were adopted to test the hypotheses.

Customer incivility increased employees’ revenge motivation and service sabotage. Emotion regulation acted as a boundary condition for customer incivility’s direct effect on revenge motivation and its indirect effect on service sabotage through revenge motivation. Cognitive reappraisal mitigated the detrimental influence of customer incivility, whereas expressive suppression worsened its adverse effects.

Managers should monitor and deter the emergence of uncivil behaviors, provide psychological support for employees experiencing customer incivility and encourage these employees to use cognitive reappraisal rather than expressive suppression as an emotion regulation strategy.

To the authors’ knowledge, no prior research has investigated the customer incivility–service sabotage relationship in the hotel industry. This study sheds light on how customer incivility can motivate service sabotage among hotel employees. Furthermore, the authors used equity theory rather than the commonly adopted resources perspective to offer new insights into the customer incivility–service sabotage relationship.

This study aims to revisits the meaning of corporate identity (CI) in practice to identify its key dimensions and the interrelationships between them and to provide insights on how to operationalize the construct.

This study is based on a comprehensive literature review and qualitative research consisting of 22 semi-structured interviews with senior managers from 11 UK-leading companies, and three in-depth interviews with corporate brand consultants who worked closely with these firms in cognate areas.

The study identifies the following six key dimensions of CI in the UK industry: communication, visual identity, behavior, organizational culture, stakeholder management and founder value-based leadership.

The focus on UK leading companies limits the generalizability of the results. Further studies should be conducted in other sectors and country settings to examine the relationships identified in the current study.

This study identifies the salient dimensions of CI and, for the first time, the role of founder transformational leadership, employee identification and top management behavioral leadership as key dimensions and sub-dimensions of CI. The study also provides novel insights about the measurements for these dimensions. Additionally, this study introduces a model for the interrelationships between CI dimensions and their influence on corporate image, based on rigorous theoretical underpinnings, which lays the foundation for future empirical testing.

Buildings are responsible for the consumption of around 40% of energy in the world and account for one-third of greenhouses gas emissions. In Saudi Arabia, residential buildings consume half of total energy among other building sectors. This study aims to explore the impact of sixteen envelope variables on the operational and embodied carbon of a typical Saudi house with over 20 years of operation.

A simulation approach has been adopted to examine the effects of envelope variables including external wall type, roof type, glazing type, window to wall ratio (WWR) and shading device. To model the building and define the envelope materials and quantify the annual energy consumption, DesignBuilder software was used. Following modelling, operational carbon was calculated. A “cradle-to-gate” approach was adopted to assess embodied carbon during the production of materials for the envelope variables based on the Inventory of Carbon Energy database.

The results showed that operational carbon represented 90% of total life cycle carbon, whilst embodied carbon accounted for 10%. The sensitivity analysis revealed that 25% WWR contributes to a significant increase in operational carbon by 47.4%. Additionally, the efficient block wall with marble has a major embodiment of carbon greater than the base case by 10.7%.

This study is a contribution to the field of calculating the embodied and operational carbon emissions of a residential unit. Besides, it provides an examination of the impact of each envelope variable on both embodied and operational carbon. This study is limited by the impact of sixteen envelope variables on the embodied as well as operational carbon.

This study is the first attempt on investigating the effects of envelop variables on carbon footprint for residential buildings in Saudi Arabia.

This study aims to present an efficient and reliable graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs)-based temperature sensor.

A high-quality dispersion of GNPs was dropped by casting method on platinum electrodes deposited on a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate. The GNPs were characterized by scanning electron microscope, Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction spectra to ensure its purity and quality. The temperature sensing behavior of the fabricated sensor was examined by subjecting it to different temperatures, range from room temperature (RT) to 150 °C.

Excellent resistance linearity with temperature change was achieved. Temperature coefficient of resistance of the fabricated sensor was calculated as 1.4 × 10^–3°C. The sensor also showed excellent repeatability and stability for the measured temperature range. Good response and recovery times were evaluated at all the measured temperatures. With measuring the sensor response, the ambient temperature can be determined.

The present work presents a new simply and low cost fabricated temperature sensor based on GNPs working at a wide temperature range.

The authorship authentication (AA) problem is concerned with correctly attributing a text document to its corresponding author. Historically, this problem has been the focus of various studies focusing on the intuitive idea that each author has a unique style that can be captured using stylometric features (SF). Another approach to this problem, known as the bag-of-words (BOW) approach, uses keywords occurrences/frequencies in each document to identify its author. Unlike the first one, this approach is more language-independent. This paper aims to study and compare both approaches focusing on the Arabic language which is still largely understudied despite its importance.

Being a supervised learning problem, the authors start by collecting a very large data set of Arabic documents to be used for training and testing purposes. For the SF approach, they compute hundreds of SF, whereas, for the BOW approach, the popular term frequency-inverse document frequency technique is used. Both approaches are compared under various settings.

The results show that the SF approach, which is much cheaper to train, can generate more accurate results under most settings.

Numerous advantages of efficiently solving the AA problem are obtained in different fields of academia as well as the industry including literature, security, forensics, electronic markets and trading, etc. Another practical implication of this work is the public release of its sources. Specifically, some of the SF can be very useful for other problems such as sentiment analysis.

This is the first study of its kind to compare the SF and BOW approaches for authorship analysis of Arabic articles. Moreover, many of the computed SF are novel, while other features are inspired by the literature. As SF are language-dependent and most existing papers focus on English, extra effort must be invested to adapt such features to Arabic text.

The paper aims to explore the relationship between customer mindsets and customer citizenship behavior. This study used the cognitive-affective-behavioral model to examine how customer mindsets relate to customer citizenship behavior. In addition, it investigated the mediating effect of customer brand engagement and moderating role of brand trust.

The study used a self-administered online survey from 412 respondents using cellular mobile operating brands. Partial least square structural equation modeling was used to analyze the collected data.

The results revealed that growth-mindset customers directly and significantly influence customer citizenship behavior. The impact of a fixed mindset on customer citizenship behavior is indirect through customer brand engagement. The moderating findings revealed that the effect of brand trust on the relationship between customer brand engagement and customer citizenship behavior is higher than that between the fixed mindset and customer brand engagement.

The findings provide valuable insights for marketing and brand managers to design marketing campaigns considering different mindsets to generate customer citizenship behavior among customers.

This study provides new avenues in consumer psychology and behavior by unfolding the underlying mechanism through which mindsets lead to customer citizenship behavior, contributing to existing knowledge by extending the cognitive-affective-behavioral model.

The purpose of this paper is to present a practical method for computing contingency‐based reliability and quality indices in power systems and to answer questions related to how much the system is reliable, how robust it is in surviving random contingencies, how much it is costing to maintain appropriate system security and reliability levels and, finally, to what extent the desired balance is maintained between generation facilities, transmission capabilities and consumer demand levels in various zones of the electric power system.

The methodology adopted in this paper is based on a combined contingency analysis/reliability evaluation scheme. A three‐component system model is utilized, which can be used effectively for evaluation and sensitivity analysis of reliability and quality in power systems. The model is a reduced (equivalent) system representation that comprises generation, transmission and load components with multi‐state values. The computational scheme presented in the paper integrates both the contingency effect and its probability of occurrence into one routine of analysis while reducing the power system around the region of interest.

The computational scheme presented in the paper can effectively assess both service reliability and system quality. The practical applications presented demonstrated that lower service reliability levels would jeopardize energy supply continuity and increase the likelihood of additional maintenance and restoration costs due to the resulting higher rate of system outages. Poor system quality levels, on the other hand, imply either deficiency or excess in the overall system capabilities as designed by its planners.

The work of this paper contributes to the solution of the reliability and quality assessment problem in practical power systems. As part of the present work, an advanced computerized scheme for fast composite system reliability and quality assessment was developed and then applied to an equivalent system model of the Saudi electricity system. The results obtained are claimed to have far‐reaching implications on various planning and operation aspects of the power system.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the needs to understand the barrier and determinant factors in knowledge sharing (KS), to find the common ones and subsequently to build a general framework that can be referred to in designing a KS tool that addresses the common factors.

The approach comprises of two major steps which are to survey the past literature to determine the most common barriers and determinant factors from various unique KS domains and to qualify the factor as the common one based on its presence in at least three to five KS domains. The grounded theory is used to analyze the past literature and to perform categorization.

This paper helps in the summarization of categories and subcategories of barriers and determinants and demonstration on the mapping between them.

This paper has not proved the actual use of the framework in building a KS tool based on the framework.

The common factors are based on at least 60 references of KS implementation such that it is useful for large area of application domains that require building KS tools.

This paper presents the understanding on the common factors and association between the barriers and determinants in building the general framework in which the application of the framework is demonstrated using actor network theory.