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Drawing on experiential learning theory, this study seeks to understand how the perceived cultural difference in a foreign country and learning flexibility, which enables more integrated experiential learning from international experience, influence expatriates’ cultural intelligence (CQ) and consequently their adjustment and job performance.

Survey data were collected from 169 expatriates in China. Polynomial regression analyses were employed to test curvilinear relationships between cultural difference and CQ and between learning flexibility and CQ. Mediation hypotheses were tested either by the MEDCURVE procedure if a curvilinear relationship was confirmed or by the Haye’s Process procedure if a curvilinear relationship was not confirmed and instead a linear relationship was confirmed.

The results demonstrated a positive relationship between cultural difference and CQ and an inverted U-shape relationship between learning flexibility and CQ. CQ mediated the relationship between cultural difference and expatriate adjustment and partially mediated the relationship between learning flexibility and expatriate adjustment. CQ positively influenced expatriates’ job performance via expatriate adjustment.

Our findings suggest that companies should not hesitate to send expatriates on assignments to culturally very different countries and focus more attention on the selection of expatriates. The findings of this study suggest firms should choose candidates who are moderate or high in learning flexibility and could engage in integrated learning and specialized learning in a more balanced manner.

This research is the first study that examines the influence of learning flexibility on CQ and expatriate effectiveness. It examines cultural difference through the lens of experiential learning theory and argues that cultural difference constitutes “stimuli” in the experiential learning environment for individual learning in an international context. The results advance our knowledge of the role of experiential learning in developing capable global managers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a brand-new phenomenon in customer consumption patterns. This resulted from heightened health awareness brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic. There is a dearth of appropriate health psychology perspectives in the existing study examining the effect of COVID-19 on consumers’ use of crowdsourced logistics (CL) platforms. In order to provide unique and thorough insights into how consumer health concerns can affect consumers’ subjective views and their decisions to use CL, this study combines the health belief model and the technology acceptance model.

Five hundred valid responses from an online survey that was created and administered in Singapore were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The findings show that all of the suggested constructs have a favourable influence on consumers’ intentions to use CL. The suggested model also demonstrates high explanatory power, with perceived usefulness serving as the primary driver, followed by perceived ease of use and self-efficacy.

The study advances previous academic research on CL and offers guidance to CL companies and lawmakers for promoting sustainable and secured last-mile delivery.

Prior studies use two measures of firm-specific return variation (FSRV): idiosyncratic volatility in absolute and relative terms, the latter of which is also termed stock price nonsynchronicity. Whereas most research focuses on investigating the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle, the authors carry out comparison of these two measures and further investigate which of the two constituents of nonsynchronicity explain the association between FSRV and stock returns, emphasising the importance of assessing which component drives stock returns.

The authors use the US individual stock returns from 1925 to 2016 and define the two measures of FRSV based on the Fama and French (1993) model. Specifically, the authors decompose the relative measure into two components: (i) absolute idiosyncratic volatility and (ii) systematic volatility. The authors conduct various tests based on high-minus-low, zero-investment quintile portfolio sorts and perform the Fama–MacBeth analysis by singling out each component.

The authors find a positive return on the portfolio sorted on relative idiosyncratic volatility or on systematic volatility, but find a negative return sorted on absolute idiosyncratic volatility. The results are robust after controlling for size, BM and other risk characteristics using a double-sorting approach. The Fama–MacBeth regression results show that a positive association between the relative measure and stock returns is driven primarily by the low-systematic-volatility anomaly across firms. The findings are robust to controlling for return residual momentum, skewness, jumps and information discreteness.

Extant research posits the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle and the low-volatility anomaly. The authors emphasize the importance of integrating these two streams of research. This study enhances the understanding of the driving force underlying the relationship between FSRV and cross-sectional stock returns.

Sailing toward sustainability is becoming the strategic focus of shipping firms. Drawing on organizational information processing theory (OIPT) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB), we investigated the impact of digital transformation (DT) on shipping firms’ sustainable management performance and the boundary conditions guiding this relationship.

The authors examined the hypotheses by employing hierarchical linear modeling on two-wave time-lagged data from 189 shipping firm employees in China.

The results suggest that a shipping firm’s DT is positively associated with its sustainable management performance and that the relationship is strengthened by having better cross-functional and customer coordination mechanisms. Furthermore, our three-way interaction analyses show that while injunctive norms in a shipping firm’s networks can strengthen the contingency roles of both cross-functional and customer coordination mechanisms, descriptive norms alone significantly influence customer coordination.

Drawing on organizational information processing and planned behavior theories, the present research provides new insights into leveraging DT for sailing toward sustainable success. Moreover, this study extends the current understandings of the boundary conditions of the relationship between DT and sustainable management performance by showing the two-way and three-way interaction effects of coordination mechanisms and subjective norms. The findings of the present research can be utilized as effective strategies for promoting sustainable management performance.

Given the significance of innovation in enabling firms to maintain a long-term competitive edge and secure excess profits, this paper aims to investigate whether and how stakeholders’ attention to innovation (SATI) influences corporate innovation.

This paper introduces a novel variable, SATI, which is achieved by segmenting stakeholders’ attention into two categories: attention to innovation and attention to other facets, using textual analysis methods. Subsequently, this paper empirically examines the influence of SATI on corporate innovation.

This paper finds that SATI positively affects corporate innovation input, and the result remains true after addressing possible endogeneity issues using instrumental variable regression. Furthermore, the positive effect of SATI on corporate innovation is stronger in firms facing greater financing constraints, thus verifying the financing constraints hypothesis. The positive effect is also stronger in firms with lower risk-taking levels, thus confirming the innovation failure tolerance hypothesis. Further analysis suggests that SATI increases both corporate innovation output and efficiency, thus ruling out the catering hypothesis.

This paper highlights the importance of SATI in driving corporate innovation. It enriches the literature on the repercussions of stakeholders’ attention and determinants of corporate innovation. In addition, it provides practical suggestions for further implementing China’s national innovation-driven development strategy.

The study of shame has a long tradition in intra- and inter-personal psychology. This paper aims to investigate whether consumers can experience brand shame after self-relevant consumption incidents. Specifically, this research proposes that consumers follow a complex shame-inducing process in the aftermath of unpleasant experiences involving their favorite brand. The moderating role of relational tie strength between consumers and their favorite brand existing prior to symbolic failures is examined.

A scenario-based, online survey (n = 660) among consumers who have recently experienced a self-relevant failure with their favorite brand was conducted. Confirmatory factor analysis ensured the reliability and validity of the measurement model. For testing the conceptual model, data was analyzed by means of a moderated mediation analysis. The proposed model was tested against, among others, common method bias and alternative models. The findings were cross-validated with a scenario-based online experiment (n = 1,616).

Results show that brand shame is a key mediator between customer dissatisfaction and brand anger when self-relevant, symbolic failures happen. Moreover, strong consumer-brand identification triggers brand-detrimental effects. It is shown to influence the connection between consumers’ inward- (i.e. brand shame) and resulting outward-directed (i.e. brand anger) negative emotions on brands, which lead to consumer vengeance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to introduce the concept of situational brand shame to the literature on favorite brands. Furthermore, it shows that consumer-brand identification moderates the direct and indirect (via brand shame) unfavorable effects of failure-induced dissatisfaction on brand anger. This research adds insights to the investigation of the “love-becomes-hate” effect arising after self-relevant failures involving consumers’ most preferred brand.

This chapter explores the influence of the banking and insurance sectors on the economic growth of Czechia, a nation with unique financial dynamics ideal for this study. Our aim is to ascertain the contribution of these financial institutions to economic growth, addressing the divergence in empirical findings that have marked this research area for decades. We scrutinise the impact of various factors, including sectoral development and the efficiency and stability of these institutions, all within the Czech context. Utilising the Granger causality test, we assess the role of several indicators related to the development of the banking and insurance sectors. Our findings reveal that in Czechia, the evolution and operational efficiency of these financial institutions significantly drive economic growth. This study provides an in-depth understanding of the role these sectors play in the Czech economic landscape, affirming their crucial contribution to the nation's economic prosperity.

Trade credit is an important business-to-business marketing tool for building firms’ competitive advantage. Many studies explore the determinants of trade credits from a trust-based view, but the role of political connections is largely overlooked, despite their potential influence in assessing firms’ trustworthiness in the context of emerging economies. This study aims to fill this gap by examining how political connections affect the capacity of emerging economy firms (EEFs) to grant and receive trade credit.

This study tests a conceptual model using secondary data collected from 1,149 Chinese privately owned listed manufacturing firms between 2008 and 2016.

This study finds that political connections reduce EEFs’ accounts receivable and payable; their philanthropic activities alleviate this negative effect for accounts payable, while patent applications reduce it for accounts receivable. These findings suggest the effect of political connections can spillover to EEFs’ relationship with their up- and down-stream partners.

This study has implications EEF managers, particularly in pointing to the detrimental effect of political connections on relationships with buyers and suppliers, and highlights the need to adopt suitable approaches to offset this effect.

This study sheds new light on the negative effect of political connections on EEFs’ capacity to grant and receive trade credit in their exchanges with up-stream and down-stream partners. It enriches the trust-based view of trade credit by revealing the significant influence of EEFs’ political connections, while also advancing a contingency view by testing the moderating role of corporate philanthropic activities and patent applications.

Research on the relationship between customer bargaining power and supplier performance in supplier–customer relationships has flourished in recent decades. This study aims to empirically investigate whether product market overlap (PMO) in a supply chain moderates the effect of customer bargaining power on supplier profitability.

This study uses large-scale secondary data from multiple databases. Econometric panel data techniques are used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that PMO in a supplier–customer relationship and PMO in supplier–supplier relationships both exacerbate the negative effect of the bargaining power of customers on supplier profitability.

This study contributes to the field of supply chain management. This study brings new insights into the ongoing debate surrounding the relationship between customer bargaining power and supplier profitability. The study also contributes to the literature on supply chain networks by showing the impact of indirect supply chain relationships.

Although photographs in sustainability reports are useful in conveying complex messages, they may also be used to manipulate the presentation of disclosures to exploit the limited cognitive processing capacity of humans. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the features of photographs aimed at capturing individuals’ attention through visual structures and evoking specific emotions through carefully chosen content. Furthermore, it examines whether such framing practice is explained by incentives for legitimizing behaviours and influencing reputation.

The authors conduct a content analysis of photographs in 154 sustainability reports published by US companies. The authors captured the nature of photographs, the context in which they are being used, their themes and emotional content and layout and interaction features to understand how photographs are used for attribute framing to influence information processing. Furthermore, the authors statistically examine the framing practice between companies with different characteristics to identify any patterns for the impression management use of photographs in sustainability reports.

Photographs are often large with a horizontal orientation to capture attention and show content viewed at eye level and in either medium or close-up shots to engage viewers. Furthermore, photographs are emotionally loaded with different themes such as depictions of people, technology and nature. These themes are used to predominately evoke positive emotions of awe, nurturance, pride, amusement and attachment. This practice is often used by companies in environmentally sensitive areas that have close consumer relationships or are covered controversially in the media.

The authors reveal reporting practices and identify photographic features that attract attention and convey emotions that go beyond aesthetic qualities. This is important because emotions conveyed through photographs can be potentially misleading and influence judgements subconsciously.