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Motivation constitutes a central topic for business management, because of its critical impact on job performance. Therefore, understanding whether and how the style of leadership adopted by leaders in organizations promotes and maintains employee motivation is of great interest to both scholars and practitioners. Drawing on self-determination theory, this study investigates how ethical and emotional styles of leadership influence employee motivation and thus job performance.

An empirical study was conducted in the public sector in Kuwait. About 607 employees participated in this study. Structural equation modeling techniques were used for testing the causal relationships between constructs.

Results of our study indicate that both ethical and emotional leaderships enhance employee motivation. Furthermore, employee motivation has a positive impact on job performance. The results also show that job performance exerts a negative effect on quitting intentions. Finally, interest in the private sector moderates the job performance–quitting intentions relationship.

These findings provide theoretical contributions to the extant literature, as well as important practical implications for managers.

This study demonstrates the role of both ethical and emotional leaderships in shaping employee behaviors. To the best of our knowledge, this research is among the few that provides initial evidence regarding quitting intentions as an outcome of the impact of ethical and emotional leaderships on employee motivation and individual performance in Kuwait.

While some work on how employee perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) affect behavioral outcomes has been examined, less work simultaneously investigates whether employee perceptions of internal and external CSR influence the behavioral outcomes of incumbent employees working in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to draw on social exchange theory arguments to investigate the direct and indirect effects of internal and external CSR practices on employee organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and intention to quit.

An empirical study was conducted among 664 employees working in the banking sector in Kuwait. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to test the suggested hypotheses.

The results reveal that both internal and external CSR activities are positively related to OCB and OCB is negatively associated with intention to quit. Results also show that distributive justice moderates the relationship between OCB and intention to quit.

These findings extend the literature on CSR and demonstrate that organizations engaged in CSR activities (internal and external) can enhance citizenship behaviors among employees and thereby increase retention rates.

This research demonstrates the importance of CSR activities in tax-free countries, particularly, in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Since employees in GCC countries are increasingly concerned about the CSR behaviors of organizations, CSR activities can allow local organizations to signal that they are good corporate citizens. Hence, CSR could be considered as a particularly critical source of competitive advantage for businesses in the region.

This conceptual paper develops a theoretical framework to provide insights with respect to enhancing focus on entrepreneurial sustainability initiatives in the context of emerging economies. The unique idiosyncrasies of the institutional environment of emerging economies are identified along the concept of scripts.

Sense-making and social identity theory are utilized to draw propositions along with the dimensions of the three stages of the sense-making process: enactment, selection and retention, in order to identify factors that are likely to motivate the next generation of business leaders in emerging economies to undertake greater levels of sustainability initiatives.

When organizations face competing demands of meeting both social and financial goals, sense-making by next-generation leaders becomes relevant. Leaders with greater entrepreneurial orientation (EO) are more likely to take actions decoupled from local isomorphic pressures, such that they turn opportunities for sustainability into novel sustainable initiatives.

This paper proposes a framework to provide insights and directions for future research with respect to enhancing an organizational focus on sustainability initiatives in the context of emerging economies.

Bindu Aryais currently a doctoral student in International Business and Strategy at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her dissertation will empirically investigate how collaborative efforts between for-profit, not-for-profit and governmental agencies facilitate outcomes and can function to enhance sustainable development. Her research on how social networks facilitate organizational and group decision-making processes and outcomes has appeared in Journal of Management (forthcoming).

Multinational corporations (MNCs) confront complex challenges to continuously achieve higher levels of social performance across diverse country and cultural contexts. Yet many MNCs have reactive strategies toward corporate social responsibility (CSR). Such strategies do not leverage multicultural team diversity for dynamic learning. Meanwhile, cross-sector alliances between MNCs and not-for-profit entities present a rich opportunity for MNC learning. Multicultural teams often lie at the core of such initiatives in MNCs, although they have been, at best, a peripheral concern of CSR research and theory. We redress this gap in the CSR literature by integrating theory on social capital and the external team perspective and applying this to the CSR context. Our analysis has practical implications for MNCs as well, suggesting further extensions.

The learning outcomes of this paper is as follows: to identify unique selling points of a growing business for attaining competitive advantage; to understand the role of segmentation for Wellness Zone Headmasters (WZH); to explore different strategic choices for successful expansion of business; to help students understand the concept of customer satisfaction in a competitive industry; and to understand the importance of differentiation as a major deciding factor for the future of a business.

In March 2020, Kumud Goel, one of the directors of WZH, a chain of wellness spa and salon in Jammu and Kashmir (India), was considering different marketing strategies to grow her existing business. The company had opened two new outlets in the past two years and was looking at increasing its customer base. Kumud was concerned about keeping her customers satisfied in a highly competitive industry. She was aware that differentiation was critical for future growth. In what ways could WZH differentiate itself from its competitors at a time when the market was exploding? Could customer segmentation be the solution? What measures would WZH need to take to increase its repeat customers?

The case is appropriate for use in a 90-min class in a Masters in Business Administration-level management course and for undergraduates, especially marketing majors and in a module on marketing strategy and customer value.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.