Search results

Building on institutional theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for analyzing how consumer attitudes toward nudity in ads change as a result of modernization. Modernization is driven by the currents of pluralism and rationalism. The authors highlight the inherent contradiction of these two pillars and how this contradiction results in an inverted-U pattern in the relationship between level of modernization and consumer attitudes toward sex appeals. Consumers’ sexual permissiveness and their perceived insufficiency of regulatory control over sexual content in the mass media are the individual-level mediators of the two pillars.

The data were collected from three Chinese cities at different levels of modernization. A total of 811 college students from the three cities participated in the study.

The relationship between level of modernization and attitude favorability followed an inverted-U pattern. Female participants in the most modernized city possessed significantly less favorable attitudes to the ads than their male counterparts. Female and male participants were similar in their attitudes in the less modern cities. Sexual permissiveness mediated the relationship between modernization and male participants’ attitudes, but not with female participants’ attitudes. Perceived sufficiency of regulatory control over sexual content mediated the relationship between modernization and their attitudes among both male and female participants.

The paper makes an empirical contribution by testing the hypotheses regarding consumers responses to sex-appeal advertising with data collected from three Chinese cities at different levels of modernization. Additionally, it offers an institutional perspective on social attitude changes. Social attitude change is of great interest to researchers, but a systematic theoretical analysis is currently lacking.

Through a critical synthesis and reflection on the theoretical foundations and empirical evidence related to sensory marketing, this study aims to offer meaningful insights for hospitality operators and provides future research directions on sensory marketing in hospitality.

Building on an extensive review of sensory marketing studies across disciplines, this paper presents critical discussions of the theories and findings on the five senses in the context of hospitality.

The critical synthesis and discussion indicate that sensory marketing is highly relevant and applicable to operations in various hospitality sectors such as hotels and restaurants. Still, empirical evidence is required to lend support to the discussions. Although scholarly interest in sensory marketing has surged in the past decade, some research streams, such as sensory incongruence, cross-modal correspondence and sensory intensity, have yet to be extended. These under-researched areas provide directions for future hospitality research.

Through discussions of empirical evidence related to the five senses, mental simulation, cross-modal correspondence and sensory congruence, this paper provides implications for managing customers’ sensory experiences and behavior in hospitality settings.

Despite the increase of research on sensory marketing in the past decade, its full implications in the context of hospitality remain unknown. Through a critical synthesis and reflection on the hospitality literature, this paper offers research directions for a systematic expansion of sensory marketing.

Drawing on and extending the socially embedded model of thriving, this paper aims to investigate how and when customer participation promotes hospitality frontline employees’ engagement in extra-role service behavior.

A two-wave questionnaire survey was carried out among frontline service employees and their immediate supervisors in a four-star business hotel in Eastern China. Path analysis using Mplus 8.3 examined a multilevel moderated mediation model.

Customer participation has a positive effect on frontline employees’ experience of thriving, which in turn promotes their engagement in extra-role service behavior. Nevertheless, supervisors’ negative affect weakens the positive effect of customer participation.

Hotels could implement employee assistance programs, arrange training on emotional regulation and positive psychology and create a fun work environment to help alleviate supervisors’ experience of negative affect so as to lessen its adverse effect on frontline employees’ perception of customer participation.

First, this work is one of the few studies exploring how customer participation affects frontline employees’ well-being (in terms of thriving) and extra-role service behavior, which advances extant value co-creation literature. Second, the moderating role of supervisors’ negative affect enriches the limited understanding of when customer participation might not bring firm benefits. Third, by uncovering customer participation as an antecedent of employee thriving, this study extends thriving research that only attends to contexts located within organizations.

This study examines why and when nurses' role ambiguity leads to their work alienation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Survey data were collected from 335 hospital nurses in Ma’anshan, China. The data were analyzed using hierarchical regression and bootstrapping.

Occupational disidentification mediated the relationship between role ambiguity and work alienation. This mediating effect was not significant when nurses possessed a high level of perceived climate of prioritizing COVID-19 infection prevention (PCIP).

To reduce nurses' work alienation in a pandemic situation, the hospital management team should pay attention to and try to minimize the nurses' role ambiguity and occupational disidentification. When doing so, the management team will find it particularly helpful if they can make nurses perceive a strong climate of PCIP.

This study contributes to the existing knowledge of role ambiguity and work alienation by highlighting occupational disidentification as a mediator after controlling for organizational identification in the context of COVID-19. It further demonstrates when the mediating role of occupational disidentification is likely to be strong or weak by studying the moderating effect of perceived climate of PCIP.

Drawing on proactive coping theory, the authors aimed to test the mitigating effects of proactive personality on the relationships between work-to-family conflict and both work-related outcomes (i.e. career satisfaction and social network) and nonwork-related outcomes (i.e. life satisfaction and personal growth).

To increase the heterogeneity of sample, undergraduate students in a private university were randomly invited and then requested to invite any one of their parents, who had a full time job currently, to participate in the study. Sample size was 204, with a response rate of 75.56 percent.

As predicted, results showed that, for those who had a high level of proactive personality, the influences of work-to-family conflict on both work- and nonwork-related outcomes were all significantly mitigated, as compared with those who had a low level of proactive personality.

In this paper, the authors initiated a new insight into work-family interface research by advocating that individuals may “transfer” or reallocate their resources across the work and family domains. They labeled this phenomenon as work-family reallocation, which was supposedly to be differentiated from the prevailing concepts of either work-family conflict or work-family facilitation.

The study sought to investigate factors that influenced Hong Kong bank customers’ adoption of four major banking channels, i.e. branch banking, ATM, telephone banking, and internet banking. Specifically, it aimed to focus on the influences of demographic variables and psychological beliefs about the positive attributes possessed by the channels.

Based on extant literature on bank marketing and interviews with ten bank managers in Hong Kong, a questionnaire was designed. Then, in a large‐scale survey by means of mall‐intercept and telephone interviews, we successfully obtained data from 314 bank customers.

Overall, ATM was the most frequently adopted channel, followed by internet banking and branch banking, and telephone banking was the least frequently adopted channel. Psychological beliefs about the extent to which a channel possessed certain positive attributes were more predictive of adoptions of ATM and internet banking than adoptions of branch banking and telephone banking. Demographic backgrounds were strongly associated with adoption of all banking channels except ATM. A major research implication is that the theory of reasoned action is less applicable when a behavior is habitual, such as the adoptions of branch banking and telephone banking.

The managerial implications are that telephone banking can be gradually phased out, whereas internet banking is becoming the dominant channel in the future. For branch banking, different marketing strategies should be adopted for those who are financially and cognitively less resourceful, and those who are wealthier but higher time cost.

The value of the study for bank managers is that it provides an updated account of the banking behaviors of Hong Kong bank customers.

The purpose of this paper is to exhibit the influencing factors on and the process of internationalization with regard to Chinese automobile companies.

The author adopts an explorative approach to investigate the 12 major Chinese automobile manufacturers in terms of sales for the year 2010. Concentrating on the automobile industry in China, the author provides context and comparability.

The findings show that the internationalization of Chinese automobile companies cannot be explained by one theoretical model only and challenge previous internationalization research. Nevertheless, in retrospect, some patterns can be seen. Until the year 2000, technology was absorbed through domestic joint ventures with Western manufacturers. Up to 2010, internationalization involving exports may be viewed as having been a “test” phase, becoming a strategic goal defined by the Chinese government. Different internationalization attributes are aggregated into a comprehensive ranking of the case‐study companies. The ranking is analyzed with regard to managerial and company influences, as well as to incentivizing factors that potentially generate internationalization. As an incentivizing factor, the governmental environment plays a crucial role, having designated the automobile industry as one of China's pillar industries.

The paper gives new insights into internationalization processes on an industry level. In particular the Chinese strategic approach to internationalization is exhibited and discussed for the automobile industry.

In recent years, theory and research have been increasingly devoted to understanding organizational behavior in cross-cultural and global contexts, with particular attention being paid to the appropriateness of various human resources management (HRM) practices because practices that may be effective within one cultural context may not be effective in other cultural contexts. This chapter argues that a multi-level perspective is needed to explain the interplay between HRM practices and employee responses across cultural contexts. Specifically, the multi-level framework developed in this chapter elucidates the importance of fit between HRM practices, individual values, organizational values, and societal values. Societal values play a key role in the adoption of HRM practices, and the effectiveness of these HRM practices will depend largely on “fit” or alignment with the values of the societal culture in which the organization is operating. HRM practices also shape the collective responses of employees through organizational climate at the organizational level and through psychological climate at the individual level. For positive employee attitudes and responses to emerge, the climate created by the HRM practices must be aligned with societal and individual values. Building on these notions, the strength of the societal culture in which the organization is operating serves as a mechanism that links relationships between climate, value fit, and attitudes across levels of analysis. The chapter concludes with some recommendations for future research and implications for practice.

Previous studies have often yielded mixed results in relation to the similar-to-me effect on extra-role behaviors. Based on social exchange theory, the purpose of this paper is to uncover the contribution of personality similarity to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), a type of extra-role behaviors.

Questionnaire surveys were conducted in a multinational bank in Hong Kong. The participants were matched sample of 403 customer service representatives from 81 teams and their corresponding team supervisors.

Personality similarity to peers and supervisors had a positive impact on individual OCB (OCB-I) and organizational OCB (OCB-O), respectively, through better communication and social integration. Moreover, personality similarity to peers was related only to OCB-I, whereas personality similarity to supervisor was associated only with OCB-O.

Subordinates perform different facets of OCB depending on the subjects they are similar to in terms of personality. Being similar to others could facilitate communication and social integration, which in turn promote OCB targeted at similar individuals. The importance of distinguishing the similarity effects of peers and supervisors separately as well as scrutinizing the effects of different forms of OCB warrants future research attention.

Managers can promote OCB by enhancing communication and social integration among employees and supervisors.

As OCB enhances organizational effectiveness, the economic development of society in general will eventually benefit from having more effective organizations.

This study addresses the inconsistent findings of previous studies regarding the impact of similarity on OCB. It demonstrates the contribution of personality similarity to OCB beyond the confounding effects of judgment bias. It also advances theory by studying personality similarity to peers in addition to the commonly studied similarity to supervisors.

This study aims to systematically review the work–family enrichment (WFE) studies in hospitality and tourism management and provide insight into the patterns and trends of WFE literature to practitioners and future researchers.

This study design followed the guidelines of preferred reporting items of systematic reviews and meta-analysis. A final sample of 23 studies related to WFE that published from 2000 to 2021 was selected and systematically analyzed.

This study resulted in a framework that the antecedents and outcomes of WFE at the organizational, job and individual levels. Moderators between antecedents and outcomes were also identified. Theories such as conservation of resources theory, boundary theory, role theory and expansion theory were frequently applied in the investigation of WFE.

This study generated a framework that illustrates the organization characteristics, the job characteristics and individual factors that have examined in hospitality literature on the topic of WFE. This study also pointed out theories that have been used in investigating WFE. However, this systematic review may subject to publication bias and number of reviewed articles remained relatively small.

This study provides suggestions on how hospitality operators could use internal marketing strategies and certain leadership styles (e.g. transformational and servant leaderships) to enhance employees’ WFE.

This study summarized the publication trends and patterns of the WFE studies in hospitality and tourism management in the past two decades, which provides suggestions for future scholars to further explore this research topic.