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The ethics literature has focused on the influence of self-construal dimensions on unethical decision-making. However, the literature is unclear about why these self-construal dimensions (Independent-self, Relational-self, Collective-self) impact differently on unethical decision-making. Based on the theory of cooperation and competition, this study empirically examines the mediating role of competitive orientation and addresses the theoretically unexplained question of why self-construal dimensions influence differently on unethical decision-making.

Based on the deductive approach, a quantitative research study was conducted on the Sri Lankan banking industry because there have been many instances of unethical behavior reported in this sector lately. Data were collected from 305 bank branch managers using a structured survey questionnaire.

The findings revealed that competitive orientation mediates the self-construal dimensions and explained that competitive orientation is one reason why independent-self, relational-self and collective-self influence differently on unethical decision-making.

This paper addresses the unanswered question of why self-construal dimensions relate to unethical decision-making differently.

Leading with vision while granting employees autonomy is one effective organizational response to the demands of a dynamic external environment. The former is thought to align followers' behavior by providing guidance, the latter to increase variance in their behavior by relinquishing control; both exert beneficial but distinct effects on organizational performance. What has remained uncharted heretofore is how these leader behaviors shape their followers' cognition and, subsequently, yield improvements in performance. The authors argue that a leader's vision communication transforms followers' cognitive representation of their work. This not only enables them to specify their goals in alignment with the vision (goal clarity) but also to locate the meaning of their work within the bigger picture of the vision (construal level). By contrast, perceived autonomy in terms of power-sharing might directly affect followers' work engagement more narrowly.

The authors tested the model on a sample of 408 employees from eleven enterprises of a holding company. In the survey, employees reported perceived vision communication and autonomy provided by their leader. Furthermore, the authors assessed the employees' goal attainment. To capture how employees represent their daily work activities, the authors measured their construal level and their goal clarity.

The results show that both perceived vision communication and granted autonomy improve employees' goal achievement. Moreover, two processes mediate the relationship between vision communication and goal achievement in followers: first, specifying goals in terms of clarity; second, composing a higher-level mental construal of their work. In contrast, no mediation of empowering leader behaviors was found.

Better goal achievement through visionary leadership is therefore achieved through cognitive alignment of followers, while leader-granted autonomy acts as a motivational tool directly on performance.

This research explores the impacts of content-generating devices (mobile phones versus personal computers) and content features (social content and achievement content) on consumer engagement with marketer-generated content (MGC) on social media. It also examines these factors' interaction effects on consumer engagement.

The study analyzed MGC that 210 companies had posted to Sina Weibo over three years, testing the study’s proposed model with negative binomial regression analysis.

The study's results show that MGC generated via mobile phones attracts more consumer engagement than MGC generated via personal computers. MGC with more social features attracts more consumer engagement, whereas MGC with more achievement features reduces consumer engagement. The authors also found that MGC with more social features generated via mobile phones and MGC with more achievement features generated via personal computers lead to more consumer engagement due to the congruency of the construal level of psychological distance.

This research enriches the literature by exploring the effects of content-generating devices and content features on consumer engagement in the MGC context, which extends the research on consumer engagement with social media from the context of user-generated content to the MGC.

The purpose of this study is to provide insights and guidance for practitioners in terms of ensuring rigorous ethical and moral conduct in artificial intelligence (AI) hiring and implementation.

The research employed two experimental designs and one pilot study to investigate the ethical and moral implications of different levels of AI implementation in the hospitality industry, the intersection of self-congruency and ethical considerations when AI replaces human service providers and the impact of psychological distance associated with AI on individuals' ethical and moral considerations. These research methods included surveys and experimental manipulations to gather and analyze relevant data.

Findings provide valuable insights into the ethical and moral dimensions of AI implementation, the influence of self-congruency on ethical considerations and the role of psychological distance in individuals’ ethical evaluations. They contribute to the development of guidelines and practices for the responsible and ethical implementation of AI in various industries, including the hospitality sector.

The study highlights the importance of exercising rigorous ethical-moral AI hiring and implementation practices to ensure AI principles and enforcement operations in the restaurant industry. It provides practitioners with useful insights into how AI-robotization can improve ethical and moral standards.

The study contributes to the literature by providing insights into the ethical and moral implications of AI service robots in the hospitality industry. Additionally, the study explores the relationship between psychological distance and acceptance of AI-intervened service, which has not been extensively studied in the literature.

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has become one of the most influential information sources for consumers' purchase decision-making. Based on construal-level theory and from the perspective of cognitive effort, this study investigated the effects of eWOM social media types and conflicting eWOM on consumers' purchase intentions and validated the mediation role of social psychological distance, perceived value, and perceived cognitive effort.

Two scenario-based experiments were conducted to validate the research model. Specifically, a 2 (eWOM social media type: strong-tie vs weak-tie) × 2 (conflicting eWOM: with vs without) between-subjects design was used. ANOVA, multiple regression analysis with PROCESS, and partial least squares (PLS) were employed to test the hypotheses.

The results showed that eWOM social media types had significant effects on both social psychological distance and perceived value. The significant chain mediating effects of social psychological distance and perceived value between eWOM social media types and consumers' purchase intentions were found. In addition, conflicting eWOM had significant effects on both perceived value and perceived cognitive effort. Indirect effects of conflicting eWOM on purchase intention through perceived cognitive effort were discovered.

These results contribute to the eWOM literature by investigating the influences of eWOM social media types and conflicting eWOM on consumers' purchase intentions. They also contribute to construal-level theory by extending its applicability to the field of eWOM.

This paper aims to examine how the temporal distance can influence the effect of the scarcity message. To demonstrate this effect, the authors use the limited-quantity flash sales and compare two types of mixed promotion method comprising discount rate and limited quantity.

The results of the experiment reveal that consumers in the temporally distant condition have a relatively high-level construal of the limited-quantity flash sales and are more likely to value desirability (discount rate) over feasibility (limited quantity).

When the expected value is identical, consumers prefer limited-quantity flash sales with smaller limited quantity but higher discount rates. However, consumers in the temporally near condition have a relatively low-level construal of the limited-quantity flash sales and are more likely to value feasibility (limited quantity) over desirability (discount rate).

When the expected value is identical, consumers prefer limited-quantity flash sales with lower discount rates but larger limited quantity.

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.

Bread waste is one of the largest contributors to the environmental footprint of supermarkets, mostly because of the short shelf life of fresh bread. This study examined a possible solution: offering frozen bread with a considerably longer shelf life. Professional freezing of bread can preserve its quality better than freezing at home. In introducing frozen bread, supermarkets can communicate either a high construal social benefit (food waste reduction) or a low construal personal benefit (product quality).

An online experiment (n = 367) with a three group between subjects design was used. Dutch participants saw an offering of frozen bread accompanied by (1) a communication message about food waste, (2) a communication message about product quality, or (3) no communication message (control condition).

In line with expectations, emphasizing food waste reduction influenced general attitudes toward frozen bread and the bakery department more strongly than the benefit of higher product quality, while the opposite was true for purchase intentions.

Retailers who include frozen bread in their assortment have to make a trade-off between especially stimulating consumer attitudes toward the bakery department by focusing on a food waste reduction message, or especially stimulating sales by focusing on a quality message.

This study provides new insights into the effects of benefit communication on attitudes and purchase intentions. The results show that these effects differ for attitudes and intentions, depending on the communication message.

This paper investigates how two characteristics of language, abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity, influence user engagement in communication exercises on innovation targeted to the general audience. The proposed conceptual model suggests that innovation fits well with more abstract language because of the association of innovation with imagination and distal construal. Moreover, communication of innovation may benefit from greater adherence to the narrativity arc, that is, early staging, increasing plot progression and climax optimal point. These effects are moderated by content variety and emotional tone, respectively.

Based on a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) application on a sample of 3225 TED Talks transcripts, the authors identify 287 TED Talks on innovation, and then applied econometric analyses to test the hypotheses on the effects of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity on engagement, and on the moderation effects of content variety and emotional tone.

The authors found that abstractness (vs concreteness) and narrativity have positive effects on engagement. These two effects are stronger with higher content variety and more positive emotional tone, respectively.

This paper extends the literature on communication of innovation, linguistics and text analysis by evaluating the roles of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity in shaping appreciation of innovation.

This paper reports conceptual and empirical analyses on innovation dissemination through a popular medium – TED Talks – and applies modern text analysis algorithms to test hypotheses on the effects of two pivotal dimensions of language on user engagement.

This study examines the relationship of positive career shocks and career optimism. The mediating role of career decision-making self-efficacy (CDSE) between positive career shocks and career optimism and the moderating role of consideration of future consequences – immediate (CFC-I) between CDSE and career optimism are checked.

Through cluster sampling, cross-sectional data from 192 professionals of electronic media industry were collected via an electronically administered questionnaire. For preliminary descriptive data analysis, SPSS version 21 was used. SmartPLS version 3.0 was used for testing the proposed hypotheses.

The results showed that positive career shocks have a relationship with career optimism via CDSE. Also, CFC-I moderated the relationship of CDSE and career optimism such that the relationship of CDSE and career optimism was stronger at higher level of CFC-I.

The study provides implications for the career consultants, human resource professionals and senior management of organizations. All these stakeholders can strive to build an inventory of positive career shocks. Also, shifting to a surprised business model of announcing compensations and promotions is another area to work on. The results of this study further suggest disengaging the fresh potential employees in the initial processes of recruitment. Interdepartmental coordination of health and safety department and human resource management department is also a very important implication for this study to highlight the positive aspects of being optimistic.

The study is among the few empirical studies which investigates the relationship between positive career shocks and career optimism via CDSE. Also, in light of the latest call of various empirical works in the domain, this study adds a moderating variable, i.e. CFC-I in predicting career optimism. Furthermore, contrary to the conventional approach of applying students' data on career models, this study tests the proposed career model on data collected from professionals.