Search results

This study aims to explore the role of frontline service employees’ (FSEs) awareness that their job can be substituted by smart technology, artificial intelligence, robotics and algorithms (STARA) in their job autonomy and proactive service performance and when these relationships can be buffered. Drawing on the cognitive appraisal theory of stress, the study examined the mediating relationship between FSEs’ STARA awareness, job autonomy and proactive service performance and the moderating effects of self-efficacy and resilience on this relationship.

The authors administered two-wave online surveys to 301 South Korean FSEs working in various service sectors (e.g. retailing, food/beverage, hospitality/tourism and banking). The Time 1 survey measured respondents’ STARA awareness, self-efficacy, resilience and job autonomy, and the Time 2 survey assessed their proactive service performance.

FSEs’ STARA awareness negatively affected their subsequent proactive service performance through decreased job autonomy. The negative association between STARA awareness and job autonomy was weaker when FSEs’ self-efficacy was high than when it was low. While the authors observed no significant moderation of resilience, the author found a marginally significant three-way interaction between STARA awareness, self-efficacy and resilience. Specifically, STARA awareness was negatively related to job autonomy only when both self-efficacy and resilience were low. When either self-efficacy or resilience was high, the association between STARA awareness and job autonomy became nonsignificant, suggesting the buffering roles of the two personal resources.

Given that the measurement of variables relied on self-reported data, rater biases might have affected the findings of the study. Moreover, the simultaneous measurement of STARA awareness, self-efficacy, resilience and job autonomy could preclude causal inferences between these variables. The authors encourage future studies to use a more rigorous methodology to reduce rater biases and establish stronger causality between the variables.

Service firms can decrease FSEs’ STARA awareness through training in the knowledge and skills necessary to work with these technologies. To promote FSEs’ proactive service performance in this context, service firms need to involve them in decisions related to STARA adoption and allow them to craft their jobs. Service managers should provide FSEs with social support and exercise empowering and supportive leadership to help them view STARA as a challenge rather than a threat.

Distinct from prior research on STARA awareness and employee outcomes, the study identified proactive service performance as a key outcome in the STARA context. By presenting self-efficacy and resilience as crucial personal resources that buffer FSEs from the deleterious impact of STARA awareness, the study provides practitioners with insights that can help FSEs maintain their job autonomy and proactive service performance in times of digitalization and automation.

The purpose of this study is to investigate when and why supervisor negative feedback is associated with employees' job performance via two different pathways (i.e. emotion-focused coping and problem-focused coping) and to introduce proactive personality as a moderator.

Time-lagged data were collected using a field survey research design. Participants included 389 dyads of employees and their direct supervisors from five companies in China.

Supervisor negative feedback can lead to employees' emotion-focused coping, which in turn impairs their job performance. Meanwhile, supervisor negative feedback can trigger employees’ problem-focused coping, which subsequently promotes their job performance. Furthermore, proactive personality moderates the indirect effect of supervisor negative feedback on employee performance through emotion-focused coping.

This study explored the double-edged effects of supervisor negative feedback on employee job performance from a coping strategy perspective and investigated how proactive personality influences the choice of coping strategies.

Grounded in dynamic capabilities theory, this study aims to examine how dynamic capabilities and a transactive memory system (TMS) can build the resilience of service organizations and improve their financial performance. Limited studies examine the link between a TMS and organizational resilience.

The authors test a theoretical model on a sample of 350 UK service firms that were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and analyze the data using partial least square structural equation modeling.

Results highlight the positive effects of a TMS and dynamic capabilities on organizational resilience. Only a TMS and organizational resilience have direct positive effects on financial performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to ascertain the influence of a TMS on organizational resilience in service firms following adversity.

This study aims to explore how to overcome and address the loss of exploratory innovation, thereby achieving greater success in exploratory innovation. This phenomenon of loss occurs when enterprises decrease their investment in and engagement with exploratory innovation, ultimately leading to an insufficient amount of such innovation efforts. Drawing on dynamic capabilities, this study investigates the relationship between organizational foresight and exploratory innovation and examines the moderating role of breakthrough orientation/financial orientation.

This study used survey data collected from 296 Chinese high-tech companies in multiple industries and sectors.

The evidence produced by this study reveals that three elements of organizational foresight (i.e. environmental scanning capabilities, strategic selection capabilities and integrating capabilities) positively influence exploratory innovation. Furthermore, this positive effect is strengthened in the context of a high-breakthrough orientation. Moreover, the relationships among environmental scanning capabilities, strategic selection capabilities and exploratory innovation become weaker as an enterprise’s financial orientation increases, whereas a strong financial orientation does not affect the relationship between integrating capabilities and exploratory innovation.

Ambidexterity is key to successful enterprise innovation. Compared with exploitative innovation, it is by no means easy to engage in exploratory innovation, which is especially important in high-tech companies. While the loss of exploratory innovation has been observed, few empirical studies have explored ways to promote exploratory innovation more effectively. A key research implication of this study pertains to the role of organizational foresight in the improvement of exploratory innovation in the context of high-tech companies.

This paper contributes to the broader literature on exploratory innovation and organizational foresight and provides practical guidance for high-tech companies regarding ways of avoiding the loss of exploratory innovation and becoming more successful at exploratory innovation.

Strategic flexibility (SF) has become increasingly important for firms because of the fast changes in the external environment. In line with the practical importance of SF, an emerging research field has developed around it that has attempted to understand the nature of SF and the key relationships. The aim of this study is to unveil the semantic structure of the recent literature on SF and to suggest new promising areas for future research.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review with a bibliographic analysis technique, which allows authors to identify the main recent streams in the literature, as well as offer reflections and suggestions for future research.

The authors uncover three main emerging areas in the research on SF, namely SF as a dynamic capability, the role of knowledge management for SF and the relationship between a firm SF and the external environment. The authors put forward three avenues for future research on SF: Avenue 1. SF, business model innovation (BMI) and other dynamic capabilities (DC), Avenue 2. Digital technologies and SF/organizational agility and Avenue 3. SF and sustainability. Articles included in the special issue entitled “A strategic perspective on flexibility, agility and adaptability in the digital era” contribute to Avenue 2, thus paving the way for filling some of the identified gaps regarding the relationship between SF and digitalization.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first literature review on SF that uses a bibliometric approach to draw conclusions on the findings in the literature. The review contributes to the theoretical understanding of SF by illustrating and explicating core topics that have persisted over time, as well as by presenting three main avenues for further developing authors’ knowledge around SF.

This research investigates the roles that resources, organisational structure and climate play in the performance management of National Sport Organisations (NSOs).

This qualitative study draws data from 31 interviews, five focus groups conducted amongst Botswana National Sport Organisations. To corroborate the data collected, documents from these sport organisations were content analysed.

The amount and type of resources available, the degree to which decision-making is centralised, practices formalised and roles specialised affects how NSOs implement performance management. NSOs were not implementing performance management systems and could not tell whether they were creating favourable environments to implement the practices.

Sport managers, policymakers and educators can use insights from this study to improve their practices. This study also proposes avenues for further research.

This study contributes to sport management literature on performance management, and it is original because such as study has not been conducted before.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic literature review of the adoption of immersive marketing technology (IMT) in terms of strategic planning of its adoption, resource requirements and its implications and challenges.

This study categorizes and contextualizes qualitative approaches to evaluate the literature, with Scopus databases serving as the primary source of 90 selected articles in the areas of information technology, business and marketing strands. Theme analysis was carried out using thematic techniques and grounded approach principles to facilitate thematic coding and generate theme analysis.

The analysis was supported by the three concepts of business flexibility, agility and adaptability, which were drawn as a strategy for IMT adoption. The findings presented three main themes: proactive flexibility, responsive agility and reactive adaptability that enable business owner–managers to craft a strategy for IMT adoption.

The novel contribution of this study is the inclusion of key implications related to IMT as a starting point of the next level of innovative marketing for all academics, practitioners and business owner–managers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe challenges to ethnic minorities in the UK. While the experiences of migrants are both complex and varied depending on individuals' social class, race, cultural proximity to the host country and acculturation levels, more in-depth studies are necessary to fully understand how COVID-19 affects specific migrant groups and their health. Taiwanese migrants were selected because they are an understudied group. Also, there were widespread differences in pandemic management between the UK and Taiwan, making this group an ideal case for understanding how their acculturation journey can be disrupted by a crisis.

Qualitative data were collected at two different time points, at the start of the UK pandemic (March/April 2020) and six months on (October/November 2020), to explore migrant coping experiences over time. Theoretically, the authors apply acculturation theory through the lens of coping, while discussing health-consumption practices, as empirical evidence.

Before the outbreak of the pandemic, participants worked hard to achieve high levels of integration in the UK. The pandemic changed this; participants faced unexpected changes in the UK’s sociocultural structures. They were forced to exercise the layered and complex “coping with coping” in a hostile host environment that signalled their new marginalised status. They faced impossible choices, from catching a life-threatening disease to being seen as overly cautious. Such experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society.

It is important to note that the Taiwanese sample recruited through Facebook community groups is biased and has a high level of homogeneity. These participants were well-integrated, middle-class migrants who were highly educated, relatively resourceful and active on social media. More studies are needed to fully understand the impact on well-being and acculturation of migrants from different cultural, contextual and social backgrounds. This being the case, the authors can speculate that migrants with less resource are likely to have found the pandemic experience even more challenging. More studies are needed to fully understand migrant experience from different backgrounds.

Public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. In particular, this paper has shown how separation, especially if embraced temporarily, is not necessarily a negative outcome to be corrected with specific policies. It can be strategically adopted by migrants as a way of defending their health and well-being from an increasingly hostile environment. Migrants' home country experience provides vicarious learning opportunities to acquire good practices. Their voices should be encouraged rather than in favour of a surprising orthodox and rather singular approach in the discussion of public health management.

The paper has clear public health policy implications. Firstly, public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. Acknowledging migrants' voice is a critical first step to contribute to the development of a fair and inclusive society. Secondly, to retain skilful migrants and avoid a future brain-drain, policymakers are advised to advance existing infrastructure to provide more incentives to support and retain migrant talents in the post-pandemic recovery phase.

This paper reveals how a group of previously well-integrated migrants had to exercise “coping with coping” during the COVID crisis. This experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society. It contributes to the understanding of acculturation by showing how a such crisis can significantly disrupt migrants' acculturation journey, challenging them to re-acculturate and reconsider their identity stance. It shows how separation was indeed a good option for migrants for protecting their well-being from a newly hostile host environment.

The purpose of this study is to highlight and demonstrate how the study of stress and related responses in construction can best be measured and benchmarked effectively.

A range of perceptual and physiological measures are obtained across different time periods and during different activities in a fieldwork setting. Differences in the empirical results are analysed and implications for future studies of stress discussed.

The results of this study strongly support the use of multiple psychometrics and biosensors whenever biometrics are included in the study of stress. Perceptual, physiological and environmental factors are all shown to act in concert to impact stress. Strong conclusions on the potential drivers of stress should then only be considered when consistent results apply across multiple metrics, time periods and activities.

Stress is an incredibly complex condition. This study demonstrates why many current applications of biosensors to study stress in construction are not up to the task and provides empirical evidence on how future studies can be significantly improved.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to focus explicitly on demonstrating the need for multiple research instruments and settings when studying stress or related conditions in construction.

Informed by the concept of well-being in Islam and the eudaimonic view of psychological well-being (PWB), and drawing on resilience theory, this study aims to understand (1) the implications of residing in conflict areas for entrepreneurs’ PWB, (2) the barriers facing entrepreneurs in these areas and (3) the implications of their religiosity for their PWB.

Utilizing an interpretative qualitative method, this study employed 22 entrepreneurs residing in conflict areas (Palestine and Libya). Thematic analysis was used to explore the participants’ experiences and insights.

The findings show that living in conflict areas enhances certain components of entrepreneurs’ PWB, such as self-acceptance and having a purpose in life and diminishes other components of their PWB, including environmental mastery, personal growth, the presence of autonomy and positive relations with others. Additionally, the findings suggest that religiosity, viewed through an Islamic lens, positively contributes to entrepreneurs’ PWB and identify societal (macro level) barriers faced by entrepreneurs in these areas.

The study is theoretically and contextually relevant and offers novel insights into the interplay between religion and well-being in conflict areas. It presents a reinvigorated awareness, opens specific research directions and permits the contextual applicability and possible extension of resilience theory.