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In this paper, the authors draw from the concept of a “focused factory” to examine whether a focused strategy provides superior performance over a non-focused strategy in firms experiencing service disruptions.

The authors test their hypotheses using panel data of the US domestic airline industry from 1998 to 2019.

Overall, the study findings show that a focused strategy provides superior financial performance over a non-focused strategy in both stable environments and unpredictable environments. The authors also find that the effect of service disruptions on profitability is less pronounced for firms following a focused strategy. This shows that focused firms need to grow over time to sustain profitability. Their post hoc analysis shows that for a non-focused strategy (but not for a focused strategy), firm size moderates the effect of service disruptions on profitability. This suggests that a firm pursuing a non-focused strategy can mitigate the negative effect of service disruptions by increasing its size.

This is the first study that examines the effectiveness of the focused strategy in mitigating service disruptions. The results provide further support for the effectiveness of the focused strategy in responding to service disruptions in service organizations.

While luxury brands have increasingly pursued CSR activities such as corporate donations, this strategy may not be effective because there is an inherent mismatch between the concepts of “luxury” and CSR. The present research examines the effects of different types of donation strategies (frequency-focused vs. amount-focused).

Two experimental studies were conducted. Study 1 provides initial evidence to our prediction that a frequency-focused strategy is beneficial for luxury (vs. non-luxury) brands to leverage their positive brand evaluations. Study 2 further replicates this using a different brand and establishes the underlying mechanism.

Findings show that a frequency-focused strategy is beneficial for luxury (vs. non-luxury) brands to leverage their positive brand evaluations. This is because a frequency-focused strategy makes consumers perceive the luxury brand's commitment to help, which in turn reduces consumers’ skepticism toward their CSR activities.

The study illustrates a novel mechanism that shows when and how different corporate donations influence luxury brand evaluations.

In this study, self-leadership strategy serves as a self-regulatory mediating mechanism of individual differences in predicting individual creativity because it is related to actions intended to lead their own goal-directed activities. The purpose of this paper is to explore the boundary conditions of the effect of regulatory focus on employee self-leadership behaviors.

Considering the contextual influence, cross-level moderating effect of empowering leadership on the relationship between the promotion (prevention) focus and self-leadership has been examined. The research data were collected from 441 employees of 65 work teams from three software companies located in Northern Taiwan. A time-lagged design by implementing three time surveys was applied to minimize potential problems of cross-sectional design. At Time 1, employees completed the measures of promotion focus, prevention focus, empowering leadership, and individual-level control variables. At Time 2, employees reported the extent of their self-leadership at work. In the final survey, team leaders assessed the individual employee creativity.

This study concludes several findings. When self-leading behavior-focused strategies are considered as mediators, the indirect relationships that promotion focus and prevention focus had with individual creativity were confirmed. As an influential team-level indicator, empowering leadership could moderate the relatedness between employees promotion-focused strategies and behavior-focused strategies that positively influenced on individual creativity.

In this study, responding to the call by De Stobbeleir et al. (2011) to examine how employees actively manage their creative performance, the author zoomed in on self-leadership strategies and how these strategies relate to actual creative performance.

The global pandemic has required organisational leaders to respond rapidly in a time of uncertainty. A specific challenge for leaders during the global pandemic is the salient and immediate threat to worker health and well-being. Unfortunately, the consequences of different leadership actions in this context are not well understood. By exploring the path from leader behaviour to employee well-being via experienced work characteristics, this study aims to provide a framework for better understanding pandemic threat and corresponding leadership impact.

Two prevention-focused leadership strategies were explored: defend and adapt strategy. Two important work characteristics role clarity and workload were used to help explain the links between leadership strategies and well-being. Potential mediating pathways were tested in path analysis with Mplus (v7.4) based on 515 online survey responses.

Different mediating pathways demonstrated complex associations between the constructs. Increases in the both prevention-focused leadership strategies were found associated with positive well-being by increasing employees' perceptions of leadership and by improving role clarity in the workplace. Notably, evidence also supported that increase in defend strategy was linked to reduced worker well-being through intensified workload.

In times of uncertainty amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, prevention-focused leadership is vital to engage the workforce and ensure compliance with safety procedures to avoid associated risks to worker health and organisational performance. This research focused on the rarely studied topic of prevention-focused leadership, and how prevention strategies were related to employee well-being. Based on the findings for prevention-focused defend and adapt strategies, this study suggested leadership practices that might shape employee well-being in a time of turbulence.

This study explores the role of organisational culture in promoting collective coping strategies in construction project teams in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Three collective coping strategies were examined, including problem-focused, relationship-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies.

O'Reilly et al.’s (1991) organisational culture profile (OCP) assessed organisational culture values. Data were collected through an online questionnaire from practitioners in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) construction organisations.

The findings show a high correlation between competitiveness culture values and problem-focused team coping strategy. Relationship-focused team coping strategy was found to have a high correlation with emphasis on rewards and performance orientation values. Conversely, an emotion-focused team coping strategy correlates highly with competitiveness, supportiveness and emphasis on rewards cultural values.

The cross-sectional design of the survey and the UAE context may present limits to the generalisability of findings.

Limited attempts have been made to study collective coping in construction project teams. The study paves the path for exploring emergent socio-psychological concepts in construction organisations, including the impact of organisational culture on team collective coping with adverse events.

Understanding the pivotal impact of culture on successful team coping provides managers with valuable insights into managing situational adversity in construction project teams.

The focused factory is one of the concepts that decision-makers have adopted for improving health care delivery. However, disorganized definitions of focus have led to findings that cannot be utilized systematically. The purpose of this paper is to discuss strategic options to focus health care operations.

First the literature on focus in health care is reviewed revealing conceptual challenges. Second, a definition of focus in terms of demand and requisite variety is defined, and the mechanisms of focus are explicated. A classification of five focus strategies that follow the original idea to reduce variety in products and markets is presented. Finally, the paper examines managerial possibilities linked to the focus strategies.

The paper proposes a framework of five customer-oriented focus strategies which aim at reducing variety in different characteristics of care pathways: population; urgency and severity; illnesses and symptoms; care practices and processes; and care outcomes.

Empirical research is needed to evaluate the costs and benefits of the five strategies and about system-level effects of focused units on competition and coordination.

Focus is an enabling condition that needs to be exploited using specific demand and supply management practices. It is essential to understand how focus mechanisms differ between strategies, and to select focus that fits with organization’s strategy and key performance indicators.

Compared to previous more resource-oriented approaches, this study provides theoretically solid and practically relevant customer-oriented framework for focusing in health care.

Examines the relationship between the dimensions of self‐leadership behavioural‐focused strategies, job satisfaction and team performance. It also evaluates the extent to which job satisfaction mediates the influence of self‐leadership behavioural‐focused strategies on team performance.

Involves a questionnaire‐based survey of employees from a manufacturing organisation operating in Australia. A total of 304 useable questionnaires were received from employees who are engaged in self‐managing activities. These were subjected to a series of correlational and regression analyses.

There are three major findings in this research. First, the relationship between self‐leadership behavioural‐focused strategies and job satisfaction is direct, positive and significant. Second, the relationship between job satisfaction and team performance is positive and significant. Finally, the results have clearly shown that job satisfaction mediates the relation between self‐leadership behavioural‐focused strategies and team performance.

The cross‐sectional nature of the study renders it vulnerable to some problems so that future studies should measure self‐leadership behavioural‐focused strategies, job satisfaction and performance using longitudinal data and/or data from multiple sources.

The study suggests that organisations emphasising empowerment should utilise training programs aimed at developing employees' self‐leadership behavioural‐focused strategies that focus on self‐assessment, self‐reward and self‐discipline.

The paper is the first to examine self‐leadership behavioural‐focused strategies influences through a covariance structure analysis. It also clarifies the mediating affects of job satisfaction on the self‐leadership behavioural‐focused strategies/team performance relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to explore coping strategies of female business expatriates and to examine how these strategies are associated with the women's international adjustment.

Data were collected through mail surveys to western female business expatriates in Hong Kong regarding their coping strategies and adjustment.

As predicted, the results showed that the female expatriates more often used problem focused than symptom focused coping strategies. Surprisingly, there was no association between problem focused coping strategies and socio‐cultural adjustment. However, as expected, symptom focused coping strategies were negatively related to adjusting in socio‐cultural terms. As presumed, there was no relationship between any of the coping strategies and psychological adjustment.

The special contextual circumstances in Hong Kong could have contributed to the unanticipated findings that there was no association between problem focused coping strategies and any type of adjustment studied. Through cross‐cultural training, female business expatriates could benefit from being informed that applying symptom focused coping strategies may make them less well adjusted to a host location.

Women still represent a relatively untapped source for expatriation and the research on female business expatriates is still inadequate in many respects. An important issue examined by this study is how women cope with the stress of international assignments and how that may affect their international adjustment.

Drawing upon Folkman and Lazarus’ (1984) coping framework and interdependence theory (Thibaut and Kelley, 1959), the purpose of this paper is to investigate how expatriate spouses’ coping strategies (problem-focused and emotion-focused) affect expatriate spouse adjustment and expatriate adjustment. In addition, the authors also examine the mediating effect of expatriate adjustment on the spouse coping strategies-spouse adjustment relationship.

To test these relationships, the authors collected multi-source data from 191 expatriate spouses and their expatriate partners living in 37 countries.

The results revealed that problem- and emotion-focused coping strategies positively and negatively, respectively, influenced all types of spouse adjustment: personal, interaction, and cultural. Both forms of spouse coping also influenced expatriate adjustment. The authors also found that expatriate adjustment mediated the relationship between expatriate spouses’ coping strategies and spouse adjustment.

The results suggest that multinational organizations should pay equal attention to the adjustment of both their expatriates and their spouses. Both expatriates and their spouses should be included in the initial selection process and in pre-departure training to get well equipped before the international assignment. Training spouses to adopt problem-focused coping strategies would help to facilitate the effective adjustment of both spouses and expatriates.

The research provides one of the first examinations that investigate expatriate spouses’ coping strategies and their impact on expatriate and expatriate spouse adjustment. This research also highlights the interdependency of expatriates and their spouses.

The purpose of this paper is to examine coping strategies, social support, and psychological distress for comparable samples of unemployed (n=389) and re-employed (n=270) individuals. The authors hypothesized that problem-focused coping and higher levels of social support would be associated with lower levels of psychological distress for unemployed vs re-employed participants.

The cross-sectional design and the convenience sampling method were used in the study.

Although unemployed participants reported poorer coping, higher levels of psychological distress, and lower levels of social support compared to re-employed participants; social support and coping strategies predicted psychological distress. Multiple regression analyses suggest that emotion-focused coping strategies were related to higher levels of psychological distress, whereas social support and problem-focused coping strategies were related to lower levels of psychological distress. Social support accounted for more variance in participants’ psychological distress above and beyond all other variables. Single and unemployed participants of the study used less problem-focused, more emotion-focused coping, and perceived lower social support than married unemployed. Gender and marital status of the unemployed were also significantly associated with psychological distress. In addition, older and less educated unemployed participants perceived less social support and used emotion-focused coping more frequently.

The findings indicated that being female, single, older, and low educated are the potential sociodemographic risk factors for the psychosocial well-being of unemployed people.

The favourable effects of certain coping strategies suggest the potential benefits of interventions to reduce reliance on emotion-focused coping and stimulate more problem-focused strategies in order to enhance psychological well-being.