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Management discretion in the decision to reduce payroll costs is an important but under-researched issue in management accounting. The authors leverage the experimental environment to test the role of organizational culture (close vs. distant) and managerial communion (concern for others) along with their interaction with sales decline persistence (one vs. two periods) on planned layoff decisions. The authors find that communal managers are hesitant to downsize employees and that a close organizational culture interacts with one period sales declines to reduce layoffs although the influence of culture is reduced with persistent sales declines. The authors also examine the influence of culture and communion on managers’ preference for pay cuts as an alternative to layoffs. The authors find that a close culture and higher communion are associated with decisions to choose pay cuts over layoffs; however, these costs interact such that managers low in communion in a distant culture express a higher preference for layoffs. These findings illustrate the combined influence of economic, organizational, and dispositional factors on manager decisions about the extent and form of labor cost reductions due to sales declines.

The purpose of this study is to use a lifetime income measure to evaluate the long-run housing affordability for an understudied cohort of households in the literature – the millennials. The authors do this in the context of Malaysia, measuring long-run affordability for four housing types across geographic locations and income distributions.

This study calculates a long-run housing affordability index (HAI) using data on house prices and household incomes. Essentially a ratio of predicted lifetime incomes to house prices, the HAI is computed for four common housing types in Malaysia from 2005 to 2016 and for six states in the country. The HAI is also compared across four income percentiles.

The analysis reveals varying patterns of housing affordability among different states in Malaysia. Housing affordability has declined since 2010, with most housing types being unaffordable for millennial-led households with the lowest income. Housing is most affordable for those in the highest income bracket, although even here, there are pockets of unaffordable housing as well.

Based on the findings, this study proposes three targeted interventions to improve housing affordability for Malaysian millennials.

This study fills a gap in the literature by examining the long-run housing affordability of Malaysian millennial-led households based on both geographic location and income distribution. The millennial population is understudied in the housing affordability literature, making this study a valuable contribution to the field.

This study aims to investigate the critical role of online brand community (OBC) engagement and brand evangelism: the role of age, gender and membership number.

To achieve the study’s objective, 303 active Facebook OBC users were surveyed. The AMOS structural equation modelling (SEM) is used to test the hypothesised model.

The results indicate that OBC engagement improves brand evangelism. Specifically, the results show that age, gender, and OBC membership number moderate the relationship between OBC engagement and brand evangelism. Interestingly, this study found that female, younger and low-OBC follower consumers more significantly contribute to nourishing brand evangelism than male, older and high-OBC follower counterparts.

OBC engagement is validated as a key brand evangelism driver, further substantiating its role as a crucial strategic metric. Moreover, age, gender and OBC membership number as moderating factors in the association between OBC engagement and brand evangelism (word of mouth referral, brand defence and future purchases) have been verified. Although the findings suggest that improved OBC engagement contributes to evangelism, this effect transpires more significantly among female, younger and low-OBC followers than male, older and high-OBC followers.

(Digital) servitization, referring to service-driven strategies and their increasing implementation in manufacturing, is one of the most rapidly growing areas in industrial service research. However, the cultural change involved in successful servitization is a phenomenon that is widely observed but poorly understood. This research aims to clarify the processes of social construction as manufacturers change their organizational culture to transform into industrial service providers.

This research takes a systematic approach to integrate disparate literature on servitization into a cohesive framework for cultural change, which is purposefully augmented by rationale culled from organizational learning and sensemaking literature.

The organizational learning framework for cultural change in servitization introduces a dynamic perspective on servitizing organizations by explaining social processes between organizational and member-level cultural properties. It identifies three major cultural orientations toward service, digital and learning that govern successful servitization.

This research contributes to the servitization literature by presenting a new approach to reframe and explore cultural change processes across multiple levels, thus providing a concrete starting point for further research in this area.