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Financial analysts' roles and incentives mean that they have conflicting identities to maintain towards investors and firm managers. The authors study how analysts adopt various politeness strategies in their questioning to establish socially desirable identities in the Q&A of publicly accessible earnings calls.

The study is based on a sample of US firms with extreme earnings changes. 46 transcripts of end-of-year earnings calls were investigated with the help of linguistic discourse analysis, drawing on frameworks of face and linguistic politeness. For each transcript, the authors identified the structure of the face-threatening acts (FTAs) that arise when analysts ask probing questions and ascertained what specific politeness strategies, if any, are used by analysts to mitigate those FTAs. The authors examine how analysts perform identities through politeness in language and compare analysts' politeness behaviour and identity construction in the increasing earnings sub-sample with the decreasing earnings sub-sample.

Analysts negotiate different identities according to specific social contexts, promoting their identity as (1) competent professionals when firms report problematic performance by asking questions in a confrontational manner with few politeness strategies and (2) dependents of the firm by asking questions in a more polite manner when firms experience satisfactory performance. Analysts aim to present a socially desirable face in Q&A to influence managers' and investors' perceptions.

The study raises awareness about linguistic politeness as a communication strategy in the Q&A in earnings calls. It thereby enables managers and analysts to use linguistic politeness consciously and strategically and to recognise such use by others.

This study complements existing literature on earnings conference calls as part of external corporate communications by focusing on analysts' use of language when interacting with manages. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to show that politeness underpins analysts' language use as a device for identity negotiations. This is important to understand because analysts' identities vis-a-vis managers and investors is closely related to the stability of the financial system.

The purpose of the present research is to introduce a combined framework that integrates innovative work behavior, product innovation process and customer knowledge management; then, to explore the mediating effect of customer knowledge management in the relationship between innovative work behavior and the product innovation process.

The basis for the present research is a cross-sectional design. Data collection from 154 employees occurred using the following structured questionnaires: Customer Knowledge Management (CKM), Innovative Work Behavior (IWB) and Product Innovation Process (PIP). Data processing used SPSS version 26.0, including the PROCESS (3.5) macro analysis.

The results show positive relationships between innovative work behavior and the product innovation process (r = 0.420, p < 0.01). Pearson's correlation shows a coefficient of 0.42, meaning that 42% of the variations in perceived product innovation are due to variations in innovative work behavior. The second condition of the mediation test involved testing the relationship between the independent variable (Innovative Work Behavior) and the mediating variable (Knowledge Management) and showed a significant relationship (r = 0.272, p < 0.01). The findings suggested that knowledge management that other determinants supported, such as collaboration in idea exploration, idea championing and encouragement of participation in idea implementation, significantly contributed to the product innovation process (r = 0.509, p < 0.01). The bootstrapping method confirmed that innovative work behavior supports product innovation through the mediation of customer knowledge management (z = 3.01, p = 0.002).

The cross-sectional design, along with the relatively low number of participants and the self-reporting nature of the questionnaires, represent the current study's main limitations. Developing the research model could integrate new variables, such as customer co-creation processes, performance-based compensation, employee citizenship activities and transformational leadership.

This research has both theoretical and practical implications. These emphasize the importance of further investigation into the factors influencing companies' innovation processes. They also provide managers with a means of finding a fit between the deployment of customer knowledge mechanisms and the achievement of innovative workplace behavior, to improve innovation process efficiency.

The current study broadens the empirical research area of customer knowledge management and its impact on both innovative work behavior and the product innovation process, particularly in knowledge-intensive market scenarios that require organizations to be innovative.