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Purpose – This paper explores a pervasive yet little explored myth that underlies much marketing theory and practice: living in harmony with nature. While previous research typically presents “harmony with nature” as something consumers can easily find by returning to a benevolent “Mother Nature,” the current research problematizes how “harmony with nature” is discursively constructed in contemporary advertisements.

Methodology/approach – This paper traces the visual genealogy of contemporary advertising imagery to explore different discursive constructions of the harmony myth. Over 600 advertisements published in Backpacker magazine between 2007 and 2009 form the database for this research.

Findings – Drawing on a more nuanced understanding of the organic framework of nature, and representations of nature in the artistic genre of Romantic landscape painting, the current research finds that divergent images of an “Arcadian” and “Dynamic” nature give rise to different constructions of harmony that are fraught with tension. Harmony might be as easily lost as it is found, or it might never be achieved at all.

Originality/value of paper – This research shows that living in harmony with nature is less harmonic than it seems. It extends previous research that adopted an implicitly unproblematic understanding of finding harmony in nature by uncovering nuances and contradictions within contemporary manifestations of the harmony myth. Implications for marketers and for our understanding of the human/nature relationship more generally are offered.

This study aims to explore the influence mechanism of inclusive leadership on employees' innovative behavior, in order to provide useful inspiration for leaders and enterprises to develop.

This study constructs a moderated mediation model based on the valid questionnaire data of 211 employees in service in enterprises and used SPSS23.0 and AMOS24.0 analysis software to analyze the data and test the theoretical hypotheses, and explore the influence mechanism of inclusive leadership on employees' innovative behavior.

The empirical findings show that inclusive leadership has a significant positive impact on employees' innovative behavior; organizational harmony plays a mediating role in the relationship between inclusive leadership and employees' innovative behavior; and innovation self-efficacy plays a positive moderating role between organizational harmony and employees' innovative behavior. Therefore, inclusive leadership can create a harmonious organizational climate and further improve employees' innovative behavior under the influence of employees' creative self-efficacy, which can promote innovative behavior and sustainable development of enterprises.

The authors put two variables, organizational harmony and employees' innovation self-efficacy, into the same model for correlation tests for the first time, and introduced into the mechanism of inclusive leadership's influence on employees' innovation behavior, which broadened people's understanding of organizational harmony and innovation self-efficacy and broadened the ideas for the subsequent research about the relationship between them.

Recently, a growing need for harmony has been observed worldwide. Harmony is a universal value in both Western and Asian countries. This paper aims to study how the concept of harmony is reflected in the innovation of European multinational grocery retailers and how harmony-related innovations affect the financial performance of the retailers.

The research is based on a multisource database including innovation outcomes and financial performance indicators of 17 European multinational grocery retailers in the period of 2011–2018. In sum, 1,399 innovations were identified by content analysis. The relationship between innovation outcomes and financial performance was measured by panel regression analysis.

Results indicate that retailers differ in launching harmony-oriented innovations. Moreover, 40% more innovations are related to harmony with people as those related to harmony with nature. Finally, harmony-with-people innovations have a significantly positive effect on retailers' sales growth.

Based on the research findings, retailers can improve their sales growth by launching innovations that focus on harmony in human relationships.

This paper extended the concept of harmony to the field of innovations. First, the research showed how the value of harmony appears in the innovations of multinational retailers. Second, the study differentiated between harmony-with-people and harmony-with-nature innovations. Third, the findings revealed that harmony-oriented innovations contribute to retailers' financial performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate Peter Senge’s ideas from the perspective of the spiritual ideal of harmony/He (和).

Following a literature review of the conceptualization of Senge’s fifth discipline and harmony, an appreciative case study of Alibaba is adopted to demonstrate the role of harmony in guiding the transformative application of the five disciplines of the learning organization.

In developing as a learning organization, Alibaba is portrayed as having embraced three levels of harmony: person-within-oneself, person-to-others and person-to-nature harmony. The authors identify three equivalencies between Senge’s disciplines and the traditional Chinese ideal of harmony. First, personal mastery and metal models correspond to developing person-within-oneself harmony. Second, team learning and shared vision entail developing person-to-others harmony. Third, systems thinking aligns with person-to-nature harmony.

The case study demonstrates various approaches that can be used to foster the development of person-within-oneself, person-to-others and person-to-nature harmony within an aspiring learning organization.

This paper shows how core values of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, distilled into the Chinese ideal of harmony, can encourage the cultivation of learning organizations.

The purpose of this paper was to examine individual differences in the susceptibility to pluralistic ignorance of avoidance among Japanese by measuring the value of social harmony. It was hypothesized that the pluralistic ignorance of avoidance will occur more frequently among those with a low regard for the value of social harmony than those with a high regard.

In two scenario studies, the authors had participants rate both their own avoidance and others’ avoidance in conflict situations. In Study 1, the authors measured the value of social harmony by Yamaguch et al.’s (1995) Collectivism Scale, and they originally constructed a scale to measure the value in Study 2.

Consistent with the hypothesis, pluralistic ignorance occurred only among Japanese participants with a low regard for the value of social harmony and not among those who valued it highly.

These findings suggest that those who have a different stance from the cultural value feel a normative pressure by the biased perception of others’ behavior due to pluralistic ignorance, which, as a result, works to preserve the predominant cultural value.

The purpose of this paper is to employ a Yin-Yang harmony perspective to propose a novel circled 5C model to understand the unique harmonizing process of how conflicts are resolved in China. Despite increasing research on labor conflicts in Chinese manufacturing, Western theories still can not explain how Chinese culture influences conflict management.

The authors investigate a large manufacturer where a severe labor strike happened in South China. A mixed-methods research design is adopted. The scale of Chinese harmony and analysis of variance are used to identify the underlying unharmonious factors triggering the labor strike. The grounding theory approach (a case study) was adopted to further examine the proposed 5C model.

“Harmony with corporate system”, “Harmony between departments” and “Harmony with firm leader” were found to arouse employee grievances the most. Differences in age, gender, marital status, educational level, tenure and position were discovered to affect workers’ perceptions of workplace harmony. The proposed 5C model was supported.

As a lesson in handling escalating labor conflicts, this study allows foreign investors to better understand how to cope with relevant labor strife issues in China. In addition, this project integrates research with consultancy service, which can be seen as an exciting step forward in bridging academics and practitioners.

Based on Yin-Yang harmony thinking, this study suggests an integrative, context-specific concern – concern for harmony for China to transcend the Western dual-concern model regarding the choice of coping with conflicts. The paper constructs a novel circled 5C model of the Chinese harmonizing process (conflict, clash, communication, comprise and consensus), which characterizes the dynamic, contingent and art-oriented nature of Chinese conflict management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how participants in diverse schools newly implement the Sanford Harmony social and emotional learning (SEL) program and perceive its benefits for students and overall school climate.

The current study employed a convergent parallel mixed-methods design with a sample of five elementary schools in the western USA. Measures included classroom observations, administrator interviews, teacher interviews and focus groups, student focus groups, and a teacher questionnaire.

Findings indicated expected variation in implementation across schools, although all participants reacted favorably to the program and, importantly, would recommend the program to others. Administrators, teachers and students all saw the value of the program, particularly in terms of student relationship building and improved school climate. Implementation challenges experienced by schools were consistent with research on diffusion of innovations.

The present study demonstrates the importance of effective professional development, continued support, collective decision making and intentional integration of the SEL program throughout a school to support robust implementation and ultimately achieve intended outcomes.

Researchers have yet to examine in-depth implementation of the Sanford Harmony program and how best to support scale-up and more intentional implementation in schools. As implementation fidelity is a key component of a program achieving intended outcomes, the findings from the present study contribute to the knowledge base of supporting SEL program implementation.

Identifying the in-built art-based, multi-dimensionally dynamic nature of the Chinese notion of harmony from the philosophical perspective of Yijing, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanisms among the degree of harmony, employee affective commitment (AC) and compliance behavior at workplace in China.

This paper follows an empirical research design. To reduce extraneous sources of variation and measurement error, this study constrained the sample collection to full-time employees in manufacturing. Regression analysis was used to examine the hypotheses.

Results show that the degree of harmony is positively related to AC and compliance behavior. Findings also confirm the mediation effect of AC on the relationship between the degree of harmony and employee compliance behavior.

The research suggests that firms in China may exploit boosting the degree of harmony in organizations as an effective means to enhance employee AC to and compliance with their employers. It enables non-Chinese managers to gain a better understanding of the importance of creating harmonious environment for Chinese employees.

This study demonstrates the East-West cultural differences on the notion of harmony (art-based vs science-based views), investigating HR-related issues in China through a newer and broader lens, namely a revolutionary view of “East-West” integrative thinking. Using the model decoded by Yijing's eight trigrams to measure organizational harmony, this paper proposes a novel framework illustrating the relationships between a unique Chinese cultural variable (harmony) and two well-established Western measures (AC and compliance behavior), in response to the recent call for analyzing context-specific implications to develop new context-sensitive theories in HRM.

This study aims to investigate the impact of service employees’ agreeableness personality and daily self-esteem on their daily interpersonal behaviors in terms of interpersonal harmony and counterproductive work behavior toward other individuals (CWB-I). Furthermore, this study examines whether the impact of daily self-esteem on daily interpersonal behaviors is moderated by the quality of service employees’ relationship with their manager and leader–member exchange (LMX).

Using a sample of 111 restaurant employees in China who took daily surveys with 1,412 ratings for 10 consecutive days, a longitudinal analysis was conducted to test the research hypotheses using hierarchical linear modeling.

The results show that agreeableness personality predicted daily interpersonal harmony but had no significant effect on daily CWB-I. It was also found that daily self-esteem predicted both daily interpersonal harmony and daily CWB-I, and LMX moderated the effect of daily self-esteem on daily interpersonal behaviors.

Given the fluctuation of employees’ interpersonal behaviors, organizations should guide the variability of interpersonal behaviors in the positive direction. To promote daily interpersonal harmony and reduce daily CWB-I, managers could focus on recruiting employees with agreeableness, offering daily self-esteem training and enhancing the quality of LMX.

This research is unique in its objectives to examine what influences service employees’ interpersonal behaviors on a daily basis and its methods to implement a longitudinal approach unlike previous studies that often relied on cross-sectional designs to enhance the ecological validity of the findings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the mediating role of organisational harmony and fellow-feelings in the relationship between intelligence generations, dissemination and implementation on business performance and explain how market orientation impacts certain aspects of organisational behaviour which in turn lead to the performance of service firms.

The data set comprises 108 responses of senior managers within the logistics sector. The multi-level sequential mediation path analysis is used to examine the above mediating role.

Results indicate that intelligence dissemination (ID), response implementation (RI) and business performance relationship is significantly mediated via fellow-feelings and organisational harmony. However, the relationship between dissemination, implementation and overall business performance is mostly mediated by fellow-feelings and followed by organisational harmony. Furthermore, when overall market orientation (intelligence generation, dissemination and RI) is used as a determinant of business performance, organsiational harmony emerged as the most significant contributor to organsiational performance.

Managers are urged to focus on building fellow-feelings among their employees, resulting in a harmonious work environment between functional units and market orientation organisation wide.

Compared to previous research, this is one of the first attempts to develop an understanding of fellow-feelings, contributing to organsiational harmony resulting market orientation and, hence, business performance. Market orientation conceptualisations lump intelligence generation, dissemination and RI of business activities together but do not explain how market orientation impacts fellow-feelings and organisational harmony which in turn leads to performance. The authors specifically address this important lacuna in our conceptualisation and propose that ID and RI lead to fellow-feelings within functional departments and results in organisational harmony.