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This paper aims to introduce a new integrated strategic framework entitled, “The corporate identity, total corporate communications, stakeholders’ attributed identities, identifications and behaviours continuum” and elucidates the central and strategic importance of corporate identity apropos corporate communications, corporate image, attributed stakeholder identifications and resultant behaviours. The strategic importance of corporate identity is noted. The continuum incorporates a variety of disciplinary/theoretical perspectives.

The paper/framework is informed by corporate marketing and strategic perspectives; legal theory of the firm; social identity branch theories; and stakeholder theory. The effects and management of corporate identity are seen as a continuum. The framework accommodates Tagiuri’s (1982) scholarship on corporate identity.

This paper formally introduces and explicates “The corporate identity, total corporate communications, stakeholders’ attributed identities, identifications and behaviours continuum”. Corporate identity management is an on-going strategic senior management/strategic requisite. Notably, the legal theory of company law – routinely overlooked – and its impact on corporate identity management is accepted, acknowledged and accommodated. The importance of stakeholders and stakeholder identification (a derivative of social identity theory) is underscored.

Via the explication of the continuum, managers can comprehend the nature and importance of corporate identity; appreciate that corporate identity adaptation/change is on-going; comprehend its interface/s with corporate communications, stakeholder attributed identities, identifications and the business environment; understand the need for on-going fidelity to an institution’s legally based core purposes and corporate identity traits (juridical identity); cognise the efficacy of constant stakeholder and environmental analysis. Corporate identity sustainability requires corporate identity to be advantageous, beneficial, critical, differentiating and effectual. Stakeholder prioritisation is not solely dependent on power, legitimacy and urgency but on legality, efficacy, ethicality and temporality.

The resultant framework/approach, therefore, aims to make a meaningful advance on the territory and, moreover, seeks to be of utility to scholars and practitioners of corporate marketing, strategy and company law. Arguably, therefore, the framework is more ambitious than extant framework on the domain. The resultant framework/approach, therefore, aims to make a meaningful advance on the territory and seeks to be of utility to scholars and practitioners of corporate identity, communications, images, identification, stakeholder theory, company law and, importantly, corporate strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether customer-company identification (CCI) can transfer from one organization to the next within the context of service alliances.

A between-subjects experiment using a fictitious alliance and a field study focused on a real alliance tests identification transfer at the time of a service alliance announcement and while the service alliance is in operation.

Identification transfer is enabled by an exclusive service alliance but not an inclusive one. For identification transfer to be maintained, customers must perceive the companies as a coherent group (i.e. high entitativity) and have close physical proximity to the alliance.

By drawing heavily on self-categorization theory for the proposed effects, the current research provides a new theoretical framework to the service and brand alliance literature that contrasts with the attitude-based theories commonly used. Furthermore, the current research explores how company-company relationships influence CCI whereas most research has focused on characteristics of the customer-company relationship. These two differences suggest service alliances provide more value to the companies and customers than currently realized.

The traditional and still dominant logic among nearly all empirical positivist researchers in schools of management is to write symmetric (two-directional) variable hypotheses (SVH) even though the same researchers formulate their behavioral theories at the case (typology) identification level. Cyert and March’s (1963), Cyert, R. M., & March, J. G. (1963). A behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall), Howard and Sheth’s (1969, Howard, J. A., & Sheth, J. N. (1969). The theory of buyer behavior. New York, NY: Wiley), and Miles, R. E., & Snow, C. C.’s (1978, Miles, R. E., & Snow, C. C. (1978). Organizational strategy, structure, and process. [A. D. Meyer, collaborator; H. J. Coleman Jr., contributor]. New York, NY: McGraw Hill) typologies of organizations’ strategy configurations (e.g., “Prospectors, Analyzers, and Defenders”) are iconic examples of formulating theory at the case identification level. When testing such theories, most researchers automatically, nonconsciously, switch from building theory of beliefs, attitudes, and behavior at the case identification level to empirically testing of two-directional relationships and additive net-effect influences of variables. Formulating theory focusing on creating case identification hypotheses (CIH) to describe, explain, and predict behavior and then empirically testing at SVH is a mismatch and results in shallow data analysis and frequently inaccurate contributions to theory. This chapter describes the mismatch and resulting unattractive outcomes as well as the pervasive practice of examining only fit validity in empirical studies using symmetric tests. The chapter reviews studies in the literature showing how matching both case-based theory and empirical positivist research of CIH is possible and produces findings that advance useful theory and critical thinking by executives and researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of identity-based relationships, customer brand identification and peer identification, in driving customer outcomes including customer experiential hedonic value, social influence and repurchase intentions through the effects on value co-creation among customers and competitor brand hate, while taking into consideration the moderating impact of individualism.

The study integrates social identity theory, identity-based marketing perspective and self-construal theory to develop relationships. The data comprises a web-based survey of customers in the USA and was analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Customer brand identification and peer identification are drivers of value co-creation among customers, which leads to favorable outcomes at the customer and brand levels. Customer brand identification drives customers to hate competing brands, which, in turn, motivates customers to exert social influence in favor of their brand and to hold additional repurchase intentions. Customer brand identification and peer identification play different roles in motivating customers to co-create value with their fellows and drive customers to feel hatred toward competing brands contingent on customer individualism.

Customer brand identification and peer identification play different roles in engaging customers in value co-creation with their peers and competing brands have with their rivals. Individualism self-construal holds a dual role when interacting with customer identification. The study fills multiple gaps in the literature by examining additional effects of customer brand identification and peer identification and exploring a relatively new dimension of the value co-creation process, as well as the role of customers in the competition between brands.

Brands need to view customers who identify with them as socially active customers capable of participating in value co-creation with other customers and engaging in the rivalry faced by the brands. Moreover, brands are required to build and nurture relationships that are based on social identification to encourage customer brand identification and peer identification which results in favorable customer and business outcomes.

This study examines the effects of two forms of customer identification on value co-creation between customers and competitor brand hate. In addition, it identifies the dual moderating role of customer individualism on the effects of both social identification forms. The study fills multiple gaps in the literature by understanding new aspects of customer identification, value co-creation and brand hate.

The purpose of this paper extends the authors’ previous contributions on aircraft system identification, such as open loop identification or closed loop identification, to cascade system identification. Because the cascade system is one special network system, existing in lots of practical engineers, more unknown systems are needed to identify simultaneously within the statistical environment with the probabilistic noises. Consider this problem of cascade system identification, prediction error method is proposed to identify three unknown systems, which are parameterized by three unknown parameter vectors. Then the cascade system identification is transferred as one parameter identification problem, being solved by the online subgradient descent algorithm. Furthermore, the nonparametric estimation is proposed to consider the general case without any parameterized process. To make up the identification mission, model validation process is given to show the asymptotic interval of the identified parameter. Finally, simulation example confirms the proposed theoretical results.

Firstly, aircraft system identification is reviewed through the understanding about system identification and advances in control theory, then cascade system identification is introduced to be one special network system. Secondly, for the problem of cascade system identification, prediction error method and online subgradient decent algorithm are combined together to identify the cascade system with the parameterized systems. Thirdly from the point of more general completeness, another way is proposed to identify the nonparametric estimation, then model validation process is added to complete the whole identification mission.

This cascade system corresponds to one network system, existing in lots of practice, such as aircraft, ship and robot, so it is necessary to identify this cascade system, paving a way for latter network system identification. Parametric and nonparametric estimations are all studied within the statistical environment. Then research on bounded noise is an ongoing work.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, research on aircraft system identification only concern on open loop and closed loop system identification, no any identification results about network system identification. This paper considers cascade system identification, being one special case on network system identification, so this paper paves a basic way for latter more advanced system identification and control theory.

This study examined the effect of professional identification on several job attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and career satisfaction), and explored the moderating roles of gender and organizational tenure on these relationships. Informed by social identity theory, gender role theory, and organizational socialization theory, several hypotheses were developed and tested with a data set consisting of 309 salaried lawyers collected in Hong Kong. Regression analysis revealed that (1) professional identification had a significant positive effect on both job satisfaction and organizational commitment, (2) gender moderated the relationship between professional identification—job satisfaction and professional identification—organizational commitment, and (3) organizational tenure moderated the relationship between professional identification and job satisfaction as well as the relationship between professional identification and career satisfaction. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

By drawing on theories of social identity, attraction, social comparison and consumer identification, this research seeks to examine how consumers' perceptions of other customers of an organisation (the other customer effect) may have an influence on corporate image and consumer‐company identification. This study aims to test a model integrating these constructs in two contexts, i.e. products and services. It also seeks to investigate the attitudinal and behavioural consequences of a favourable corporate image in order to provide more insights to the argument that a corporate marketing approach helps to enhance marketing performance.

A survey of a convenience sample of 383 adult consumers is conducted. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is employed in order to test the proposed model. An alternative model is examined both in products and in services contexts.

The results indicate that perceptions about other customers influence customers' affective and behavioural reactions towards a company for both products and services. This finding suggests that corporate‐level marketing activities aiming to increase interaction among consumers lead to favourable corporate image and higher consumer‐company identification and hence desirable marketing outcomes. Furthermore, results show that for services the other customer effect is more prominent than for product offerings.

This study extends the concept of other customer effect to the context of corporate image and consumer‐company identification studies. It provides evidence that shifting towards corporate‐level marketing gives organisations another avenue for gaining a distinct position in the minds of consumers. Furthermore, by addressing both service and product contexts, it shows that other customer effect may exist beyond services studies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if personal identification could explicate the black box between participative leadership and employee ambidexterity. Also, the authors aim to explore how and why the top-down effects of higher-level leadership styles affect lower-level outcomes.

The authors collected multilevel and multisource data from top manager teams, and unit managers and employees of research and development, marketing and sales, and operations from Taiwanese technology firms.

The results revealed that individual-level personal identification partially mediated the relationship between firm-level participative leadership and individual-level employee ambidexterity, and individual-level coworker social support moderated the effect of firm-level participative leadership on individual-level employee ambidexterity through individual-level personal identification.

This paper demonstrated the importance of participative leadership and personal identification. It contributed to profound comprehension for potential mechanisms of individual-level personal identification and an enhancer of individual-level coworker social support why and how affects firm-level participative leadership on individual-level employee ambidexterity.

Prior researches have indicated that leadership had an important impact on employee creativity. However, the authors know little about the link between the dark side of leadership-abusive supervision, and employee creativity, as well as its underlying mechanisms. Combining psychological safety theory and social identification theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between abusive supervision and employee creativity and the mediating role of psychological safety and organizational identification between abusive supervision and employee creativity.

The authors conducted a multi-source and time-lagged data collection. At Time 1, team members evaluated abusive supervision and psychological safety, and at Time 2, team members evaluated organization identification, and team leaders evaluated members’ creativity. Abusive supervision, psychological safety were evaluated at first stage and organizational identification, creativity were evaluated at second stage, being conducted 2-4 weeks later after the first stage. Finally 423 participants completed two waves of data collection.

The results suggested that, abusive supervision had negative effects on psychological safety and organizational identification, and psychological safety partially mediated the relationship between abusive supervision and organizational identification, and organizational identification fully mediated the relationship between psychological safety and creativity, and the negative effect of abusive supervision on employee creativity was mediated by psychological safety and then by organizational identification.

This study identifies and examines the mechanism underlying the effect of abusive supervision, and suggests that psychological safety and organizational identification are two important mediators of the complex relationship between abusive supervision and employee creativity. Therefore, this study not only re-examines the inconsistent effect of abusive supervision on employee creativity, but also represents the first attempt at integrating the psychological safety perspective and social identification theory to study employee creativity and offers important implications for theory development.

Customer service is crucial for organizations' survival and competitiveness in the hospitality industry. The purpose of this study is to examine how and when servant leadership affects extra-role customer service.

The hypotheses were tested with a sample of 302 employees from a passenger transport company in China.

Results demonstrate that servant leadership was positively related to extra-role customer service and that this relation was mediated by relational identification. In addition, the mediating effect of relational identification in the relation between servant leadership and extra-role customer service was contingent on prosocial motivation.

The study is the first to explore the relation between servant leadership and extra-role customer service from the perspective of relational identification and the moderating role of prosocial motivation.