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Drawing on media richness theory and a framework of interpersonal communication goals, this study investigates how and why the IT industry's top managers use communication media to achieve their interaction goals in e-leadership.

A qualitative research approach is applied to understand top managers' communication media use and interaction goals. The empirical data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 33 top managers from large IT companies and analysed using theory-guided thematic and ideal-type analyses.

Top managers were categorized into three types, based on their communication goals through face-to-face communication. Relationship-oriented top managers pursued relational and communal goals, whereas task-oriented ones wished to achieve instrumental and communal goals. Task- and relationship-oriented top managers pursued relational, instrumental, and communal goals. This study indicates that communal, instrumental, relational, and self-presentational goals influence managers' communication media selection.

This study brings new knowledge to the management communication research field. It expands the framework of interpersonal communication goals by identifying communal goals as a new category, in addition to existing instrumental, relational and self-presentational goals. This study suggests that media richness theory could be advanced by recognizing that a broader set of communication goals – including communal, instrumental, relational, and self-presentational – influences managers' communication media selection.

This longitudinal study focuses on the specific behaviours of both top and other leaders in family firms that are implementing lean and green practices in order to contribute to the sustainability transition.

Over the course of two years and two months, longitudinal comparative case research was carried out within two Indonesian family firms in the logistics and transportation business. Data were collected via of 86 interviews, 37 observed meetings within the firms and 12 work floor visits. The thematic analysis approach was based on the “fuller full-range theory of leadership”.

Over time, the leaders at various hierarchical levels learned to diversify their behavioural repertoire; solely exhibiting the transactional or transformational leadership style was not effective for employees’ adoption of lean and green practices. Instead, the leaders had to integrate the behaviours from the transactional, transformational and instrumental leadership styles.

This study explores the extension of leaders’ behaviours over time. Our findings result in two propositions that theoretically explain the evolved behaviours that steered the organisational transformation towards a lean and green firm. Given its context (i.e. Indonesian family-owned logistics firms), this study offers insights that might generalise to similar family firms in other Asian countries.

The purpose of this paper addresses the issue of inconsistent findings regarding the impact of consumers' need for touch (NFT) on webrooming behavior. It investigates the moderator of maximization by drawing on maximizing mindset theory.

Three studies were carried out to test the hypothesized relationships. The first study investigated the impact of autotelic NFT on webrooming intention. The second study examined the impact of instrumental NFT on webrooming intention. The third study tested all hypotheses by the structural equation modeling approach.

The results confirm moderation by consumers' maximizing mindset. The moderated mediation analyses show that the interaction effect of autotelic NFT and maximization influences webrooming intention indirectly via anticipated sensory pleasure. Likewise, the interaction effect of instrumental NFT and maximization influences webrooming intention indirectly via product fit uncertainty.

The study draws on maximizing mindset theory to show that consumers' autotelic NFT and instrumental NFT drive their webrooming intentions depending on the activation of their maximizing mindset. The nonsignificant relationship between autotelic NFT and webrooming intention in the context of satisficers explains the conflicting findings reported in the literature. Consumers' affective and cognitive responses were also studied to uncover the underlying mechanisms of their webrooming intention. This research contributes to the literature by enhancing the understanding of webrooming behavior.

The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to making workers more uncompromising with respect to issues such as quality of workplace relations and work-life balance. Hence, motivation and leadership style assume a key relevance for keeping the workforce engaged. We hypothesize that individuals may exhibit different preferences for motivational drivers and for leadership style, and that these two sets of preferences might be correlated with each other and with employees’ personality traits.

Here, we empirically investigate the relationship between leadership style and motivation, by also hypothesizing the possible contribution of personality traits. An online survey was developed and distributed to 150 employees or interns/trainees to collect measures related to their preference for leadership, their motivational drivers, as well as their personality traits. The data were analyzed by means of mediation and moderation analyses to disentangle the three-level relationship existing between these constructs.

Our results suggest that indeed there exists a relationship between preferences for leadership style and motivational drivers. Furthermore, one of these relationships appears to be critically mediated by specific personality traits.

This work is the first, to our knowledge, empirically testing the existence of a three-level relationship between leadership preferences, motivation and personality traits of employees and to contribute to disentangle their reciprocal influences.

Thus far, we have treated critical thinking descriptively and analytically in previous chapters. In this, the epilogue, as a closing chapter, we intend to consider critical thinking normatively – what it should be, ideally and holistically. We do this in four stages. First, recapitulating the essential concepts, theories, and paradigms of social welfare, social well-being, and social progress, we suggest that critical thinking should ultimately understand and further social progress and social well-being for all humanity. Second, we submit that the great wealth of corporate and free-market capitalism should – as spiritual capital – benefit all, especially the poor and the marginalized. Third, in order to realize the first two objectives, we posit that critical thinking should be repositioned as the art of aesthetic reasoning and aesthetic rationality such that, fourth, it is best realized within the framework of social mindfulness. We discuss major theories grounding these four parts and reflect on their managerial implications and propose future directions for critical thinking research and development.

The purpose of this study is to clarify why business travel has ambivalent effects on occupational well-being. We examine associations between business travel, career satisfaction and turnover intentions, as well as the mediating role of functional and dysfunctional coping strategies.

We collected four waves of data across three months from 676 employees (n = 147 business travelers who traveled for work at least once during the study period; n = 529 non-travelers) working in various industries and managerial positions.

Consistent with expectations, the greater the extent of business travel, the higher both career satisfaction (mediated by higher emotional and instrumental support, positive reframing, and substance use, and lower venting and self-distraction, denial and self-blame, and behavioral disengagement) and turnover intentions (mediated by higher active coping and planning, venting and self-distraction, behavioral disengagement, and lower positive reframing).

Findings reveal that business travel presents an ambivalent psychological experience and point to the importance of obtaining and using a coping portfolio in this context.

This study addresses functional and dysfunctional coping as unexplored mediating mechanisms between business travel, career satisfaction, and turnover intentions and provides new insights for research and practice on business travel.

Currently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and several outer space industry multibillionaire entrepreneurs – e.g., Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), to name a few – are actively engaged in outer space research that reports innovative advances, such as outer space mining, outer space tourism, outer space medicine labs, outer space terraforming of Mars and moon, and altering celestial bodies and terrestrial humans to enhance extraterrestrial survivability. All these advances induce serious ethical concerns of human identity and dignity and destiny, human rights and privileges over earth and her resources, and cosmic sustainability. Further, the current understanding of sustainability development is highly anthropocentric (i.e., the earth and cosmos are meant solely for man's use) and limited in scope as a terrestrial, temporal, economic, and pro-human project. Critical thinking invites sustainability development to include trans-terrestrial, trans-temporal, trans-economic, and transhuman developments. While outer space research certainly offers great hopes of newer living spaces and resources for mankind already strapped by depleted terrestrial habitable spaces, we believe that this capital-intensive “elitist” unregulated outer space research industry may benefit a chosen few at the expense of polarizing mankind in terms of one's undeserved financial capacities to afford extraterrestrial spaces and privileges while endangering Nature by deploying massive terrestrial energy resources for outer space rocket launches causing trailing cosmic debris and planetary pollution. We frame this complex problem into terrestrial humanist issues versus extraterrestrial transhumanist issues, each domain triggered by pro-planetary versus pro-cosmic breakthrough technologies, thus creating a fourfold framework that enables us to explore a distributed ethical strategic understanding and ethical resolution of outer space ethical concerns.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the cause–effect relationships between workplace friendship and knowledge-sharing behavior, from a static perspective. Furthermore, it investigates the bi-directional relationship between the increase in both workplace friendship and knowledge-sharing behavior over same time periods, and also endeavors to identify whether there is a significant negative lagged effect of the increase in both workplace friendship on knowledge-sharing behavior, and vice versa, across time from a dynamic perspective.

The study conducts a three-wave questionnaire survey to test the research model. A latent change score approach was used to test the direct relationship between changes in workplace friendship and changes in knowledge-sharing behavior.

The findings reveal that knowledge-sharing behavior fosters workplace friendship and workplace friendship promotes the emergence of knowledge-sharing behavior. An increase in workplace friendship promotes an increase in knowledge-sharing behavior over same time periods. However, an increase in workplace friendship will lead to a lagged decrease of knowledge-sharing behavior across time, and vice versa.

The time interval in this study is a little short to capture the full changes in workplace friendship. Some important control factors and mediating mechanisms are not included in the research model.

This study guides managers to focus on various motivators to better strengthen workplace friendship and knowledge-sharing behavior and to consider and effectively respond to the negative side of workplace friendship and knowledge-sharing behavior across time.

This study emphasizes the predictivity of one important interaction patterns, namely, knowledge-sharing behavior on friendship at the workplace, from a static perspective. This study also shows the benefits of an increase in workplace friendship for the development of knowledge-sharing behavior in the same time period. Furthermore, the study presents a counterintuitive finding when taking the lag effect into consideration in exploring the relationship between changes both in workplace friendship and knowledge-sharing behavior, and identifies a negative side of both when viewed over longer periods.

This paper analyzes employees’ perceptions of data collection processes for human resource analytics (HRA). More specifically, we study the effect that information sharing practices have on employees’ attributions (i.e. benevolent vs malevolent) through the perceived legitimacy of data collection and monitoring processes. Moreover, we investigate whether employees’ emotional reaction (i.e. fear of datafication) depends on their perceived legitimacy and attributions.

The research is based on a sample of 259 employees operating for an Italian consulting firm that developed and implemented HRA processes in the last 3 years. The hypothesized model has been tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) on Stata 14.

This paper demonstrates the mediating role of perceived legitimacy in the relationship between information sharing practices and employees’ benevolent and malevolent attributions about data collection and monitoring processes for HRA practices. Results also reveal that perceived legitimacy predicts employees’ fear of datafication, with benevolent attributions that partially mediate this relationship.

This research indicates that employees perceive, try to make sense of and emotionally react to HRA processes. Moreover, we reveal the crucial role of information sharing practices and perceived legitimacy in determining employees’ attributions and emotional reactions to data collection and monitoring processes.

Combining human resource (HR) attributions, HR system strength, information processing and signaling theories, this work explores employees’ perception, attributive processes and emotional reactions to data collection processes for HRA practices.

The paper examines the impact of market power on wages within the context of a developing country, focusing on Brazil.

With access to matched employer–employee data from Brazil, we first characterized the evolution of the local labor market concentration (Municipality Herfindahl–Hirschman Index [HHI]). Then, we built a fixed-effect model with instrumental variables to verify the association between the local labor market concentration and wages. Finally, a difference-in-difference (DiD) was implemented to verify whether a merger transaction impacted the workers’ earnings in the Brazilian banking sector.

The paper’s findings suggest that there may be a negative relationship between market power and workers’ earnings.

This research conducted an in-depth investigation of the labor market power in a developing country. As far as we know, our work is the first to evaluate the extension of local concentration in Brazilian formal labor markets and to illustrate its evolution over the last decades. Additionally, when going through the effects of market concentration on wages, we use a new identification strategy that explores changes in the HHI that are caused by national trends in an industry as a source of exogenous variation. Finally, the last part of the paper assesses the effects of antitrust policy on the labor market, a kind of investigation that is still scarce.