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Fake news stories have become a central element of crises that corporate public relations practitioners have confronted. Whether such stories are rumors, outright lies or deliberate attempts to discredit corporations, they have the same impact and require specific strategies for public relations practitioners to effectively respond. The purpose of this study is to uncover strategies to manage crises that arise from fake news and if and how these strategies differ for other corporate crises.

In this multi-method study of 21 in-depth interviews and a 8-person focus group with senior-level corporate public relations practitioners, authors explored decision-making strategies for responding to fake news crises. Transcripts of interviews and the focus group were thematically analyzed.

Results reveal insights regarding how public relations practitioners determine if and when to respond to fake news crises in corporations; what response strategies public relations practitioners have the autonomy to employ for fake news crises in corporations, and how public relations practitioners control media narratives during fake news crises in corporations.

The findings guide public relations practitioners to craft an autonomous decision-making process and effective online listening strategies—establishing a watchful waiting approach—and determine if the fake news issue is a passing moment or movement swirling into a crisis.

Few studies have examined the perspectives of crisis communication experts about minimizing and managing fake news crises. The study identifies opportunities for future research focused on crises originating from fake news and disinformation.

This study aims to examine the effects of the culture for innovation, work engagement and the use of interactive performance measurement systems (PMSs) in the interorganizational accounting processes automation at a shared services center (SSC).

A single-entity survey was carried out at an SSC provider of B2B accounting services of a multinational company in the electrical sector, and structural equation modeling was applied for data analysis.

The results show that the culture for innovation, the work engagement and the use of interactive PMS positively and significantly influence the accounting process automation in the investigated SSC. Moreover, the use of interactive PMS presents a mediating effect on the relationship between culture for innovation and work engagement.

The research findings contribute by revealing that the culture of innovation, work engagement and the interactive PMS support the use of robotic process automation and artificial intelligence in the interorganizational automation of accounting processes in an SSC-type service ecosystem. This highlights the importance of the culture of innovation and the positive feeling toward work being reinforced by the organization and the role of the interactive PMS as a formal instrument to transmit the organizational objectives and provide a common vision.

The study reveals that the use of interactive PMS seems to be an important conductor of the behavior of employees toward the accounting process automation strategy at the SSC, reinforced, in this case, by the culture of innovation and work engagement.

This study examines how potentially irresponsible banking operations affect organisational reputation. A moderated mediation model is applied to explain how major aspects of social irresponsibility affect the relationship between consumer awareness of allegedly irresponsible operations, blame and bank reputation. The empirical context is the Swiss franc mortgage crisis that affected the banking industry in most Central and Eastern European countries.

The research study uses data collected from a large survey (N = 1,000) conducted among Polish bank consumers, including those with mortgage loans in Swiss francs. To test the proposed model, the authors use Hayes' process macro.

The findings show that blame fully mediates the effects of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) awareness on organisational reputation. Three facets of social irresponsibility moderate this relationship. Specifically, the perceived harm and intentionality of corporate culprits cause people to be more likely to blame a bank for the difficulties posed by indebted consumers. At the same time, the perceived complicity of consumers in misselling a mortgage reduces the level of blame and its subsequent adverse effects on bank reputation.

Although a strong reputation is crucial in the financial industry, few studies have attempted to address reputational risk from a consumer perspective. This study helps to understand how potentially irresponsible selling of a financial product can adversely affect a bank's reputation.

The purpose of the article is to examine whether, if Bernays can be cast as “Dr Jekyll”, the personification of “good”, respectable public relations, and Goebbels as “Mr Hyde”, “evil”, disreputable propaganda, a comparison of their writing and work provides an insight into public relations as an activity distinct from propaganda or rather adds weight to the conclusion that both are behaviours of “self-presentation for attention and advantage”.

A comparative analysis of writings and work of contemporaries, Bernays and Goebbels, gathered from original documents, speeches and interviews from the 1920s to the mid-1940s, as well as secondary academic and historical sources, was carried out. The analysis of their views on propaganda and “public relations” was organised using the point-by-point method.

The findings support the conclusion that both activities are behaviours of “self-presentation for attention and advantage”. For Bernays and Goebbels, public relations and propaganda were always self-advantaging communication that drew attention to the positive values and behaviours of the interests they represented and masked the negative ones.

There are striking parallels between contemporaries, Bernays and Goebbels, including working in public opinion management for their respective governments and embracing propaganda as a means of “engineering consent”. Yet, while Bernays has been lauded as the “father of public relations” and “the PR profession's first philosopher and intellectual”, Goebbels is remembered as a “master manipulator”, “probably the most overt and arguably the most important, exponent of propaganda in history”. To the researcher's knowledge, there are no other point-by-point analyses of their work with a view to distinguishing public relations as an activity distinct from propaganda.

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, ubiquitous social media has become a primary channel for information dissemination, social interactions and recreational activities. However, it remains unclear how social media usage influences nonpharmaceutical preventive behavior of individuals in response to the pandemic. This paper aims to explore the impacts of social media on COVID-19 preventive behaviors based on the theoretical lens of empowerment.

In this paper, survey data has been collected from 739 social media users in China to conduct structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis.

The results indicate that social media empowers individuals in terms of knowledge seeking, knowledge sharing, socializing and entertainment to promote preventive behaviors at the individual level by increasing each person's perception of collective efficacy and social cohesion. Meanwhile, social cohesion negatively impacts the relationship between collective efficacy and individual preventive behavior.

This study provides insights regarding the role of social media in crisis response and examines the role of collective beliefs in the influencing mechanism of social media. The results presented herein can be used to guide government agencies seeking to control the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between career adaptability and career resilience. Alongside, the mediating role of career-management fit was also tested on the relationship between career adaptability and career resilience.

Cross-sectional data were collected from the employees of higher-education institutes via an online survey questionnaire. The partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique using the SmartPLS application was employed for the data analyses.

Results showed that career-management fit positively mediates the relationship between career adaptability and career resilience. Further, a direct positive relationship between career adaptability and career resilience was also substantiated.

Theoretical implications, managerial implications, study limitations and future research directions are also discussed.

The authors put forward the field by probing the developmental strategy for career resilience. This is because, in academics, career-resilient individuals can better contribute towards academic growth and can also maintain a good life balance (Mishra and McDonald, 2017). Hence, this study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first to investigate the career-management fit as a pathway bridging career adaptability and career resilience.

This paper aims to focus on the issue of high employee turnover in the Indian tech industry. An integrative review is conducted to analyse the past and current state of literature, as well as prepare a research agenda for future studies.

A pool of 72 articles published between 2010 and 2022 is reviewed with a special focus on Indian tech employees. This study elucidates the extent and impact of employee retention strategies through content analysis.

Two broad perspectives have been established in the literature: the reasons for quitting and the explanations for staying. By means of a comprehensive review, this paper combines these two aspects of literature and suggests factors under organization’s control to retain competent tech employees.

The study is designed to integrate the two theoretical viewpoints of employee turnover literature by consolidating the reasons behind quitting behaviour and staying intention. Codes combining the two aspects are presented as a valuable resource to retain tech talent.

The spread of fake news represents a serious threat to consumers, companies and society. Previous studies have linked emotional arousal to an increased propensity to spread information and a decrease in people’s ability to recognize fake news. However, the effect of an individual’s emotional state on fake news sharing remains unclear, particularly during periods of severe disruptions such as pandemics. This study aims to fill the gap in the literature by elucidating how heightened emotions affect fake news sharing behavior.

To validate the conceptual model, this study uses a quantitative approach. Data were collected from 212 online questionnaires and then analyzed using the structural equation modeling technique.

Results of this study show that positive emotions have indirect effects on fake news sharing behavior by allowing users to view the quality of information circulating on social media in a more positive light, and increasing their socialization behavior leading them to share fake news. Negative emotions indirectly impact fake news sharing by affecting users’ information overload and reinforcing prior beliefs, which in turn increases fake news sharing.

This study identifies several novel associations between emotions and fake news sharing behavior and offers a theoretical lens that can be used in future studies. It also provides several practical implications on the prevention mechanism that can counteract the dissemination of fake news.

This study investigates the impact of individuals’ emotional states on fake news sharing behavior, and establishes four user-centric antecedents to this sharing behavior. By focusing on individuals’ emotional state, cognitive reaction and behavioral response, it is among the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to offer a multidimensional understanding of individuals’ interaction with news that circulates on social media.

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of audit committee financial experts on the risk of financial corruption in public companies.

A time-lagged, matched-pairs sample of 352 corporations was utilized to test the study's hypotheses (176 financially corrupt firms plus 176 compliant firms). To uncover financially corrupt firms, 2,895 Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases from the Securities and Exchange Commission were thoroughly evaluated.

The results show that financial experts on audit committees generally increased financial corruption. However, the impact was reversed when audit committees had three or more financial experts, showing that having at least three financial experts reduced financial corruption.

The study's findings call into question the long-held practice of appointing at least one financial expert to audit committees. This study offers a novel approach to improve corporate oversight and reduce financial corruption by having at least three financial experts on audit committees.

This study aims to conceptualize and investigate the relationships between halal entrepreneurial success, innovation capability and sustainable innovation in the halal industry.

Both integrative and generative approaches are combined to move forward from the literature to a theoretical contribution. The paper presents a model that relates halal entrepreneurial success to innovation capability and sustainable innovation. A purposive sample of 340 Malaysian halal entrepreneurs is used to test the conceptualized model. The partial least square technique was then used to assess the structural model.

The results disclosed that halal entrepreneurial success is positively related to both innovation capability and sustainable innovation. Also, the innovation capability mediates the relationship between halal entrepreneurial success and sustainable innovation.

This research conceptualized and examined a novel model that assesses the relationships between halal entrepreneurial success, innovation capability and sustainable innovation in the halal industry.