Search results

The paper examines financial resilience responses/capacities of governments from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana in relation to COVID-19. It highlights the governments’ fiscal, budgetary and actions as either anticipatory or coping mechanisms towards the pandemic.

Multiple case studies and secondary data were used, including official government documentation/records, expert views, policy publications by supranational organisations and international financial institutions and media reports. Textual analysis was conducted to evaluate the case countries’ resilience.

The paper highlights how governmental budgetary initiatives, including repurposing the manufacturing sector, can sustain businesses, aid social interventions and reduce vulnerability during health crises. In addition, the paper highlights that external borrowing continues to be indispensable in the financial and budgetary initiatives of the case countries. The paper finds that lessons learnt from the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in West Africa within the last decade have shaped the anticipatory resilience capacities of the case countries against COVID-19.

The paper uses the notion of resilience, the dimensions of the resilience framework and the resource-based view (RBV) theory to unearth resilience patterns. This sort of combined approach is new to financial resilience studies.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of personality traits (PTs) of individual investors on their investment intention (II). Further, to study the mediating role of overconfidence (OC) bias and financial literacy (FL) on the relationship between PTs and II.

The present study uses the quantitative approach for the data collection from the sample of 327 Indian investors investing in the stock market. The questionnaire was divided into segments to assess the investor’s PTs, OC, FL and II. The PT has been measured using the Big Five Personality Traits. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the reliability and validity of the constructs. The hypothesis was tested using structural equation modeling.

Findings of the study show that the PTs of an individual investor are associated with FL and II but insignificant with OC bias. Further, the FL and OC bias have a positive and significant influence on II. In addition, the mediation analysis showed that FL partly mediates the relationship between PTs and II.

The present study is helpful for financial companies, government, personal finance advisors and individual investors; they can keep in mind the behavior-related traits that can influence the investment decisions and design the portfolio accordingly. The policy-makers can implement programs on FL to enhance investment decisions in India.

This paper is unique that covers the mediating role of psychological bias, i.e. OC bias and FL, between the PTs and II of an Indian investor.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, huge numbers of employees shifted to remote working, with various consequences for their family and working lives. This study aims to focus on the factors that affect their creativity while working from home. As individual creativity is shaped by context, the authors investigate the moderating role of the domestic environment on employees’ creative contributions while working remotely.

The authors base the arguments on the complexity perspective on innovative work behaviour (IWB) and consider innovation a recursive process in which innovative behaviour can inform, and not simply follow, subsequent creative acts. The sudden spur of the pandemic interrupted the natural recursiveness of the creativity–innovation process and allowed them to empirically investigate the direct and indirect effects that levels of pre-pandemic IWB had on individuals’ creative behaviour. The authors hypothesise that this relationship is moderated by two resource-conserving contextual factors: work–home conflict and a feeling of social isolation. The participants were 803 employees from several Italian corporations. The data were collected during the first lockdown period (April–May 2020).

The findings support the existence of a three-way interaction, suggesting that IWB affects further creative behaviours when both work–home conflict and social isolation are low.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that investigates what happened to employees’ creativity during the COVID-19 massive remote working situation. The results should be interpreted beyond the unique context because remote working will continue.

The mental healthcare is experiencing an ever-growing surge in understanding the consumer (e.g., patient) engagement paradox, aiming to vouch for the quality of care. Despite this surge, scant attention has been given in academia to conceptualize and empirically investigate this particular aspect. Thus, drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) paradigm, the study explores how patients engage with healthcare service providers and how they perceive the quality of the healthcare services.

Data were collected from 279 respondents, and the derived conceptual model was tested by using Smart PLS 3.2.7 and PROCESS. To complement the findings of partial least squares (PLS)-based structural equation modeling (SEM), the present study also applied fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions to explore substitute conjunctive paths that emerge.

Findings show that patients’ perceived intimacy (PI), cohesion and privacy enhance the quality of mental healthcare service providers. The results also suggest that patients’ PI, cohesion and privacy have indirect effects on the perceived quality of care (PQC) by the service providers through consumer engagement. The fsQCA results derive that the relationship among conditions leading to patients’ perception of the quality of care in regard to mental healthcare service providers is complex and is best reflected as multiple and conjectural causation configurations.

The findings from this research contribute to the advancement of studies on patients’ experiences by empirically examining the unique dynamics of interaction between consumers (patients) and mental healthcare service providers, thereby enriching both the literature on social interactions and the understanding of the consumer–provider relationship.

The results of this study provide practical implications for mental healthcare service providers on how to combine the study variables to enhance the quality of care and satisfy more patients.

A significant research gap has ascertained the inter-relationship between PI, cohesion, privacy, engagement and PQC from the perspective of mental healthcare service providers. This research is one of the primary studies from a managerial and methodological standpoint. The study contributes by combining symmetric and asymmetric statistical tools in service marketing and healthcare research. Furthermore, the application of fsQCA helps to understand the interactions that might not be immediately obvious through traditional symmetric methods.

Scholars and practitioners have raised concerns that mandatory remote work can lead to feelings of isolation and alienation in employees. Therefore, this study aims to investigate this issue by examining the impact of work communication satisfaction in remote environments on employee alienation and job satisfaction.

Sensemaking and social information processing (SIP) theory are used for formulating the hypotheses. To test the hypotheses, primary data were collected from 418 employees working in various Indian organizations and analyzed using AMOS and Hayes' PROCESS macro for SPSS.

The findings reveal that work communication satisfaction is negatively associated with alienation and positively associated with job satisfaction. Alienation mediated the relationship between work communication satisfaction and job satisfaction. Additionally, employees belonging to organizations with stronger CSR associations reported feeling less alienated than employees of organizations with weaker CSR associations.

Organizations can improve work communication satisfaction by devising remote communication plans that clarify employee expectations regarding the frequency, purpose and channel of communication. Additionally, organizations should communicate their CSR efforts to employees, particularly during times of crisis, as this can help improve employee impressions of the organization.

The study extends the work on alienation by approaching it from the perspective of sensemaking. The research demonstrates how work and non-work-related social information cues (work communication and CSR associations) can influence employee attitudes through their sensemaking. The context of the study adds to its uniqueness.

Grounded in dynamic capability view, this research develops a decision support model, which enables determining consistent and sufficient configurations of resilience strategies to mitigate vaccine operations and distributions (O&D) challenges and thus improve O&D performance (i.e. O&DP).

Through qualitative in-depth interviews, the authors first identified challenges and resilience strategies related to vaccine O&D. Next, using the quality function deployment technique, three quantitative case studies were performed to determine the most important challenges and resilience strategies. Finally, utilising fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, the authors determine sufficient conditions of challenges and strategies leading to improve vaccine O&DP.

The findings reveal that strategies alone are not effective instead a combination of strategies and nullification of challenges is needed to enhance vaccine O&DP. Further, the findings revealed that not only the presence of challenges, but also the lack of strategies reduces the vaccine O&DP.

The authors' findings will assist the health service decision-makers for strategizing an effective and efficient vaccination program by selecting the right combination of challenges and resilience strategies.

The authors' study develops a novel decision support model and offers significant learning for the future vaccine O&DP.