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Until now, very little empirical research has focused on social media adoption behavior within relatively small firms, and fewer still on adoption drivers within the specific context of microentrepreneurs, including that of micro-retailers. The purpose of this manuscript is to contribute to the study on social media adoption at the firm level by focusing on the specific role of institutional pressures, as captured by coercive, mimetic and normative pressures, in the initial adoption of social media in the context of micro-retailers.

This study, based on self-administered questionnaires, collected data from more than 200 micro-retailers in an emerging market and utilized the partial least squares modeling approach.

Findings reveal that normative and mimetic (not coercive) pressures are critical to initial adoption. Additional analysis, though not directly the center of attention in the study, indicates that both coercive and normative pressures are critical to continued adoption, especially for retailers who currently use social media to promote their businesses.

This study represents one of the few attempts to extend the institutional theory to study social media adoption behavior in the firm. In addition, it is the first in the literature to extend the theory to social media adoption within the context of microenterprises, primarily micro-retailers, who form the significant majority in the world.

Rather than overstating the favorable effects of gamification on work outcomes, the purpose of this paper is to present a more balanced perspective into the effects a gamified human resource management (HRM) system may have on creativity at work. This conceptual paper explores and delineates how employees' interaction with gamification features within a gamified HRM system enables and particularly undermines employees' motivation for workplace creative performance.

The cross-disciplinary nature of this paper necessitates the reliance on theoretical principles, the explanatory and predictive capacities of theories central to human-computer interaction, employee motivation and creativity fields. Thus, the tenets of affordance, self-determination and dynamic componential theory were utilized to analyze the affordance of a gamified HRM system for employees' creative outcomes.

It is discovered that augmenting the HRM system with gamification affordance is crucial amid global market change and increasing digitization. However, incorporating game design elements into work systems does not necessarily guarantee an increase in creative outcomes. On the contrary, the system may equally undermine employees' motivation, which in turn hampers their creative outcomes.

Many gamification papers have more often than not touted the positive effects of such a system on the targeted outcome. Based on the affordance theory which shows that a user's interaction with gamification properties could produce different outcomes (not only favorable ones) and considering the intricacies of employees' motivation and behavioral outcomes at work, this paper takes a more balanced perspective to examine how gamification could generate intended as well as unintended consequences for employees' creativity, which is crucial to overall job performance.

The importance of trust in student–university relations is relevant not only for the quality of the educational process and the satisfaction with studying achieved by students, but also for the importance of positive evaluation of HEIs to others. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify the stages and mechanisms that build trust in student–university relations, the causes of trust violation and trust repair practices.

Public university students from Poland (16) and Germany (12) took part in the study based on semi-structured interviews. The research procedure followed an inductive approach. In addition, the critical events technique was used to identify trust violation and trust repair practices.

The study identifies the stages of the HEIs trust building process and the mechanisms upon which it is built. It attempts to catalogue trust violations, distinguishing three groups of “perpetrators” and categories of their differentiation in terms of their impact on trust. The study indicates ad hoc, informal methods of trust repair applied at HEIs and their conditions.

This study provides useful guidance for managers on how to build and maintain trust in HEIs.

The issue of trust building in HEIs is relatively new and therefore has not been sufficiently recognised to date. This study is the first to the author's knowledge to comprehensively address the problem of trust building, pointing out the mechanisms on which the formation of trust in HEIs is based. This study provides a novel contribution to the limited literature on trust violation and trust repair in HEIs.