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The aim of this study is to examine the existing literature on service robots in order to identify prominent themes, assess the present state of service robotics research and highlight the contributions of seminal publications in the business, management and hospitality domain.

This study analysed 332 Scopus papers from 1985 to 2022 using bibliometric techniques like citation and co-citation analysis.

The study findings highlighted that there has been a consistent rise in publications related to service robots. The paper identifies three significant themes in the service robot literature: adoption of service robots in the context of customer service, anthropomorphism and integration of artificial intelligence in robotic service. Furthermore, this study highlights prominent authors, journals, institutions and countries associated with research on service robots and discusses the future research opportunities in this domain.

This study contributes to the service robots’ literature in the hospitality context by compilation of various reference materials using a comprehensive bibliometric analysis. Previous studies do not point out crucial themes in this area, nor do they provide an overview of prominent journals, institutions, authors and trends in this field. Therefore, this study attempts to fill the lacunae.

Cold calling being one of the most preferred modes of sales strategies in the past, with all digital platforms setting in, is it still the best option a B2B service firm has? To seek answer to this interesting question is the purpose of this paper. The study seeks to understand the contributions of both the sales force and the digital marketing team towards lead conversion. The paper also aims to derive a sense-making model for lead conversion based on a few propositions of the study.

The authors have adopted mixed method approach. The authors have chosen a small enterprise offering B2B services to understand the sales process. The past one-year cold calling data were analyzed. In addition, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted among the managers and the executives of the firm. The study adopts the AIDA model of customer response and the stages of selling process to better map the sales process of the firm. Based on the analysis, a new model is proposed to aid lead conversions.

The findings suggest that cold calling is not an effective mode of sales strategies in this case as the firm experienced a very low conversion rate. However, with the integration of digital marketing efforts with sales process, the sales team could achieve higher conversion rate.

Very few studies in the literature examines the effectiveness of cold calling strategy integrated with digital marketing efforts. This is one of the few studies examining cold calling strategy in B2B service firm in India.

COVID-19 pandemic has overturned the work and family life challenging the world in unpredictable ways that were previously unimaginable. With universities shutting down and emergence of online classes, this phenomenon is prevalent among academicians as well. With this background, the current study aims to investigate the direct relationships between workplace isolation (WPI) during COVID-19 and work–family conflict (WFC) with psychological stress (PS) mediating and organizational identification (OI) moderating the relationship between the two.

The authors employed time lagged survey and collected data at three different time intervals (T1, T2, T3) from 203 academicians working across various universities and colleges in India. The data were analyzed quantitatively using SPSS PROCESS Macro and AMOS.

The results indicated that WPI during COVID-19 has a significant positive relationship with PS and WFC . It was also found that PS partially mediated the relationship between WPI during COVID-19 and WFC. Further, OI emerged as a potential moderator.

Based on the current empirical studies, it remains unclear if WPI during COVID-19 is associated with WFC. Therefore, drawing upon stress–strain–outcome (SSO) model and the conservation of resource theory, this study makes a significant contribution to the existing body of literature by exploring the unexplored associations. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, such an association has not received much scholarly attention before.

The service effort behavior (SEB) of health professionals may be impeded by many factors. This study aims to draw upon the conservation of resources and stressor–strain–outcome theories to test a moderated mediation model that explores how work–family conflict (WFC) influences SEB. The mediating effect of emotional irritation (EI) and the moderating effect of organizational identification (OI) was also tested.

Data was collected over two waves from 524 health professionals working across India and was tested using SPSS PROCESS macros and Amos 24.

The results revealed that WFC has a significantly negative relationship with SEB, and EI mediates the relationship between the two variables. The mediation process was further moderated by OI.

There is an absolute scarcity of evidence that has explored the association of WFC and SEB with the mediating role of EI. Along with offering a nuanced understanding of these relationships, this study also presents some interesting insights to health-care administrators.

Halal and Islamic tourism is gaining attention in the tourism literature in recent years. This study uses bibliometric analytical techniques to explore all the publications indexed in the Scopus database in the broad subject of Halal and Islamic tourism from 2004 to 2021.

The authors found 238 publications that fit the function, subject and set criteria. The papers were analysed in terms of publication by knowledge area, number of studies published every year, contribution by countries, number of authors and most influential journals. VOS viewer was used to perform a visual analysis on co-occurrence of keywords and document citations.

According to the findings, the Scopus database includes 151 (34.40%) documents on business, management and accounting, and 89 (20.27%) documents on social science. It was reported that 29 documents were published in 2018, followed by 54 documents in 2019 and 56 documents in 2021. Malaysia has contributed 86 documents on Islamic tourism, whereas Indonesia has contributed 64 documents. The paper also discusses other interesting findings.

The bibliometric analysis carried out was confined to Scopus data. Other national and international databases were not taken into account for this research.

Between 2004 and 2021, this study examined relevant studies on Halal and Islamic tourism. The study presents a concise review of the literature accessible to researchers working in this area and provides recommendations for future research.

Though there is an increasing corpus of work on contemporary styles of leadership, studies on distributed leadership (DL) are still in the nascent stage. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how DL affects team effectiveness from the neglected perspectives of team cognition, team motivation and team coordination in startup companies using multi-level analysis.

The authors investigated the study variables through the lens of 42 teams in 18 startup organizations operating in India, representing an equitable distribution of the manufacturing and service sectors. M-plus was used to do statistical analysis on the multi-level model.

Drawing upon social exchange theory (SET), results indicated that DL had a favorable impact on team effectiveness and team cognitive processes, team motivation and team coordination mediates the association between DL and individual perceptions of team effectiveness.

Various studies have been carried out relating to leadership and how it impacts effectiveness. However, as far as the authors know, previous studies have failed to empirically address how DL drives team effectiveness by uncovering the mediating impact of team cognitive processes, team motivation and team coordination in the Indian startup context.

Grounded in emotional dissonance and social presence theories, this study examines whether the characteristics of employee–customer interaction (frequency, routineness and duration) and emotional intelligence (EI) have an impact on emotional labor (surface acting (SA), deep acting and naturally felt emotions (NFE)) and whether the type of interaction (face to face, voice to voice and online) moderates this relationship.

A survey method was employed to collect data from employees working in hotels, customer care and e-booking services (n = 604). The model was tested using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The study showed that EI was positively linked to deep acting and NFE but negatively associated with SA. Frequency of interaction had a negative relationship with deep acting and NFE but a positive association with SA. Duration of interaction (DOI) had a positive relationship with deep acting and NFE but a negative association with NFE. Routineness of interaction had a negative relationship with deep acting and NFE but surprisingly had a negative relationship with SA. Online interaction moderated the relationship between EI and deep acting.

This pioneering study examines the relationship between EI and characteristics of employee–customer interaction with emotional labor in the Indian hospitality context. While the association between EI and emotional labor has been studied, this study is unique in substantiating the moderating effects of interaction type and is among the first to do so empirically.

This study aims to evaluate the thermal performance of phase change materials (PCMs) microcapsules (MCs) attached using SiO₂ microspheres and investigate the thermal regulation effect on the coated denim fabric.

The PCM microcapsule was prepared by in situ polymerization using a mixture of solid paraffin and butyl stearate as core material (CM) and methyl methacrylate as a monomer. The SiO₂ microparticles were attached to the outer layer of the membrane to enhance the thermal performance of MCs. The morphology, chemical structure, latent heat storage and thermal resistance of MCs were characterized. PCM MCs were coated on the denim fabric and thermo-gravimetric analysis was conducted; thermal insulation and thermal infrared imaging performance of the coated fabrics were also investigated.

The diameters of SiO₂ particles and PCMs MCs were 300-500 nm and 1 μm, respectively. SiO₂ was wrapped on single-wall PCMs MCs with the mass ratio of 1:5. With the addition of SiO₂, the phase transition temperature range of MCs increased from 34°C to 39°C, and the endothermic and exothermic latent heat decreased by 5.35 J/g and 10.07 J/g, respectively. The degradation rate of MCs was significantly slowed down at high temperature. The denim fabric coated with MCs revealed thermal regulation property. After absorbing heat, the MCs slowed down the rate of heat loss and extended the heat release time.

The phase transition temperature of the composite CM was wide, and the latent heat storage was reduced. The addition of SiO₂ particles can significantly slow down the rate of heat loss, but it further reduces the latent heat storage performance.

The method developed provided a simple and practical solution to improve the thermal regulation performance of fabrics.

The method of adjusting the phase transition temperature range of the composite CM is novel and many applications could be found in preparation of PCMs and thermal management.

The purpose of this paper is to study the inhibition effect of (6-phenyl-3-oxopyridazin-2-yl) acetohydrazide (GP4) on the corrosion of mild steel in acidic medium by gravimetric measurements, potentiodynamic polarization, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS).

Weight loss measurements, potentiodynamic tests and EIS were performed during this study.

(6-phenyl-3-oxopyridazin-2-yl) acetohydrazide (GP4) was found to be a very efficient inhibitor for mild steel in 1.0 M HCl solution, reaching about 85 per cent with inhibitor concentration 1.0 × 10-3 M at 303 K.

(6-phenyl-3-oxopyridazin-2-yl) acetohydrazide (GP4) was found to play an important role in the corrosion inhibition of mild steel in acidic solution.

This paper is intended to be added to the family of pyridazine derivatives which are highly efficient inhibitors and can be used in the area of corrosion prevention and control.