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This study aims to investigate how credit rating agencies and banks, important credit market participants, incorporate corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related information in their assessment of firm’s creditworthiness.

The authors collect stand-alone CSR reports published by Fortune 500 companies from 2002 to 2014 and use file size as a readability measure to investigate the impact of stand-alone CSR reports’ readability on firms’ credit ratings and cost of borrowing.

The authors find that firms with higher CSR report readability enjoy higher credit ratings and lower costs of bank loans, suggesting that rating agencies and banks perceive lower default risk for firms with more readable CSR reports. Further analysis indicates that the positive association between CSR report readability and credit ratings is more pronounced for firms with high CSR performance. Conversely, the negative association between CSR report readability and bank loan spreads is more pronounced for firms with low CSR performance and credit quality, suggesting complementary roles of rating agencies and banks in their use of CSR reports.

Overall, the results highlight the importance of improving the textual characteristics of CSR reports, especially readability, in reducing information risk in the credit market.

This study aims to examine the effect of cybersecurity threat and efficacy upon click-through, response to a phishing attack: persuasion and protection motivation in an organizational context.

In a simulated field trial conducted in a financial institute, via PhishMe, employees were randomly sent one of five possible emails using a set persuasion strategy. Participants were then invited to complete an online survey to identify possible protective factors associated with clicking and reporting behavior (N = 2,918). The items of interest included perceived threat severity, threat susceptibility, response efficacy and personal efficacy.

The results indicate that response behaviors vary significantly across different persuasion strategies. Perceptions of threat susceptibility increased the likelihood of reporting behavior beyond clicking behavior. Threat susceptibility and organizational response efficacy were also associated with increased odds of not responding to the simulated phishing email attack.

This study again highlights human susceptibility to phishing attacks in the presence of social engineering strategies. The results suggest heightened awareness of phishing threats and responsibility to personal cybersecurity are key to ensuring secure business environments.

The authors extend existing phishing literature by investigating not only click-through behavior, but also no-response and reporting behaviors. Furthermore, the authors observed the relative effectiveness of persuasion strategies used in phishing emails as they compete to manipulate unsafe email behavior.

The purpose of this study was to test the mediating effect of psychological entitlement in the relationship between perceived overqualification (POQ) and workplace ostracism. In addition, the authors posited that POQ would interact with task interdependence to influence psychological entitlement and indirectly affect workplace ostracism.

Using data collected in three waves from 450 workers in a state-owned enterprise, the authors tested the proposed moderated mediation model.

POQ increased workplace ostracism through the mediation of psychological entitlement. Moreover, task interdependence buffered the positive effect of POQ on psychological entitlement.

When recruiting, managers should be careful about hiring employees who are too above the job requirements to lessen employees' POQ and lower its negative impact. In addition, they could reduce the feeling of being ostracized for overqualified employees through increasing task interdependence.

Existing research on antecedents of workplace ostracism had mainly focused on the ostracizers, while largely ignoring the victims. Moreover, of the few studies on the victims of ostracism, most focused on inherent employee characteristics or external environmental factors, while little research attention has been given to employees' subjective perceptions. The present study is among the first to examine whether employees' POQ and individuals' self-perception that their skills, knowledge and abilities exceed the job requirements would lead to being ostracized and if so, how and when.

Drawing upon the career construction theory (Savickas, 2002, 2013) and the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989, 2001), the purpose of this paper is to explore whether, how and when career adaptability influences citizenship outcomes (i.e. citizenship behavior and citizenship fatigue).

Two-wave data were collected from 306 employees working in the operation department of an e-commerce company in Eastern China.

The results showed that both affective commitment and emotional exhaustion mediated the relationship between career adaptability and both citizenship behavior and citizenship fatigue, revealing a dual-process mechanism. Moreover, both the positive association between career adaptability and affective commitment and the negative association between career adaptability and emotional exhaustion were stronger among employees with a high (vs low) level of hindrance stressors.

This study sheds light on the mechanisms and boundary conditions of the career adaptabilities–citizenship outcomes relationship.

This is one of the first studies to investigate the mechanism of the relationship between career adaptability and citizenship outcomes using multi-wave data.

The purpose of the paper is to understand the detrimental effects of vocational delay of gratification (VDG) based on the ego-depletion perspective and to explore the specific mechanism in this dynamic process.

The study used experience sampling to survey 89 employees at 3 time points within each day over 10 days and built a 4-stage sequential mediation model.

Results revealed that, at the daily level, afternoon VDG had a positive effect on end-of-day work–family conflict through afternoon ego depletion. The work–family conflict continued the state of ego depletion to the next morning and led to poor job dedication the next morning.

The findings suggest organizations and employees should consider not only the benefits of delay of gratification (DG) but the costs as well.

The current study is the first to investigate a dark side of VDG and to explore its underlying mechanism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of servant leadership on followers’ subjective career success and the mediating role of career skills. The moderating effect of followers’ proactive personality is also investigated.

This paper collected two-wave matched data from 283 employees of an IT company. The authors use hierarchical regression and bootstrapping to test the hypotheses.

Servant leadership has a positive effect on career satisfaction and perceived employability through career skills. In addition, proactive personality moderates the association between servant leadership and career skills, such that the relationship is stronger when proactive personality is high. Proactive personality also moderates the indirect effect of servant leadership on career satisfaction and perceived employability.

The findings suggest that organizations should select and train leaders to practice servant leadership to enhance employee subjective career success.

This is the first study to investigate the mechanism and boundary conditions of the association between servant leadership and employee subjective career success.

A new method is derived for solving systems of ordinary differential equations of the first order. It is fully explicit, requires no matrix inversion, and shows relatively large time steps. The one‐ and two‐dimensional diffusion equations and the one‐dimensional electron transport equations of semiconductor devices are solved to demonstrate both the accuracy and the efficiency of the proposed method. This method is accurate and efficient when results are compared with analytical solutions.

The aim of this project is to modify and test the executive model of professional teacher training of disaster prevention education.

A three‐level teacher‐training program for disaster prevention education and training curricula is designed for campus disaster mitigation. The designed disaster prevention education in schools focus on the awareness of disasters, attitude toward prevention, preparation beforehand, appropriate countermeasures, scheduled drills, establishment of community‐based prevention units, participation, training programs for teachers, safety warning signs for public buildings, and research on disaster prevention.

The accomplishment of the project includes: the design of a systematic license procedure for disaster prevention for the leading‐level, county‐level, and campus‐level; the design of a systematic curricula for teacher training of disaster prevention and training campus‐level teachers; and the evaluation of the efficiency and performance of the teacher‐training program for disaster prevention education.

A three‐level teacher‐training program for disaster prevention education and training curricula is designed. Statistics analysis of training and learning efficiency evaluation by trainee shows that the designed courses are efficient and practical. The project cultured 310 campus‐level disaster prevention teachers and more than 1,000 licensed teachers trained that follow the training program in Taiwan.

The purpose of this paper is to study the problem of a routing problem with uncertain try-on service time (VRPUS) for apparel distribution, and to devise solution strategies coping with the uncertainty by an evolutionary algorithm. VRPUS belongs to the category of practical routing models integrated with uncertain service times. However, in the background of apparel distribution, it has distinct features. The try-on service will improve the customer satisfaction by providing experiences to customers; the return cost is saved; the customer loyalty is improved for experiencing face-to-face try-on services. However, the uncertainty of try-on service time makes the apparel distribution process uncertain and incurs additional risk management cost, such that the logistics companies should optimally make decisions on the choice of the service and the service processes.

This paper devised a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model for the base vehicle routing problem (VRP) and then it is extended to support the solution strategies for uncertain try-on times. A try-on time estimation parameter and a time reservation parameter are used to cope with the uncertain try-on time, and the try-on rejection strategy is applied when the uncertain try-on time is realized at customer and no surplus time can be used for try-on service besides distributing to remainder customers. Due to the computational complexity of VRPUS, an evolutionary algorithm is designed for solving it. These parameters and strategy options are designed for the operational decisions by logistics companies. Finally, a decision support system (DSS) is designed.

Five experimental scenarios are performed to reveal the impacts of parameters and solution strategies coping with uncertain try-on time on the distribution cost, return cost, and the try-on service failure. The tuning methods are designed to assist the decisions by logistics companies.

A new routing problem is addressed for apparel distribution in fashion industry especially in the context of booming apparel e-commerce, which is a VRP with uncertain try-on service time for apparel distribution; three strategies are developed to cope with the try-on time uncertainty. The proposed method is also a theoretical base for designing a practical DSS for logistics companies to provide try-on service to customers.

The purpose of this paper is to study the problem of clothing uniform assignment (CUA) and propose an immune co‐evolutionary algorithm to search optimal assignments of uniform garments to employees.

Multi‐size fitting measures are proposed based on multi‐attribute decision making. An immune co‐evolutionary algorithm incorporating immune inspired mechanisms is proposed to search optimal assignments.

The experimental results show promising performance. The model and the algorithm are aiming at a valuable problem and can be incorporated into the information systems for large‐scale industrial companies.

Uniform assignment problem is modeled with garment size fitting constraints. Multi‐size fitting measures are proposed based on multi‐attribute decision making and an immune co‐evolutionary algorithm is proposed to search optimal assignments.