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The purpose of this study was to develop a measurement instrument for organizational learning capability (OLC) in a Chinese management context. Previous research has indicated a need for measurement instruments with proven ecological validity in China, because the learning capability of organizations is influenced by the organization’s external environment.

The authors followed a consequent inductive procedure from item sampling through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and nomological validation. The initial part sampled relevant descriptors from a diverse sample of 159 employees from heterogeneous backgrounds in China. After sorting by an expert panel, EFA of data from a sample of 161 executive students yielded a three-dimensional construct comprising knowledge acquisition, knowledge sharing and knowledge utilization. These three constructs were again tested in CFA using a sample of 357 employees from five companies.

The findings across the three samples resulted in a three-dimensional measurement scale that is called as the organizational learning capability questionnaire (OLCQ). The OLCQ displayed high internal consistency, reliability and nomological validity.

This focus of this study has only been to establish a measurement instrument that allows indigenous research on organizational learning in China. The approach was statistically driven grounded approach, not a theoretical assumption of learning mechanisms special to the Chinese culture. Further research is needed to estimate how this approach yields results that are different from other cultures or the extent to which our findings can be explained by features of the Chinese culture or business environment.

This study offers a practical measurement instrument to assess practical and scientific problems of organizational learning in China.

The work here emphasizes the necessity of a knowledge sharing community for organizational learning to appear. It addresses a call for more indigenous Chinese management research.

The authors provide a measurement instrument for OLC with proven ecological validity and with promising consequences for research and practice in China. The instrument is empirically grounded in the practices and behaviors of Chinese managers, avoiding biases that stem from previously identified shortcomings in cross-cultural management research. To the knowledge, it is the first of its kind and a contribution to a call for indigenous management theories with contextual validity.

Despite its flourishing development since first proposed, job crafting literature has provided limited insights into why people craft their jobs. This study theoretically develops a two-dimensional integrative framework for the motives of job crafting, including orientation (self-oriented vs work-oriented vs other-oriented) and self-determination (autonomous vs introjected vs external) dimensions. We further investigate the specific motives of job crafting from actor and observer perspectives.

We conducted two critical-incident recall surveys among 120 and 100 employees from varied sectors and organizations, who responded from the actor and observer perspective respectively. 395 and 299 valid open-ended responses were then collected and coded following the steps for content analysis.

Drawing from the proposed two-dimensional theoretical framework, we identified 16 specific job crafting motives from actor and observer perspectives.

Our findings remind managers to pay attention to employees' motives of job crafting and take appropriate managerial actions according to their varied motives.

By incorporating job crafting from the motivation literature and identifying diversified motives that drive employees to engage in job crafting, this qualitative study contributes to both the job crafting literature and the broader application of self-determination theory in the field of organizational behavior.

Taking attribution theory as an overarching framework, the study aims to examine how employees attribute and respond to a colleague's approach crafting.

Two complementary studies, including a scenario experiment (Study 1; N = 114) and an online survey (Study 2; N = 220), were conducted to test the hypothesized model.

Study 1 found support for the attribution of a prosocial motive to approach crafting, which in turn led to more social support and less social undermining among observers. This mediation was stronger when the job crafter was perceived as less other-oriented. Study 2 replicated the findings of Study 1 and further showed that when observers attributed both high impression management and prosocial motives to approach crafting, the positive relationship between their prosocial motive attribution and social support for the job crafter got weakened, while the negative relationship between their prosocial motive attribution and social undermining of the job crafter was strengthened.

The findings demonstrate that approach crafting gives rise to specific attributions and reactions toward the job crafter, which enrich the understanding of the social consequences of job crafting in the workplace.

Despite its practical importance, the emotion of awe has received scant research attention in the organizational literature. To facilitate future scholarship on this important topic, the authors explore and compare the elicitors of awe at work in three countries representing two culture clusters, including the USA and Canada (the Anglo cluster) and China (the Confucian Asia cluster).

The authors gathered responses from 163 working adults from the USA and Canada and 126 working adults from China using open-response survey, and analyzed each response following the guidance of grounded theory.

Across cultures, there are 10 common elicitors of awe, including virtue of organization, ability and achievement of organization, beauty of workplace, virtue of colleagues, ability and achievement of colleagues, dedication of colleagues, charisma of colleagues, status and power of colleagues, personal growth and achievement and perceived meaningfulness. Looking within cultures, the authors found two awe elicitors that are specific to China: status and power of organization, and work content.

Organizations and supervisors wishing to induce the emotion of awe would be well-advised to pay attention to the design of their workplace, as well as their attitudes and behaviors toward employees, customers and the general public.

This study contributes to the emotion literature, organizational literature and cross-cultural literature by demonstrating elicitors of awe in the workplace across the Anglo cluster and the Confucian Asia cluster.

In this “Info-plosion” era, recommendation systems (or recommenders) play a significant role in finding interesting items in the surge of online digital activity and e-commerce. The purpose of this paper is to model users' preference evolution to recommend potential items which users may be interested in.

A novel recommendation system, namely evolution-learning recommendation (ELR), is developed to precisely predict user interest for making recommendations. Differing from prior related methods, the authors integrate the matrix factorization (MF) and recurrent neural network (RNN) to effectively describe the variation of user preferences over time.

A novel cumulative factorization technique is proposed to efficiently decompose a rating matrix for discovering latent user preferences. Compared to traditional MF-based methods, the cumulative MF could reduce the utilization of computation resources. Furthermore, the authors depict the significance of long- and short-term effects in the memory cell of RNN for evolution patterns. With the context awareness, a learning model, V-LSTM, is developed to dynamically capture the evolution pattern of user interests. By using a well-trained learning model, the authors predict future user preferences and recommend related items.

Based on the relations among users and items for recommendation, the authors introduce a novel concept, virtual communication, to effectively learn and estimate the correlation among users and items. By incorporating the discovered latent features of users and items in an evolved manner, the proposed ELR model could promote “right” things to “right” users at the “right” time. In addition, several extensive experiments are performed on real datasets and are discussed. Empirical results show that ELR significantly outperforms the prior recommendation models. The proposed ELR exhibits great generalization and robustness in real datasets, including e-commerce, industrial retail and streaming service, with all discussed metrics.

Virgin Atlantic Cargo is one of the largest air freight operators in the world. As part of a wider strategic development initiative, the company has identified forecasting accuracy as of strategic importance to its operational efficiency. This is because accurate forecast enables the company to have the right resources available at the right place and time. The purpose of this paper is to undertake an evaluation of current month-to-date forecasting utilized by Virgin Atlantic Cargo. The study employed demand patterns drawn from historical data on chargeable weight over a seven-year-period covering six of the company's routes.

A case study is carried out, where a comparison between forecasting models is undertaken using error accuracy measures. Data in the form of historical chargeable weight over a seven-year-period covering six of the company's most profitable routes are employed in the study. For propriety and privacy reasons, data provided by the company have been sanitized.

Preliminary analysis of the time series shows that the air cargo chargeable weight could be difficult to forecast due to demand fluctuations which appear extremely sensitive to external market and economic factors.

The study contributes to existing literature on air cargo forecasting and is therefore of interest to scholars examining the problems of overbooking. Overbooking which is employed by air cargo operators to hedge against “no-show” bookings. However, the inability of air cargo operators to accurately predict cargo capacity unlikely to be used implies that operators are unable to establish with an aspect of certainty their revenue streams. The research methodology adopted is also predominantly discursive in that it employs a synthesis of existing forecasting literature and real-life data for accuracy analysis.

Tourism is one of the largest industries in world and is also emerging in Iran. While the country’s brand is still developing, it is important to investigate how current efforts are working towards ensuring tourists’ satisfaction and positive behavior in terms of intentions to recommend and revisit Iran. This chapter explores how destination brand image, value, awareness, and personality affects satisfaction from the perspective of tourists visiting Iran. The study explores if tourists’ satisfaction impacts their revisit and recommendation intentions in favor of Iran as a future holiday destination. The study results show that branding is a significant determinant of satisfaction and loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to explore structural relationships between quality, destination image, perceived value, tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty with emphasis on the mediating effect of tourist satisfaction on relations between destination image and destination loyalty, and between perceived value and destination loyalty in the context of small-scale sporting events.

Construct validity of the measurement scale was verified by confirmatory factor analysis, factor loadings, average variance extracted, construct reliability and correlation analysis. Reliability of the measurement scale was verified by Cronbach’s α analysis. A structural equation modeling test with maximum likelihood estimation was used to test structural relationships between variables in the proposed model using the responses of 311 participants.

Results showed significant and powerful impacts of: event quality, destination image and perceived value on tourist satisfaction; destination image, perceived value, and tourist satisfaction on destination loyalty and demonstrated; and tourist satisfaction fully mediates relationships between destination image and destination loyalty, and between perceived value and destination loyalty.

The study shows: it is meaningful to include quality and value in tourism destination image-satisfaction-loyalty models; provides empirical evidence that tourist satisfaction fully mediates the relation between perceived value and destination loyalty; and confirms small-scale as well as large-scale sporting events should be viewed as important aspects of marketing strategies aimed at improving quality, image, value, satisfaction and loyalty.