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Drawing on the self-congruity theory and customer engagement literature, this research accounts for the influence of the three dimensions of customer self-congruity on customer engagement with global brands by uncovering the mediating mechanism of brand psychological ownership and moderating mechanism of global connectedness. The research framework is tested across developed and developing country contexts to highlight any cultural differences in the drivers of customer engagement with global brands.

Data were collected from developed (USA; n = 270) and developing (India; n = 273) countries through two online surveys and tested, employing structural equation modeling, across the two markets to investigate cross-cultural variations.

Social self-congruity has the strongest influence on customer engagement for USA consumers, while all three forms of self-congruity are equally important in India. Psychological ownership consistently works as the mediating mechanism across both contexts. While global connectedness accentuates the relationship between self-congruity and brand psychological ownership for Indian consumers, it attenuates the relationship amongst USA consumers.

While prior literature mainly establishes a direct link between self-congruity and customer engagement, this study provides a deeper understanding of the self-congruity–customer engagement relationship by: a) investigating the mediating role of psychological ownership; b) examining the moderating role of global connectedness and c) studying all three forms of self-congruity (i.e. actual, ideal and social) simultaneously. The study, testing the framework in developing and developed country settings, highlights cultural nuances in forming customer engagement with global brands.

This study investigated a new attributional phenomenon in a brand scandal setting in which consumers tend to blame the top management of a brand, even though it was the frontline parties that caused the scandal. The authors termed this phenomenon upward blame attribution (UBA), shedding light on whether consumers in a host country indicate a higher UBA for a multinational (vs domestic) brand scandal, which in turn reinforces their revenge and impairs their reconciliation reactions, and whether these effects are contingent on consumer animosity.

Two experimental studies were conducted with real and fictitious brand/product and country stimuli with 1,399 Chinese participants.

Both studies verified UBA and found that Chinese consumers' UBA is higher for multinational (vs domestic) brand scandals, which drives their stronger desire for revenge and weaker desire for reconciliation. Moreover, consumers with high (vs low) animosity toward a multinational brand's home country reported a higher UBA for the multinational (vs domestic) brand scandal, which in turn reinforces their desire for revenge and impairs their desire for reconciliation.

The study provides new insights into host-country consumers' more severe UBA and responses toward multinational versus domestic brand scandals and the amplifying role of consumer animosity in these processes. It also has implications for mitigating host-country consumers' UBA and negative responses to multinational brand scandals.

This study contributes to the blame attribution literature by verifying consumers' UBA and the country-of-origin (COO) literature by revealing host-country consumers' higher UBA, stronger revenge desire and weaker reconcile desire toward multinational (vs domestic) brand scandals. It extends the knowledge regarding consumers' blame attributions toward the top management of a multinational (vs domestic) brand in scandals and the impact of such attributions.

This paper aims to review the challenges of performance appraisal in organizations and argue that these challenges can and must be overcome.

The authors review research on performance appraisal in organizations and on claims that organizations are abandoning performance appraisal.

Structured performance appraisals are still the norm in organizations around the world. There are clear and practical strategies for improving appraisals. These include improving feedback and removing unnecessary complexity, clarifying the goals of appraisal systems, focusing appraisal on behaviors and outcomes under the employee's control and increasing the fairness of appraisal systems.

Research is needed on the effects of changing the ways performance appraisals are conducted in organizations.

Practical strategies for improving performance appraisal are outlined.

Better performance appraisals will benefit organizations and their members.

This paper refutes the growing claim that organizations are abandoning performance appraisal and illustrates practical strategies for improving performance appraisal.

This paper aims to examine how customer participation in new service development (NSD) and customer relationship management (CRM) technology can improve the NSD performance of manufacturing firms. Additionally, the paper examines CRM technology usage to understand how it impacts new service performance both individually and jointly with customer participation in NSD.

This study is a survey of 216 manufacturing managers who are overseeing the development of new services at their organizations. For the analysis, structural equation modeling is used with Amos 22.0. Measures of all latent variables in the analysis pass the traditional tests for reliability, convergent validity and discriminant validity. Furthermore, the results of a common latent factor test for common method variance and Harman’s one-factor test indicate that common method bias is not a source of endogeneity in the model.

Customer participation has a positive effect on NSD performance. CRM technology usage also has a positive effect on NSD performance. The effect of customer participation on NSD performance is enhanced by CRM technology. The results of a post hoc analysis suggest that the usage of CRM technology has the most benefit for managing the technical aspects of customer participation.

This study has methodological limitations that may impact the generalizability of results. For instance, it is based on cross-sectional self-reported survey data, which is more subjective than longitudinal secondary data. Survey research lacks the depth and nuance of qualitative research designs, which are commonly employed to study NSD. In addition, this study focuses on large US manufacturing firms. The authors do not include small firms or international organizations in the sample. Despite these limitations, they believe the findings can provide significant contributions to the NSD literature.

Although prior research has shown that customer participation and CRM technology can individually influence new product development (NPD) performance, the results indicate they are equally effective factors in the development of new services. Furthermore, the authors show that customer participation can be enhanced via the use of CRM technologies. The interaction is more pronounced within the technical aspects of NSD.

This study contributes to the NSD literature, and it also has implications for managers leading NSD efforts in traditional tangible-product industries. The findings provide additional evidence that customer participation is an effective NSD strategy for manufacturing firms (Morgan et al., 2019). Furthermore, CRM technology is integral to NSD performance. CRM technology not only has a direct effect on NSD performance, but the interaction term of customer participation by CRM technology also has a positive effect on NSD performance.

Scholars have pointed out the need for improvement and refinement in public management research, also depending on the role of public administration for sustainable development. Because government organizations employ a substantial portion of the workforce, management practices in the public sector are critical areas for designing, implementing and delivering policies that can achieve the goals set forth in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. For these purposes, and in implementation of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) programme, Italy recently launched an ambitious National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) which includes, among other things, upskilling goals for staff employed, following the modernization process that has involved the Italian public sector in the last decades, with the Decree n. 150/2009. Aiming both to understand the extent of the application of the reform and to answer some basic questions (why, what and how) concerning Individual Performance Appraisal Systems (IPAS), we conducted a content analysis on the 220 documents already produced by the Italian Ministries. The study has been conducted in two different steps of the reform process and provides solid evidence of the reforms' effects on designing and implementing individual performance systems. The analyzed documents reveal no longer-term vision in implementing the IPAS that involves some critical performance management utilities such as training, development, fair pay and deployment of employees, raising new questions about a sustainable approach to the individual performance management process even in public organizations.

The authors sought to examine how nostalgic feelings influenced purchase intentions of sport fans towards branded merchandise. Additionally, the goal was to test the childhood brand nostalgia (CBN) scale to see if it was an effective measure in this context. This was an important early step in understanding the way nostalgia may influence sport fan's merchandise preferences.

Surveys were completed by 601 fans of two professional sport teams in the USA. These consumers were targeted geographically through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and half given a modern branded t-shirt and the other half a retro branded t-shirt. To examine brand nostalgia in this context, the CBN measure was evaluated and examined to see its impact on each group, using hierarchical regressions.

The results demonstrated that CBN positively impacted consumers purchase intentions in the retro logoed t-shirt group. However, in the modern logoed t-shirt group, CBN did not significantly influence purchase intentions.

The findings of this study suggest that retro merchandise is working as expected, as it is attractive to those who feel nostalgic about their team. Secondarily, this study's findings suggest it may be vital for marketers to be conscious that their retro materials are connecting to the past.

This study was an early examination of a measure of nostalgia and its impact on purchase intentions in sport. The findings suggested that this CBN instrument may be appropriate in retro marketing research, especially regarding sport merchandise. Further, the findings suggest that nostalgic feelings may be influential toward retro merchandise, but not modern merchandise.

This research aims to explore the role of awareness of harm and responsibility for environmental protection in reducing pollution from single-use plastic bags (SPBs) in coastal communities (CCs). To this end, this study develops and tests a unique model that explains residents’ intention to reduce the use of SPBs in coastal regions.

A questionnaire was used to collect data from 721 coastal residents in Vietnam. Structural equation modeling and moderation analysis were applied to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results show that awareness of the impact of SPBs on the environment and human health and awareness of the responsibility to protect the coastal environment significantly affect attitudes and intentions to reduce the use of SPBs. Moreover, such awareness of responsibility strengthens the attitude-intention relationship.

The findings suggest that CCs should not receive a lower priority in campaigns and efforts to reduce SPBs. In this regard, providing residents with free environmentally friendly bags and education programs on the impact of SPBs could be implemented.

CCs are directly impacted by pollution from SPBs. However, little is known about how this affects their polluting behavior. This study shows that CCs are not immune to polluting behaviors and that SPBs can be significant among residents. It also demonstrates that awareness of harm and feeling responsible for the environment are essential drivers of (intended) sustainable behaviors.

Modern careers are marked by periods of feeling betwixt, or “in-between,” – yet, there is no validated measure of this experience, recognized as subjective liminality. The present research aims to (1) operationalize subjective liminality and (2) develop and validate a scale to measure it.

A literature review was used to operationalize subjective liminality, and the scale validation was performed using four separate samples: 150 workers on M-Turk, 151 graduate and professional students at a large Midwestern University, 252 unemployed individuals in the US and Canada, and 416 full-time employed individuals in the US.

Subjective liminality was conceptualized as a second-order latent construct reflected by three dimensions: feelings of anxiety, ambiguity and reduced group identification. A 9-item scale was developed and validated to measure it.

This study clarifies and measures an emergent construct in the career transition and organizational change literature.

This chapter explores the potential impact of middle leaders on their learning environments and on learning outcomes, focusing primarily on authenticity in leadership in schools. In outstanding schools, middle leaders are very active and visible in their curriculum areas, as well as more broadly around the school. They work together to build leadership capacity through the promotion of shared leadership practices based on a collective ethic of responsibility. They actively influence others to break down silos between departments and teams within a school. It is through the quality of their engagements that they project, maintain, and sustain their presence and influence with and on others. The work of authentic middle leaders is transformational insofar as they promote and support transformational teaching and learning for their students.