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As consumer debt can substantially impair subjective well-being, it is crucial for research to gain insights into how consumers can be motivated to improve financial planning. This paper aims to investigate how frontline employees in financial services can help consumers regulate their financial planning behaviors and how financial service providers can effectively support their frontline employees in this effort through leadership and organizational climate.

We incorporate regulatory focus theory and conservation of resource theory to develop a conceptual model that we test in a triadic study with a unique dataset collected from consumers, frontline employees, and managers in the banking sector.

We find that frontline employees must pay attention to the details of consumers’ needs and customize the service to those needs to trigger consumer promotion focus and stimulate consumers’ financial planning behaviors. Moreover, our results emphasize that the organization must act as an integrated entity. Thus, a manager’s servant leadership and an organizational climate of customer stewardship are crucial for frontline employees to transform consumers’ financial planning behaviors.

The study highlights frontline employees’ key role in motivating consumer financial planning behavior, offering a new perspective in transformative service research on enhancing financial well-being.

The findings provide financial service providers with actionable implications for enhancing consumers’ financial planning. This benefits both consumers and financial institutions, as customers with greater spending power can buy more financial products.

This study advances transformative service research on consumer financial planning behavior, which has largely focused on consumer-related or society-level variables, by exploring the role of frontline employees and organizational support in terms of leadership and climate.

This chapter explores the role and impact of adaptive thinking and transformational leadership in developing and leading an enabling culture that aligns with a school’s vision and mission. This chapter will also probe the varying dimensions that enable or inhibit a school culture and the tools needed to shape and maintain it including the challenges posed in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In this chapter, examples of adaptive challenges, data-driven instructions, and effective use of technology, will be referred to as one dimension of a culture that shows alignment or lack of it with the school’s vision and mission, the role and impact of transformative adaptive leadership on school’s overall culture, especially in the UAE, and MENA region. Finally, this chapter will examine the impact of adaptive and distributed leadership in leading a cultural change.

This paper aims to explores the escapist journey that consumers embark on to reduce self-discrepancy, from the motivation to satisfy personal goals to the fulfilment of these goals. Escapism is a powerful concept for understanding why and how people resolve a perceived self-discrepancy. Previous research has provided rich and diverse insights into the motivations and goals, experience contexts and outcomes that are associated with escapism. However, these notions have been explored in an independent, piecemeal fashion that has hampered the development of cohesive theoretical foundations.

The authors conduct a qualitative study, relying on 33 journeys derived from 20 in-depth interviews, to understand and explain how escapism is initiated, formed and relived.

The findings document the existence of a predominantly utilitarian and a predominantly hedonic model, articulating why and how consumers pursue distinctly different types of escapist journeys. Utilitarian escapism is primarily concerned with the need to avoid negative emotional states, prompting consumers to decide impulsively to engage into routinised experience contexts to find relief. Hedonic escapism is primarily concerned with the desire to achieve positive emotional states. It involves lengthy and thoughtful anticipation, promotes consumers to pursue experiences in out of the ordinary contexts, and is realised when consumers obtain reward.

This study’s contributions present significant opportunities for further knowledge development.

The research findings have substantial practical ramifications for industry.

Understanding people’s needs to avoid the stress of everyday life (i.e. utilitarian escapism) and their desires to seek out excitement and pleasure (i.e. hedonic escapism) has important societal implications.

This research provides a robust theoretical foundation for escapism, one that is applicable across multiple settings. Findings are anchored within existing theory to articulate the notions of utilitarian and hedonic escapism, explaining why and how consumers engage in markedly different escapist journeys.

The growing number of firms leveraging social media ads highlight the urgent need for firms to understand social media ads and their effects on consumer perceptions and attitudes. This research examines whether and how different types of social media ads exert influences on ad engagement and how consumers’ psychological characteristics including regulatory orientation and lay rationalism moderate the influence of social media ads on ad engagement.

This research conducts three quasi experiments featuring two types of social media ads – interactive and transactional – to collect empirical evidence. Results are analyzed using ANOVA and Process in SPSS.

This research reveals that interactive ads lead to higher perceived enjoyment and perceived responsiveness, which further lead to higher ad engagement. Promotion focus moderates the effect of social media ads (interactive vs transactional ads) on perceived enjoyment and perceived responsiveness, and lay rationalism moderates the effect on perceived responsiveness, while prevention focus has no such effect.

First, this research establishes the connection between ad types and ad engagement in social media, which offers a new perspective to understand ad engagement. Second, it explores the underlying mechanisms of processing different types of social media ads. Third, it justifies the moderating effects of consumers’ regulatory orientation and lay rationalism on the effects of ad types on ad engagement, providing the first evidence on the moderating role of consumers’ lay rationalism in ad processing. This research helps firm marketers to fine-tune their social media ads according to consumer characteristics.

This chapter aims to analyse how tourism has oscillated from a wicked problem and a geopolitical strategy tool in Brazilian federal tourism public tourism policies (PTP) over the past century (spanning from 1921 to 2022). Recently tourism has garnered significant relevance, emerging as an alternative avenue for development within the constraints and resource limitations faced by the National States. The empirical study collected secondary data from the government official press, encompassing records from the Senate, the House of Representatives, as well as the executive and judiciary branches. Considering this timeframe, a corpus comprising more than 31,000 documents TNAs (‘Tourism Normative Acts’) was meticulously gathered and systematically analysed. Our analytical framework integrates classical geopolitics, with a primary focus on State actors and the nation-building process, and the public policy approach, which is focussed on the degrees of wickedness. Our findings show that (a) the number of international tourists as well as the number of NAT have increased in a considerable way recently, but we cannot directly connect both; (b) three are the periods (1970–1980, 1990–2000, and 2002–2016) in which we can see a tourism geopolitical strategy has been more explicitly and effectively mobilized, and it is not necessarily reflected in the number of NAT, but in the actions generated in each period; and (c) the wicked degree of the tourism policies seem to be reduced according to the more explicit geopolitical strategy is. Despite, the importance tourism has reached, the support system underpinning this endeavour remains deficient, notably in terms of material and financial resources essential for its efficacious execution.

The personalities of leaders have been shown to impact the culture of their organizations and are also expected to have a more distal impact on the firm’s financial performance. However, the authors also expect that leader gender is an important intervening variable such that exhibiting various personality dimensions may result in unique cultural and performance-based outcomes for women and men leaders. Thus, the authors seek to examine first the impact of leader personality on organizational performance, as driven through organizational culture as a mediating mechanism. In doing so, the authors propose the expected impact of specific personality dimensions on certain types of organizational cultures, and those cultures’ subsequent impact on the organization’s performance. The authors then extend to consider the moderating effects of leader gender on the relationship between leader personality and organization. To support their propositions, the authors draw from upper echelons and implicit leadership theories. The authors encourage researchers to consider the proposition within a sample of the largest publicly traded US companies (i.e., Fortune 500) at an important era in history such that for the first time, 10% of these companies are led by women. In doing so, the authors hope to understand the leadership dynamics at the highest echelons of corporate governance and provide actionable insights for companies aiming to optimize their leadership composition and drive sustainable performance.

Introduction: The idea of sustainability has become increasingly popular across many industries. To meet the demands of the present without compromising the capacity of future generations to meet their requirements, sustainable organisations prioritise integrating environmental, social, and economic aspects into their operations.

Purpose: To analyse the inter-relationship between sustainable organisations, high-potential employees (HPEs), and blended learning (BL) effectiveness. Organisations can gain a competitive edge, spur innovation, and contribute to a more sustainable and inclusive future by incorporating sustainability into their operations and offering sustainable workspaces.

Design/methodology/approach: This research approach offers a thorough understanding of the connections between sustainable organisations, HPEs, and workspaces by combining a literature review of 77 research papers, case studies, and surveys.

Findings: The dedication to sustainability draws high-potential workers and environmentally aware customers who favour supporting socially conscientious businesses.

Practical implications: The study provides valuable implications and suggestions for businesses looking to improve their sustainability and recruit top talent. These proposals should include the techniques for integrating sustainability into organisational culture, employee engagement programmes, talent recruiting and retention tactics, and designing environmentally friendly workspaces.

Originality/value: This research approach offers a thorough understanding of the connections between sustainable organisations, HPEs, and workspaces by combining literature reviews, case studies, surveys, interviews, and data analysis.

Criticality cognitions regarding the same workplace event often differ between leaders and employees. Nevertheless, its consequences on employee work outcomes remain unknown. In this study, we draw on cognitive dissonance theory to examine how and why leader–employee differences in cognitions of workplace event criticality impact employee job-related outcomes.

Wu used multilevel polynomial regression analyses from a time-lagged, multi-source field study with 145 leader–employee dyads to test our proposed model.

Leader–employee differences in cognitions of workplace event criticality can bring both benefits and perils to employees. Specifically, such differences can cause employee rumination, which in turn leads to an increase in both employee voice and fatigue.

This study contributes to the event and cognitive discrepancy literature in four ways. First, prior event studies largely adopted a singular employee perspective for investigation (e.g. Chen et al., 2021; Lin et al., 2021). By examining the impacts of event criticality from the dual perspective of leaders and employees, we attain a more comprehensive understanding of the implications of workplace events in organizational life. Second, extant studies have predominantly focused on the dark side of cognitive discrepancy (e.g. Bashshur et al., 2011; Erdogan et al., 2004; Grandey et al., 2013). Our study reveals that leader–employee differences in criticality cognitions can have both a bright and a dark side on employee outcomes, offering a more balanced and dialectical view of the consequences of cognitive discrepancy. Third, drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we introduce employee rumination as an underlying mechanism to explain the impacts of leader–employee differences in criticality cognitions on employee voice and fatigue. Finally, while prior cognitive dissonance research has primarily employed an intrapersonal perspective (e.g. Sivanathan et al., 2008; Pugh et al., 2011; Grandey et al., 2013), our study adopts an interpersonal lens and underscores that interpersonal differences in cognitions can also serve as an example of cognitive discrepancy to instigate internal dissonance processes. By doing so, we enrich our understanding of cognitive dissonance theory.

Artificial intelligence (AI) allows the brand to co-create value with young customers through mobile apps. However, as many brands claim that their mobile apps are using the most updated AI technology, young customers face app fatigue and start questioning the authenticity of this touchpoint. This paper aims to study the mediating effect of authenticity for the value co-creation of AI-powered branded applications.

Drawing from regulatory engagement theory, this study conceptualize authenticity as the key construct in customers’ value experience process, which triggers customer value co-creation. Two scenario-based online experiments are conducted to collect data from 444 young customers. Data analysis is performed using ANOVA and Process Hayes.

The results reveal that perceived authenticity is an important mediator between media richness (chatbot vs AI text vs augmented reality) and value co-creation. There is no interaction effect of co-brand fit (high vs low) and source endorsement (doctor vs government) on the relationship between media richness and perceived authenticity, whereas injunctive norms (high vs low) strengthen this relationship.

The finding provides insights for marketing managers on engaging young customers suffering from app fatigue. Authenticity holds the key to young customers’ technological perceptions.

This research highlights the importance of perceived authenticity in encouraging young customers to co-create value. Young customers consider authenticity as a motivational force experience that involves customers through the app’s attributes (e.g. media richness) and social standards (e.g. norms), rather than brand factors (e.g. co-brand fit, source endorsement).