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Aims to explore the factorial structure of automobile brand image in the context of a cross‐national study. More specifically, we intend to answer two questions: whether the factor structure of brand image perception differ across countries, and whether these differences are owing to nation's culture and level of economic development.

An existing data set, which consists of data collected from survey research, was employed. Data covering the top 20 automobile markets consisting of 4,320 eligible new car owners. Perception of and attitude towards automobile brand associations were measured using nominal scales.

Provides empirical evidence that supports the applicability of multiple brand image dimensions corresponding to the consumer's sensory, utilitarian, symbolic and economic needs at the global level. The study also suggested that factor structure of brand image differs across nations and these differences might be reflective to a nation's culture and its level of economic development.

As with any empirical study, this research inevitably has its limitations, which presents opportunities for further research: extensions of the present framework to other product categories; extensions of the national factors; extensions of the brand associations; and measurement improvement.

Understanding the similarities or differences of the factor structure of brand image across the globe facilitates the formation of a successful global image strategy. First of all, by exploring brand image structure at the global level; and the specific interrelationships among the corresponding associations

The results derived from the 20 diverse nations in the present study not only enhance our understanding of brand image structure but also provide a strong test of the empirical generalizability of automobile brand image dimensionality and factor structure in a global context.

This paper aims to explore the impact of leadership on organizational change and adaptability in a Chinese business context. Drawing on case data, this study seeks to uncover the factors that would predispose the leaders of Chinese family firms to initiate and implement organizational change and adaptation.

This study is based on 16 in-depth interviews held with key informants from the case firm. Evidence is presented in the form of interview extracts.

Research findings indicate that Chinese firm leaders can successfully facilitate organizational change by adapting their styles to match the changes in the business environment.

The issues identified are explored within a single case study setting, hence future research might replicate these findings to other samples or settings.

To lead organizational change, leaders must first be able and willing to adjust their leadership styles to match the demands of their changing business environments.

This paper adds insight to existing literature on leadership, organizational change and firm turnarounds. This paper also provides an in-depth insight into the factors that influence the leadership and management Chinese family firms.

The purpose of this study is to explore and conceptualize the process of how an emerging‐market firm develops a successful international brand.

A qualitative case study approach was employed in this study. Two rounds of data collection were conducted. Data sources include archival, interview and field notes. A total of 13 in‐depth interviews were conducted. Interviewees were drawn from across different functions and comprised top management to lower‐level employees. Collected data were analyzed in the iterate process, and emergent themes from the case form the basis of strategy conceptualizing.

An effective international branding process can be conceptualized as four sequential strategic steps: create a transcultural brand name; identify a universal appeal for its products; develop a global brand essence; and convey the brand essence through products. The case finding also shows that the ability to fuse three pairs of seemingly contrasting elements across geographical and temporal boundaries is essential in the strategic process. The three pairs of elements include Western and Eastern cultures, historical and modern elements and craftsmanship and mass‐production.

This paper is rich in qualitative detail, but with all single case study research, its limitations regard applicability to other contexts. The applicability may suffer from the idiosyncratic characteristics of the case company as well as the difference between industries and products.

The finding provides insights into how an emerging‐market firm can craft its international brand both faster and more effectively. The identified international branding process has managerial implications for international marketers in both emerging‐market and non‐emerging‐market firms.

The study fills the void in the research of international branding strategy of emerging‐market firms. The conceptualization of an international branding provides a basis for further research on how to effectively craft an international brand.

This study aims to employ a knowledge‐based capability approach to explore how born global firms accelerate their internationalization.

The paper adopts a qualitative in‐depth case study approach. Various types and sources of data were collected to provide a rich and solid foundation for theory development and data triangulation. These comprised semi‐structured interviews, field observations and archival material.

The findings show that the transformation process of international knowledge may more adequately account for the difference in internationalization at conventional globals and born globals than the “indigenous” knowledge resource, i.e. founder experience. Born global firms accelerate their internationalization process through a three‐stage transformation process: knowledge acquisition and dissemination, knowledge integration, and knowledge institutionalization. Two underlying knowledge mechanisms are identified: vertical and horizontal knowledge thrust.

The knowledge transformation process constitutes the basis of “acceleration” of born globals' internationalization. The speed of a born global's internationalization is rooted in its ability to transform internationalization knowledge resident in individual employees into organizational strategies and operational procedures. The finding bridges the gap by identifying effective organizational mechanisms in management of the knowledge process. The “speed‐up” mechanism identified in this research can equip born globals as well as conventional globals with the ability to respond quickly in a dynamic international environment.

Earlier research has identified adaptive leadership strategies and organizational culture as two key factors that influence a firm's adaptive capabilities. However, little is known about how leadership and organizational culture affect each other. Nor do the authors know how the combined effects of adaptive leadership and culture facilitates organizational adaptation over time. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap by using a co-evolutionary perspective to enhance the understanding of this phenomenon.

Data were collected through informant interviews, observations and archival material.

Study findings reveal that leaders can enhance organizational adaptability by creating an appropriate context to guide the co-evolutionary interactions between their leadership strategies, organizational culture and employees towards the ongoing achievement of firm goals.

The study enhances the understanding of how leaders facilitate organizational adaptability, especially in a family business context.

The paper research objectives are: to investigate into the classification of special interest tour preferences in terms of their types and to compare whether consumers with different demographic attributes result in discrepancies in special interest tour preferences.

Those collected questionnaires that had incomplete answers and that had a significant response tendency or were left blank with no answers were eliminated. The required statistical methods are explained thus: this study conducts analysis on special interest tour preferences by factor analysis to distinguish between the categories of special interest tour preferences; this study adopts correlation analysis to examine the ratio scale of the study's demographic variables, including age and education level; this study adopts one‐way ANOVA to examine the variables of categorical or nominal scale, such as gender, marital status, and occupation.

After collecting the questionnaire data, factor analysis is used to conduct classification of the types and a total of four types emerged: recreation type, nature/ecology type, physical adventure type, historical/artistic activity type. Furthermore, in the verification of the demographic variables of each type preferences: age and nature‐eco type preferences constitute a significant positive correlation, and age has also formed a significant negative correlation with physical adventure type; gender differences result in a significant difference in recreation type preferences and a significant difference in physical adventure type preferences; marital status has a significant variation regarding physical adventure preferences.

Special interest tours are gradually on the rise and the previous literature is still lacking a systematic method for investigative analysis. Accordingly, conducting a systematic categorization of special interest tour preferences and to examining the background of the consumers of each type of special interest tour preference is essential.

The necessity for special interest tours to conform to consumer interests, and the existence of special interests, require that those in the travel industry conduct market segmentation, prior to designing travel itineraries, so as to have an understanding of the target market. Furthermore, the types of special interest tour preference this study provides can offer the basis for discussion of relevant issues for those travel business industry operators in the industry and future researchers.

Building on the conservation of resource theory, the authors posit work-life support as an essential resource for middle managers. This paper aims to explore the positive association between work-life support, positive emotion, job satisfaction and happiness. The paper also assesses the moderating role of work pressure on work-life support and positive emotion relationship on the one hand and flextime on positive emotion and job satisfaction on the other.

Data collected from 512 middle managers of small and medium-sized firms including manufacturing, service and finance sectors in Taiwan were used to test the hypotheses.

The results reveal that work pressure strengthens the effect of work-life support on positive emotions, whereas time flexibility weakens the effect of positive emotion on job satisfaction. Work-life support positively influences happiness through the intervening variables of positive emotion and job satisfaction.

The paper highlights the importance of creating a positive work environment, as empowering middle managers with work-life support can help them handle work pressure and work-life conflict. The negative influence of flextime on positive emotion and job satisfaction highlights the need for effective handling of flextime.

This paper examines the work-life support and happiness of middle managers in the Chinese cultural context which has been under-explored. This paper expands the external validity of previous research results of Western samples by finding the positive influence of work pressure on work-life fit and positive emotion and negative influence of flextime on positive emotion and job satisfaction link.

This research probes into the execution of small and medium‐sized enterprises’ value creativities by a difference analysis with different classifications, different capital, different turnover, different employees, and different established years. This study develop a questionnaire about value creativity with five dimensions and thirty‐five items according to “Valuation” by McKinsey and Company, Inc. and Copeland et al., such as: “Aspiration and target,” “Portfolio management,” “Organization design,” “Process management,” and “Business and individual performance management.” The results are as follows: (1) Most small and medium‐ sized enterprises (SMEs) have executed value creativities; (2) There is a difference in the execution of value creativities between the livelihood industry and the chemical industry; the execution of value creativities by livelihood industry is better than the chemical industry; (3) For value creativities of the execution of different capital and turnover for SMEs, bigger entities are better than smaller ones; (4) For the value creativities of the execution of different numbers of staff in SMEs, those with more staff are better than those with fewer staff; (5) For the value creativities of the execution of different established years for SMEs, those established longer are better than those established shorter.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the impact of a corporate brand on consumer satisfaction and ascertain which corporate brand attributers had the most influential effects on consumer satisfaction.

Using a multiple regression method and an Australian sample of 235 consumers, this paper tests a relationship between consumer-perceived corporate brand and consumer satisfaction.

The results demonstrate that a corporate brand acts as a critical predictor of consumer satisfaction thus providing support for the research proposition. The three components of consumer value (functional, emotional and symbolic) were found to be critical and consistent predictors of consumer satisfaction. Corporate associations and core organizational values were also found to be the drivers of consumer satisfaction.

Although the cross-sectional nature of data collection method limits the data to a single point in time; this research contributes important insights into the factors affecting one of the key performance indicators such as consumer satisfaction.

The findings have important implications for a corporate branding strategy implementation and effective corporate brand communications that can be employed for enhancing the relationship with the existing consumers as well as acquiring new consumers.

Consumer satisfaction has primarily been studied as a mediator through which a brand impacts on consumer loyalty. This paper extends existing research by considering a corporate brand as an antecedent and a driver of consumer satisfaction. To address the disparity between operationalisation and conceptualisation of the corporate brand construct, this study maintains a corporate brand is a multidimensional construct and measures it accordingly.

The primary purpose of this paper is to verify the importance of psychological ownership in the organisational context of a franchise by testing predicted relationships concerning feelings of ownership towards branding, legal ownership of complementary assets, organisational commitment, and a willingness on the part of franchisees to diffuse a franchise brand to peers.

Evidence is presented from an empirical study on the largest taxi franchise fleet in Taiwan. Two formal questionnaires/surveys were conducted in May 2005 and September 2005, from which data were collected from 147 franchisees. Regression analysis is employed to test seven hypotheses.

The empirical results demonstrate that analysing the psychological ownership of a franchise brand from two dimensions (i.e. the degree of psychological ownership and the self‐centred propensity towards psychological ownership) sees an increase in explained variance in organisational commitment and brand diffusion in the context of the franchise organisation. It also illustrates that both dimensions of psychological ownership are negatively affected by the ownership of the non‐brand‐specified complementary assets owned by a franchisee.

The majority of previous research has investigated the phenomenon of franchising from the perspective of the agency theory or of resource scarcity; and has focused on the franchisor's concerns. A major implication of this study indicates that these perspectives, while essential, are insufficient in explaining the growth through franchising strategies. Researchers need to consider how to integrate asset ownership (or property rights) and affect elements in order to influence a franchisee's cognition and behaviour entrepreneurially. A limitation of this study is that it is conducted within the respective boundaries of cultural, professional, and industrial factors.

This study indicates that entrepreneurs can achieve better brand diffusion effects for franchise growth if they engage in merging the structures of asset ownership and psychological ownership.

This is the first paper to examine the psychological ownership of branding within the setting of a franchise organisation and highlights the importance of a sense of ownership in entrepreneurship.