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Studies have shown that customer orientation has a substantial impact on a business's success. This study examines the effects of positive personality on salespeople's proactive customer orientation (PCO) and responsive customer orientation (RCO) by incorporating the effects of job enthusiasm and transformational leadership.

A questionnaire survey is conducted. A total of 511 questionnaires are received from Taiwan's life insurance salespeople. Partial least squares (PLS) regression is used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that positive personality influences PCO and RCO both directly and indirectly through job enthusiasm. The effect of transformational leadership is also found to be significant. Financial service companies should be concerned about the important role of positive personality and transformational leadership in promoting job enthusiasm, PCO and RCO among salespeople.

Previous studies mostly focused on the direct relationship between customer orientation and organizational outcomes, neglecting the role of individual personality. This gap leaves us wondering how a positive personality influences a salesperson's proactive and responsive customer orientation. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine the mechanisms of a positive personality, job enthusiasm, and transformational leadership on salespeople's PCO and RCO.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of role ambiguity, norms of reciprocity and ethical policy on the insurance agents’ attitude and intention toward selling insurance to high-risk customers.

This study employed partial least squares regression analyses to test the hypothesized relationships in the conceptual model. To ensure that the questionnaires captured the concept as intended, customer risk status and the level of insurance premium were mentioned literally in the scenario.

The findings indicated that the insurance agents’ attitude toward high-risk customers has a significant association with the insurance agents’ behavioral intention. Norms of reciprocity and ethical policy have a significant relationship with the attitude and intention.

High-risk customers may want to buy more insurance. In this case, an adverse selection problem could occur when the insurers lack customer information prior to the insurance transaction. The insurance agents are important marketing channels in the insurance industry. They seek out new customers, gather customer information, and are expected to act in the best interest of the customers. Yet, the insurance agents’ attitude toward high-risk customers is seldom mentioned in the studies on insurance marketing and regulation. This research may make some contributions to the relevant literature because there are few studies in this field.

Sexual harassment is often the result of the abuse of power by perpetrators over victims. This study investigated the effects of customer reward power, customer coercive power, perceived behavioral control (PBC), and personal factors on full-time life insurance salespeople's intentions to report customer sexual harassment.

This study collected quantitative data through questionnaire surveys. A total of 743 valid questionnaires were collected.

Two types of customer sexual harassment (quid pro quo and hostile work environment) were evaluated. PBC was found to be the most influential factor affecting whistleblowing intentions. Regression analysis indicated that customer reward power significantly affected whistleblowing intentions toward quid pro quo customer sexual harassment. The male salespeople experienced stronger customer coercive power than did the female salespeople.

Not every society views customer power and customer sexual harassment in the same manner. By examining Taiwan's life insurance salespeople and including the concept of customer power, this study broadens the understanding of whistleblowing intentions toward the two types of customer sexual harassment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how sales compensation disclosure, salespeople’s perception of corporate social responsibility (CSR) toward customers (i.e. customer-focused CSR), regulatory knowledge and coworkers’ ethical behavior may influence life insurance salespeople’s moral intensity and intentions to engage in misleading sales behaviors.

The hypotheses are analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) regression with the data gathered from full-time life insurance salespeople in Taiwan.

The main findings indicate that disclosing sales compensations will alter the ethical decision-making process of life insurance salespeople. The findings further point out that customer-focused CSR is an important variable affecting moral intensity and ethical intentions.

There has not been any research on the effects of compensation disclosure on moral intensity and misleading sales behavior. The literature gap has led to a poor understanding of the relationship between the compensation disclosure policy and ethical sales behavior. Moreover, previous studies indicate that specific factors (such as moral intensity and ethical intention) are directly associated, while the research shows that as long as a regulatory policy (e.g. the policy of compensation disclosure) changes, the correlation between these variables may shift from significant to nonsignificant (or vice versa). The results are interesting enough to warrant more research, and they also show that the direct link between variables mentioned in previous research is not always stable or universal.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate which factors will affect the insurance claims adjusters’ attitude and behavior intention toward lenient claims handling practices. These factors include organizational justice, behavioral-based control, significant others, and customer complaints.

Data are collected with questionnaires from full-time licensed insurance claims adjusters in Taiwan. Partial least squares method is used to test the hypotheses.

The main results show that significant others and organizational justice have significant effects on the claims adjusters’ attitude toward the lenient claims handling practices. Significant others and attitude have significant effects on the behavioral intention.

The influence of claims management on insurance companies’ operation is quite considerable. Poor claims management may not only harm insurance companies’ finance, but also affect the adjustment of future premiums. Yet, in reality, some claims adjusters are found to make flawed claims decisions. Very few studies discuss this problem. This study provides an initial step toward understanding this issue.

In the insurance industry, it is common for the insurance salespeople to sell insurance products to friends, relatives and associates. However, permitting (or encouraging) salespeople to sell insurance through personal relationships may result in some ethical conflicts. For example, some insurance salespeople may help relatives or friends with pre-existing medical conditions buy the health insurance. Previous studies on insurance fraud have rarely focused on this problem. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effects of guanxi (guanxi refers to the durable social connections and relationships a Chinese person uses to exchange favors for a specific purpose) on the salespeople’s acceptance of customer–salesperson collusions. Two types of guanxi are discussed in the research. The author further focuses on how the ethical attitudes and intentions are affected by the salespeople’s guanxi considerations, consequence evaluations, perception of peers’ attitudes, perceived harm to other policyholders and perceived probability of being caught.

Full-time life insurance salespeople from Taiwan were surveyed, and partial least squares method was used in the study.

The results showed that the types of guanxi, guanxi considerations, consequence evaluations, perception of peers’ attitudes and perceived harm to other policyholders were important in forming the salespeople’s ethical decision-making in the customer–salesperson collusions.

This is the first time that guanxi has been studied as the factor influencing collusive behaviors in the problems of insurance fraud. The results challenged an established belief that the insurance salespeople should first target close relations as they build their portfolio of customers.

Previous research regarding shaping factors and major causes behind accidents in the construction field is reviewed. In particular, a hypothetical model is established to correlate activity time, cost and safety in the context of construction activity acceleration planning. Two demonstration cases are presented to illustrate the proposed theoretical model in the context of critical activity expedition planning. Further, a third case uses a 100-activity project to perform the global level total project time and cost analysis, identifying specific activity acceleration plans that would materialize the shortened total project time at the lowest total project cost.

This research proposes a safety-centric application framework to guide construction acceleration planning at both activity and project levels while taking sufficient preventive measures against safety hazards and accidents. As planning construction acceleration by factoring in safety constraints inevitably drives up cost, it is imperative to control increases in activity costs at the local level in connection with schedule acceleration planning while at the same time not compromising on safety. This research also addresses this critical question through performing global level total project time and cost analysis.

An application framework is proposed for guiding a planner through identifying accident shaping factors, obeying schedule acceleration rules and accounting for safety-related costs in attempts to mitigate hazardous situations on-site at both activity level (local) and project level (global), resulting in (1) minimizing the increase of total project cost in schedule acceleration while at the same time not compromising on safety at individual activities; (2) producing specific execution plans on each individual activity in terms of the amount of time to crash and the associated activity cost.

This study is original in developing theories and methods for evaluating the impact of safety constraints upon construction time and cost in activity acceleration planning and project time-cost analysis. The research fills a gap in knowledge in terms of how to factor in sufficient safety constraints while achieving project time and cost objectives on construction acceleration planning at both activity and project levels.

Rotating machinery is a crucial component of large equipment, and detecting faults in it accurately is critical for reliable operation. Although fault diagnosis methods based on deep learning have been significantly developed, the existing methods model spatial and temporal features separately and then weigh them, resulting in the decoupling of spatiotemporal features.

The authors propose a spatiotemporal long short-term memory (ST-LSTM) method for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. The authors collected vibration signals from real rolling bearing and gearing test rigs for verification.

Through these two experiments, the authors demonstrate that machine learning methods still have advantages on small-scale data sets, but our proposed method exhibits a significant advantage due to the simultaneous modeling of the time domain and space domain. These results indicate the potential of the interactive spatiotemporal modeling method for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery.

The authors propose a ST-LSTM method for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. The authors collected vibration signals from real rolling bearing and gearing test rigs for verification.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of disclosure of sales compensations on insurance brokers’ intention to make inappropriate product recommendations.

This research examines the insurance brokers’ intention to make inappropriate product recommendations through an application of the theory of planned behavior. Surveys are used as the research instrument, and the hypotheses are tested with a between-subjects experimental design. One case of mandatory disclosure and one case of non-mandatory disclosure are compared in the research.

The results indicate that the disclosure of sales compensations is significantly associated with the subjective norms from the official authority and perceived behavioral control (PBC). The results of this study also indicate that, when the disclosure is mandatory, the PBC has a stronger effect on the insurance brokers’ intention to make biased product recommendations than dose the attitude and subjective norms. When the disclosure is non-mandatory, however, the subjective norms have a stronger effect on the insurance brokers’ intention.

The impacts of compensation disclosures on the financial professionals’ product recommendations have been less examined. This study could make a contribution to the literature by providing some empirical observations from the views of Taiwan’s life insurance brokers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible mediating role of switching cost (SC) in influencing customer loyalty (CL).

The authors derive a model containing the relationships between customer satisfaction (CS), brand image (BI), and CL through mediating effects of SC. Data collected from 200 subscribers of China Mobile was analysed using structural equation modelling technique.

The authors find that SC does not mediate the relationship between CS and CL, nor that between BI and CL. While both CS and BI have a direct and positive relationship with CL, only CS is positively associated with the SC. SC in itself has no direct relationship with CL, necessitating further understanding of its role.

Prior findings have suggested the mediating role of SC, this study, however, show that SC does not have any mediating role in influencing CL. In fact, the direct role of SC is also questioned, as the authors do not find any direct relationship between SC and CL.

While managers should retain a balanced strategy for implementing SC, developing a strong BI and achieving CS is more important, and could help avoid any negative implications that may ensue from the implementation of SC.

This paper offers empirical evidence of the importance of SC – or rather lack of it – in enhancing CL. It also helps explain how SC interacts with CS and BI.