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This study aims to examine the impact of consumers’ individual differences on their reactions to brand failure.

Three studies (one qualitative, one survey and one experiment) were conducted. Study 1 aimed to understand consumers’ thoughts at the time of brand failure. Studies 2 and 3 investigated the impact of regulatory focus and its interaction with consumers’ attachment style on their reactions to brand failure.

This research establishes that consumers demonstrate different types of behaviors at the time of brand failure. Specifically, those with a promotion focus display less negative (revenge and brand avoidance) and more positive (trust and loyalty) behavior than those with a prevention focus. Furthermore, this research shows an interaction between consumers’ attachment style and regulatory focus. The impact of regulatory focus holds only for secure consumers; for fearful consumers, regulatory focus does not change their behavior.

The study reveals the impact of regulatory focus and attachment styles on consumer behavior at the time of brand failure. Future research might examine the impact of these factors over time, rather than only at the time of the incident.

Marketers should be aware of the impact of attachment style and regulatory focus after a brand failure. This knowledge will enable them to customize their communication tools to trigger their desired condition. This research also emphasizes the role of customer service at the time of crisis.

This research is the first to investigate the impact of regulatory focus and attachment style on consumers’ reactions to brand failure.

This paper aims to examine the potential mechanisms through which regulatory focus influences employee work-related outcomes. The effects of a dual model of regulatory focus on job satisfaction and turnover intention were investigated through psychological contracts.

The data of a survey of 370 recruits (306 male newcomers and 64 female newcomers) in a Taiwanese military recruitment center provided significant support for the hypothesized dual model.

The results revealed that regulatory focus was positively related to either job satisfaction or turnover intention. A relational contract mediated the relationship between promotion focus and job satisfaction, whereas a transactional contract mediated prevention focus and turnover intention.

The study results may not apply to other sectors because data were collected only at a military unit in Taiwan. Using Taiwanese military personnel may limit the generalization of the results to those unemployed in civilian samples or those in other countries. Samples from different countries are important to establish whether the results from the study apply to other situations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first regulatory focus theory (RFT)-based study to report on the regulatory focus of newcomers as mediating the relationship between purposeful and work-related outcomes.

Previous research has found that individuals with a different goal orientation may adopt different behaviors that result in different performance levels. The results here imply that newcomers with transactional contracts have intentions to leave their organizations and perceive their relationships with their organizations according to rational choice theory.

Newcomers' distinctive self-regulatory systems and focus on meeting either nurturance or security needs were determined to get different outcomes following organizational entry. The results demonstrated that promotion-focused newcomers were satisfied with the military, whereas prevention-focused newcomers intended to leave within their first 18 weeks.

Regulatory focus theory suggests that regulatory fit influences individuals' decisions. However, little is known regarding the effect of regulatory fit on sports consumers' purchase intention. Accordingly, the authors extend the concept of regulatory fit to the sports context to understand how advertising claims affect amateur badminton players' purchase intention of badminton rackets.

A total of 200 amateur badminton players participated in this study. These participants were randomly assigned to the promotion-prime advertising claim or prevention-prime advertising claim condition.

Authors’ findings demonstrate that the experience fit between personal regulatory focus in the sports context and advertising claims induces higher purchase intention. This finding corresponds with expectations based on regulatory focus theory.

The present study extends and strengthens knowledge of personal regulatory focus in the sports context and thus shows marketers how to communicate with target customers to precisely sell sports products using the regulatory fit strategy.

The aim of the research presented in this paper is to enhance our understanding of self-gift giving behavior. Self-regulatory theory is used as a conceptual support to achieve this objective. The main idea that is explored is that consumers’ self-gift purchase intentions vary across contexts and situations to the extent that these are compatible or not with their self-regulatory mindset, whether it is chronic or situational.

Two studies, using a scenario-based experiment, were conducted to investigate the effects that regulatory focus has on consumers’ intentions to buy themselves a gift.

The results support the proposition that the chronic form of regulatory focus in success and failure situations has a significant impact on the intention to purchase a gift to oneself and show that the situational form of regulatory focus has an influence on self-gift purchase intention as well. They also confirm that situations that are congruent with consumers’ self-regulatory mindset lead to stronger self-gift purchase intentions.

The main contribution of this research lies in delineating the role that some specific dispositional and situational factors play in shaping consumers’ perceptions of success and failure events and how this impacts the eventual purchase of a gift to oneself. This contrasts with previous research on self-gift giving, where success and failure situations are assumed to be perceived similarly by consumers. Marketing managers wishing to stimulate consumers’ propensity to buy themselves gifts should consider using regulatory focus as a segmentation basis. Marketing communications should be adapted to consumers’ self-regulatory mindset.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between regulatory focus, performance measurement and corporate social responsibility (CSR) investment decisions.

Using an experimental method with a 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial design involving 144 participants, the data were analyzed using t-test and contrast test. In the experiment, the authors assigned participants into prevention focus or promotion focus group and complementary performance measurement or substitute performance measurement condition.

The results show that CSR investment is more preferable for managers in prevention focus instead of those in promotion focus group. Additionally, CSR investment is more preferable for managers in complementary performance measurement condition compared to those in substitute performance measurement condition. This study also provides evidence that the greatest CSR investment is reached when managers are in both prevention focus group and complementary performance measurement conditions.

Companies need to activate the prevention focus for managers to motivate CSR investment. Additionally, companies need to use complementary performance measurements, which consist of CSR measurement and financial measurements.

CSR research is dominated by theories explaining the external models which trigger companies to perform CSR. Existing research related to the internal models is limited to psychological aspects that are not directly related to company performance. This study investigates the motivational attributes that have a direct and strong influence on managers behavior. This research shows that regulatory focus is better at predicting CSR investment and is more motivational for individuals to perform well at work.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of regulatory foci (promotion focus and prevention focus) to expatriate adjustments (general, interaction, and work adjustments) and explore whether mentoring functions (psychosocial support, role modeling, and career development) moderate the aforementioned relationship.

Using 141 questionnaired primary data (response rate 32.25 percent) gathered from at least six months experienced expatiates of multinational companies in six industries, this study adopts regression method to examine the moderating effect.

This study found that promotion focus was positively related to the interaction and work adjustment, respectively; prevention focus was positively related to the general, interaction, and work adjustment, respectively. Psychosocial support function moderates the relationship between promotion focus and general adjustment. Career development function moderates the relationships between promotion/prevention foci and work adjustment.

According to the interactionism perspective, behavior is a result of the interaction between personality and situational influences, has a long history in social and personality psychology. This study extends this perspective to the interactive effects of mentorship (situational factor) and expatriates’ regulatory foci (personality factor) on expatriate adjustment.

Rewards and safety cues are frequently used by online marketers to enhance privacy attitudes and to encourage self‐disclosure of personal information. The purpose of this paper is to study the relative effectiveness of these influence strategies and test the boundary condition of regulatory focus.

The authors conduct an online scenario‐based experiment with a sample of adult consumers. The results were analyzed using multivariate and univariate analysis of variance.

The findings show that the use of rewards and safety cues has varying effects on privacy attitudes and self‐disclosure, and that these effects depend on consumers' regulatory focus.

The relative effectiveness of rewards and safety cues for enhancing privacy attitudes and encouraging self‐disclosure is not clear from prior research, and boundary conditions have not been established. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine regulatory focus as a moderating variable in the relationship between online influence strategies and privacy outcomes.

Individuals concerned about safety comprise a significant share of the consumer market today. This paper aims to provide the results of a study on when a front-of-package (FOP) claim about “no added negatives” can serve as a quality cue.

Four between-subjects experiments examine consumers’ quality perceptions in responses to the absence-focused claims and also identifies brand parity (Studies 1a and 1b) and the associated launch of inconsistent alternatives as moderators (Study 2) and investigate the extent to which the quality signaling value of absence-focused claims varies as a function of message regulatory focus (Study 3).

Research shows that a unique absence-focused claim indicates product quality (Studies 1a and 1b). However, there could be a cost in terms of reduced perceived quality when adding an inconsistent alternative to a brand (Study 2). Furthermore, consumers associate greater product quality with absence-focused FOP claims if an appeal is framed as prevention-focused rather than promotion-focused benefits (Study 3).

This study advances knowledge on the effects of front-of-package claims on consumer behavior and benefits marketers in determining effective front-of-package messages for product promotion.

To reconcile the mixed findings on commitment-oriented human resource management (HRM) on employee job performance, this study tests whether commitment-oriented HRM has a threshold effect on employee job performance and when this threshold effect matters. The authors further tested the role of employees' age in the relationships.

The authors conducted a survey and collected data from 601 employees in 32 firms in China, and used a multilevel approach to test the hypothesis.

The results showed that the association between commitment-oriented HRM and employee job performance was J-shaped, meaning that commitment-oriented HRM was positively related to job performance when the degree of commitment-oriented HRM exceeded a threshold. Moreover, the authors found that employee age moderated this J-shape relationship. Specifically, the curvilinear relationship between development commitment-oriented HRM and job performance was stronger in younger employees. Contrary to our prediction, the results showed that younger employees reacted more strongly to improve job performance than older employees when maintenance commitment-oriented HRM exceeded a moderate degree.

The findings on the J-shape effect and moderating role of employee age on the J-shape provided critical insights into understanding the mixed results of the effect of HRM. Additionally, this study provided new insight in the linkage between HRM practices and employee outcomes.

This study aims to investigate how firms should customize quality practices to obtain or maintain quality advantage with the development of quality culture. The paper seeks to adopt March's learning framework and to differentiate quality management practices into two bundles: exploitation and exploration.

A survey dataset, including 238 manufacturing plants located in eight countries and three industries was used to test the hypotheses. The total sample was classified into two groups depending on the maturity of quality culture, and regression analysis was conducted in each of the groups for comparison.

Data analysis results show that quality exploitation practices are highly related to performance outcome when quality culture has not become a prevailing organization culture. In contrast, quality exploration practices are significantly associated with operations performance after quality culture plays a critical role in organizational culture.

The findings encourage future research on customization of quality management practices.

The findings suggest when it is more appropriate to adopt explorative‐ oriented quality practices and when to adopt exploitative‐oriented quality practices to make quality management programs more effective.

This paper advances the understanding of quality management practices from the context‐dependent perspective. Particularly, the study suggests the selective adoption of certain quality management practices based on the evolvement of quality culture.