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This study aimed to develop scales to assess perceptions of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) self-protective measures (SPMs) and examine the psychometric properties based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB).

A total of 412 participants from Bangalore, India, randomly volunteered to participate in this research. The questionnaire consisted of items related to the TPB scales and demographic details.

A structural equation model showed a reasonable model fit. In total, 70% of the individuals' behavioral intentions of following COVID-19 SPMs were predicted by perceived benefits, barriers, social norms and social influence. Participants' age impacted on perceived benefits and perceived social influence and individuals' behavioral intentions of following COVID-19 SPMs, with a 13.6% difference in model prediction.

The TPB can be used as a strong psychometric property to assess behavioral determinants of COVID-19 SPMs.

Research on online user privacy shows that empirical evidence on how privacy literacy relates to users' information privacy empowerment is missing. To fill this gap, this paper investigated the respective influence of two primary dimensions of online privacy literacy – namely declarative and procedural knowledge – on online users' information privacy empowerment.

An empirical analysis is conducted using a dataset collected in Europe. This survey was conducted in 2019 among 27,524 representative respondents of the European population.

The main results show that users' procedural knowledge is positively linked to users' privacy empowerment. The relationship between users' declarative knowledge and users' privacy empowerment is partially supported. While greater awareness about firms and organizations practices in terms of data collections and further uses conditions was found to be significantly associated with increased users' privacy empowerment, unpredictably, results revealed that the awareness about the GDPR and user’s privacy empowerment are negatively associated. The empirical findings reveal also that greater online privacy literacy is associated with heightened users' information privacy empowerment.

While few advanced studies made systematic efforts to measure changes occurred on websites since the GDPR enforcement, it remains unclear, however, how individuals perceive, understand and apply the GDPR rights/guarantees and their likelihood to strengthen users' information privacy control. Therefore, this paper contributes empirically to understanding how online users' privacy literacy shaped by both users' declarative and procedural knowledge is likely to affect users' information privacy empowerment. The study empirically investigates the effectiveness of the GDPR in raising users' information privacy empowerment from user-based perspective. Results stress the importance of greater transparency of data tracking and processing decisions made by online businesses and services to strengthen users' control over information privacy. Study findings also put emphasis on the crucial need for more educational efforts to raise users' awareness about the GDPR rights/guarantees related to data protection. Empirical findings also show that users who are more likely to adopt self-protective approaches to reinforce personal data privacy are more likely to perceive greater control over personal data. A broad implication of this finding for practitioners and E-businesses stresses the need for empowering users with adequate privacy protection tools to ensure more confidential transactions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of cultural leadership factors (charismatic/value-based, team oriented, participative, humane, autonomous and self-protective) on the rates of opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship.

The study integrates insights from institutional and cultural leadership theories to provide a fresh perspective to advance comparative entrepreneurship research. To test the hypotheses, the authors conduct a multiple regression analysis with observations from 34 countries, using data (from the year 2013) from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for the dependent variable and from Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness to create leadership factors as independent variables.

The results show that all the types of leadership considered in the study have a relevant effect on entrepreneurial activity. However, charismatic leadership has a greater effect on entrepreneurial activity, particularly on opportunity entrepreneurship. The research also shows that autonomous leadership has a negative impact on entrepreneurial activity, although, when it is moderated by the humane dimension, this relationship changes.

Since the alternative dimensions facilitate or inhibit the generation of new firm creation, it is critical for researchers, teachers and leaders to learn about and to foster such leadership types.

This research covers a gap in the cross-cultural evidence presented in the literature and suggests the integration of the concepts leadership and entrepreneurship.

Health disparities affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) populations have been reported in many countries. For Singapore, no large quantitative studies on mental health and well-being in the local LGBTQ community have been published. The authors conducted a community-based survey (National LGBT Census Singapore, 2013; NLCS2013) that covered a comprehensive set of demographic, social and health indicators. Here, the authors investigated mental health status and its correlates in 2,350 LGBTQ individuals within the NLCS2013 sample.

The NLCS2013 was an anonymous online survey conducted amongst self-identified LGBTQ adults (aged ≥ 21 years) residing in Singapore. The survey included the World Health Organisation Well-being Index (WHO-5) as a measure of mental well-being, with low WHO 5 scores (<13/25) indicating poor mental well-being. The authors analysed relationships between low WHO-5 score and a range of respondent characteristics using multivariate logistic regression.

Strikingly, 40.9% of 2,350 respondents analysed had low WHO-5 scores, indicating poor mental well-being. Parental non-acceptance, experience of conflict at home and bullying/discrimination in the workplace or educational environments were all significantly associated with poor mental well-being. Conversely, community participation appeared protective for mental well-being, as respondents who participated in LGBTQ community organisations or events were less likely to have poor mental well-being than non-participants.

The NLCS2013 represents one of the first broad-based efforts to comprehensively and quantitatively capture the sociodemographic and health profile, including mental health status, within Singapore’s resident LGBTQ population. These findings affirm the need to address the mental health needs of LGBTQ individuals in Singapore and to foster safe spaces and allyship.

The study focuses on the negative implications that an organizational crisis can have for individual employees. Specifically, it considers job-related uncertainty, negative emotions (anxiety and frustration) and job disengagement. Through the lens of the social exchange theory, it is argued that internal crisis communication needs to provide sufficient socioemotional resources to their employees in order to mitigate these negative outcomes. In particular, the study argues for internal crisis communication that fosters organizational transparency and organizational support to achieve these mitigating effects.

An online survey among employees in Austria was administered one year after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic – this specific crisis context particularly evoked job-related uncertainty and negative emotions which are considered relevant drivers of job disengagement. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling based on a sample of N = 410.

Results show that employees' perceptions of job-related uncertainty are strongly linked to job-related anxiety and frustration; job-related frustration, in turn, strongly influences job disengagement. Overall, employees' perceptions of organizational transparency and organizational support contribute both to prevent the risk of job disengagement; however, the processes how these effects evolve differ. Whereas organizational transparency works on the cognitive level via a reduction of employees' perceptions of uncertainty, organizational support shows its effect on the emotional level through a reduction of job frustration.

The study contributes to the scarce research on how internal crisis communication can address employees' uncertainty, negative emotions and job disengagement during a crisis. Moreover, despite the lack of organizational responsibility for creating the crisis, the study emphasizes organizational accountability to respond to the needs of its employees to mitigate negative effects.

This conceptual paper aims to explore the current state of sustainability communication research, focusing on the challenges of communicating inconvenient truths in an era of scientific mistrust. Therefore, this study aims to (1) examine the existing research landscape in sustainability communication, (2) identify unresolved problems and challenges, and (3) propose strategies for counteract misinformation through targeted communication.

For this, the authors conducted a critical literature review and analyzed the resulting sample (n = 473 journal articles) by means of qualitative content analysis to (1) evaluate existing communication approaches dealing with the communication of sustainability's inconvenient truth, (2) identify stakeholder groups involved in sustainability communication, (3) discuss limitations of current communication approaches and (4) present recommendations on (more) effective communication strategies to address the unresolved issues in sustainability communication.

The analysis reveals that when it comes to sustainability communication and its unresolved problems, literature refers to four key stakeholder groups: (1) science deniers; (2) adaptation skeptics; (3) whitewashers and (4) world saviors. Furthermore, the analysis provides valuable insights into the complex dynamics involved in communicating sustainability, emphasizes the need for tailored approaches to engage and address the concerns of each stakeholder group, and exposes limitations in current communication methods and approaches. Accordingly, the analysis highlights the necessity of developing new theories, models and methods specific to sustainability communication to tackle its unique challenges effectively.

Like our society, communication sciences need a fundamental transformation to meet sustainability communication's new challenges induced by the necessary shift toward sustainable development.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of sustainability communication in research, specifically addressing the challenges of effectively communicating unpleasant news in the context of scientific mistrust. It fills a gap in existing literature by examining the progress made in addressing these issues and identifying the emerging challenges that need to be addressed.

A better understanding of the processes that shape households’ adaptation decisions is essential for developing pertinent policies locally, thereby enabling better adaptation across scales and multiple stakeholders. This paper aims to examine the determinants of household decisions to adapt, it is also possible to target factors that facilitate or constrain adaptation. This helps to identify key components of current adaptive capacity, which leads to important insights into households’ competence to adapt in the future.

This paper takes a full-pledged approach examining factors and processes that shape households’ climate adaptation decision-making in rural Cambodia at three levels: adaptation status, adaptation intensity and choices of adaptation strategy. The three-stage analyses are materialized by applying the double hurdle model and multivariate probit model, which provides a potential way to systematically assess household adaptation decision-making in rural settings.

Results show a high level of involvement in adaptation among local households who are facing multiple stressors including climatic risks. The findings suggest that perceived climate change influence households’ decisions in both adaptation status and intensity. Access to financial credit, farmland size, water availability and physical asset holdings are identified as key factors promoting the adoption of more adaptation measures. To facilitate adaptation, collective effort and support at community level is important in providing knowledge based climate information dissemination and early warning systems. Public sector support and development aid programs should focus on positive triggers for targeted community and household adaptation.

The study, to the authors’ best knowledge, is one of the first studies to investigate the determinants of local adaptation decision-making systematically in Cambodia. It also provides a comprehensive approach to improve understanding of adaptation decision-making processes by exploring how various capital assets are associated with different stages of adaptation decisions. The findings contribute to policy implications enlightening adaptation planning at multi-scales with knowledge of key factors, which enhance local adaptive capacity to reduce climate change vulnerability.

This study investigates entrepreneurial overconfidence (EOC) levels among solo entrepreneurs at the country level. Although transitions from solo to employer entrepreneur are relatively rare, the solo self-employed have become an important source of potential job creation by virtue of the sharp increase in their numbers in the past two decades. When EOC levels are too high, job creation ambitions may be unrealistic and unrealised. Unrealised ambitions and business failure can lead not only to psychological and financial costs for the individual entrepreneurs involved, but at the societal level also to wasted government resources, and increased costs for the entrepreneurial ecosystem as a whole. Therefore, it is important to know more about the entrepreneurial overconfidence levels of solo entrepreneurs in different countries and their determinants.

Using Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data for 71 countries over the period 2013–2016, the authors construct a new measure of entrepreneurial overconfidence of solo entrepreneurs and relate this to three recently developed indicators of national culture.

The findings indicate that EOC levels are positively related to Joy (versus Duty), and negatively related to Trust (versus Distrust). Finally, no significant relationship between entrepreneurial overconfidence and Individualism is found in the study (versus Collectivism).

Given the lack of literature examining the relationship between EOC levels and cultural variables hypotheses were developed using the existent body of knowledge in the area, which is at the early stage of development. The hypotheses derivation has used mostly theoretical arguments relating to the link between national culture and overconfidence of entrepreneurs in general, rather than relating specifically to solo entrepreneurs. The measure of EOC uses expectations of employment growth to proxy overconfidence, but other measures of entrepreneurial success may also be explored.

As the hiring of employees can be a costly process (Coad et al., 2017), it is important that entrepreneurs have realistic expectations of what it requires to hire employees. This is especially the case for solo entrepreneurs since they do not have experience of hiring their own employees. This paper addresses such issues at an aggregate level by exploring what factors explain country differences in overconfidence levels of solo entrepreneurs.

It is worthwhile to distinguish between solo and employer entrepreneurs when studying their EOC levels, as the ambitions of these two types of entrepreneurs are different. Empirically, this study introduces a new measure of EOC tailored towards the solo self-employed.

This study contributes to entrepreneurship literature by expanding current knowledge on entrepreneurial overconfidence at the country level. Past research has studied EOC at the individual level, however limited research exists on the phenomenon of EOC from a country level perspective. This is important as unrealised entrepreneurial ambitions may not only create substantial costs for the individual entrepreneurs involved, it may also lead to substantial societal costs, including waste of government resources.