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Based on a review of professional staff (PS), which includes research managers and administrators, in 54 academic publications, I propose a novel definition for this category of staff: ‘degree holding university employees who are primarily responsible for developing, maintaining and changing the social, digital and physical infrastructures that enable education, research and knowledge exchange’. The proposed definition facilitates the development of new research questions that target the level of the organisational fields of higher education and science, to complement research on the university and individual levels. This view supports the study of the contributions of PS to higher education and science. I anticipate that such a broader focus will help to counter and nuance accounts of ‘administrative bloat’ by focusing on how PS as a group shape and are shaped by the organisational fields of higher education and science, rather than dismissing them as superfluous or parasitic.

The unique dynamics of family firms (FFs) shape the management of financial crises. Religious and secular reasons, as a defining characteristic of this type of firm, provide a reference system for key management decisions. This paper aims to explore the under-researched topic of differences in FFs' crisis management between religious and secular family decision-makers (FDMs), considering secularization in developed countries.

The paper draws on a qualitative-empirical study of 14 large FFs from the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), through both a media analysis and semi-structured interviews with FDMs who have significant influence on key management decisions.

Despite secularization, religion continues to influence managerial decisions such as crisis management in the DACH region. The findings show that crisis management differs across religious and secular FDMs, demonstrating the substantial impact of religious and secular reasons on operational and financial measures. Thus, religious and secular reasons may partially explain the complex and ambivalent crisis management of FFs. This indicates that religion shapes FF's key management decisions in the increasingly secularized DACH region. Religious FDMs are accountable to both the firm and to God, which fosters their own personal and financial resources during crisis management.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by exploring the impact of religion and secularization within developed countries. Further, it offers deeper insights into FF's crisis management and is one of the first studies to assess the impact of religion and secularization on operational and financial measures. This research derives five propositions for further research and discusses a broad range of original implications for theory and practice.

Many consumer-focused corporate social responsibility (CSR) studies suggest a positive link between the responsibility demonstrated by a company and consumers’ intention to favor the company in their purchases. Yet an analogous causal effect between corporate social and financial performances is not evident. This chapter conceptualizes how social desirability and cynicism contribute to the discrepancy between consumers’ attitudes and their actual purchase behavior, and analyzes why consumer choices indicated in surveys do not consistently convert into actions.

We develop a conceptual framework based on hybrid choice modeling to estimate the impact of two new variables, Corporate Social Desirability and Corporate Social Cynicism, on CSR research. The model presented synthesizes research findings from the fields of CSR and psychology with a discrete choice methodology that allows inclusion of psychological aspects as latent variables.

The goal of the framework is to bridge the gap between choices stated by consumers in CSR surveys and their actual choices by quantifying and extracting the effects of biases that otherwise threaten the validity of such survey results. As the next step, the practical value of the model must be evaluated through empirical research combining a CSR choice study with social desirability and cynicism measurement.

The framework proposes a novel way of controlling CSR surveys for potential biases created by social desirability and cynicism and enables quantification of this impact, with potential application to other fields where psychological aspects may distort research results. Future empirical evidence based on the framework may also offer new insights into the mechanisms by which the two biases distort findings.

This paper aims to examine how trust and communication at the personal level relationships conform to trust and communication at the organizational level relationships and which role do the two different level relationships play in influencing firms’ commitment, performance and propensity to stay in long-term relationships.

A face-to-face questionnaire study was conducted using a sample of 209 in Mainland China companies, which were surveyed in nine exhibitions. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results support the bottom-up effect of interpersonal trust and communication on inter-organizational trust and communication. Interorganizational trust has a more powerful total effect on firm commitment. Interpersonal communication has a more powerful total effect on inter-organizational trust and communication and firms’ operational performance. Interpersonal communication, inter-organizational trust and communication have comparably high impacts on firms’ propensity to stay in long-term relationships.

This paper selects Mainland China as the research context and targets a single boundary spanner in each respondent firm to evaluate both the interpersonal and inter-organizational relationships. A cross-sectional approach was used.

This paper suggests that business people should pay attention to the role of human factors in a firm’s relational exchanges with SC partners and effectively use the positive effects of these factors to create relationship-building benefits.

This paper conducts cross-level research, which has been called for in recently published inter-organizational literature. It develops and provides empirical evidence for a bottom-up model from interpersonal relationships to inter-organizational relationships and identifies their impacts on organizational outcomes simultaneously.

Extant research shows that acquiescence response style (ARS) is culture-bound and may bias the results of comparative cross-cultural studies. Conventional measures of ARS are difficult to apply in practice. To overcome this limitation, the purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative, practice-oriented measure, namely, pARS. The authors apply Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (Hofstede et al., 2010) to test whether pARS is culture-bound. The cross-cultural study provides a high level of cross-cultural generalisability due to the extensive number of surveyed countries (n=30) and subjects (n=236.089). The authors run multi-level analysis to identify within- and between-country-level predictors.

On the individual level, the authors use data of a large-scale cross-cultural study, including 236.089 consumers from 30 countries worldwide. The authors apply several methods to test for the culture-boundness of pARS. First, they apply correlation analysis to replicate existing cross-cultural results and to ensure nomological validity. Second, applying ordinary least square regression, the authors simultaneously test the six Hofstede cultural dimensions (Hofstede et al., 2010) and investigate interactions between the dimensions. Finally, they use multi-level analysis to confirm the stability of culture-bound results, controlling for individual- and country-level variability.

The paper introduces an alternative measure for acquiescence (pARS), which is particularly suitable for shorter questionnaires. A large-scale consumer study with 236.089 respondents in 30 countries supports the culture-bound validity of pARS. The authors confirm construct validity and the nomological network of pARS. Contrasting existing studies, multi-level analysis demonstrates that a high level of power distance majorly leads to ARS. Therefore, cross-cultural researchers need to control for ARS in countries high in power distance, especially when paired with high uncertainty avoidance.

A large-scale consumer study with 236.089 respondents from 30 countries shows that respondents from various countries differ significantly in their level of acquiescence. The study confirms that power distance is the most relevant cultural dimension to explain these differences. Although ARS may bias the results of comparative cross-cultural studies, it is rarely controlled by market research studies outside the academic realm. The present work proposes and establishes the validity of a practice-oriented measure of acquiescence, namely, pARS. pARS is particularly suitable for shorter questionnaires. In contrast to prior approaches, applying pARS does not require adding non-substantive items to the questionnaire.

When a crisis occurs, do corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities protect organizational reputation by buffering negative effects or do CSR activities intensify negative effects, potentially leading to a worse reputation compared to if the organization had no prior CSR engagement? The authors hypothesize that if a crisis emerges in a domain aligned with an organization’s CSR initiatives (crisis-congruent CSR) backfire effects would arise, adversely affecting the organization’s reputation. Conversely, in cases of incongruence, where the crisis emerges in a domain not aligned with an organization’s previous CSR involvement, a buffering effect would manifest, protecting the organization’s reputation.

The authors conducted an experiment with a 3 (crisis-congruent, crisis-incongruent, and no CSR activities) × 2 (repeated measures) mixed factorial design. In the first scenario, no information was provided concerning a company’s social commitment. Alternatively, participants were exposed to an article illustrating the company’s dedication either to healthcare (crisis-incongruent commitment) or to combating sexism (crisis-congruent commitment). Afterward, participants were presented with a newspaper article addressing allegations of sexism against the company’s CEO.

The findings demonstrate that prior CSR activities have the potential both to serve as a buffer and to cause backfire effects in times of crisis. Domain congruence is the decisive moderator of these effects: Crisis-incongruent CSR activities acted as a buffer, crisis-congruent CSR activities “backfired” and led to more negative perceptions of the company’s reputation.

The study directly contributes to the understanding of CSR effects in crisis communication, while also addressing the often paradoxical and contradictory findings of prior studies.