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Although governments have used social media platforms to interact with the public in an attempt to minimize anxiety and provide a forum for public discussion during the pandemic, governments require sufficient crisis communication skills to engage citizens in taking appropriate action effectively. This study aims to examine how the National Health Commission of China (NHCC) has used TikTok, the leading short video–based platform, to facilitate public engagement during COVID-19.

Building upon dual process theories, this study integrates the activation of information exposure, prosocial interaction theory and social sharing of emotion theory to explore how public engagement is related to message sensation value (MSV), media character, content theme and emotional valence. A total of 354 TikTok videos posted by NHCC were collected during the pandemic to explore the determinants of public engagement in crises.

The findings demonstrate that MSV negatively predicts public engagement with government TikTok, but that instructional information increases engagement. The presence of celebrities and health-care professionals negatively affects public engagement with government TikTok accounts. In addition, emotional valence serves a moderating role between MSV, media characters and public engagement.

Government agencies must be fully aware of the different combinations of MSV and emotion use in the video title when releasing crisis-related videos. Government agencies can also leverage media characters – health professionals in particular – to enhance public engagement. Government agencies are encouraged to solicit public demand for the specific content of instructing information through data mining techniques.

This exploratory study aims to investigate the use of Facebook as a dialogic accounting tool for promoting citizen engagement in Italian regions.

This study adopts a mixed methodology. Indeed, it first collects some quantitative data to construct an engagement index for the Facebook pages of the Italian regions, and then it performs a content analysis of some posts while also examining the tenor of the related comments and the level of interaction between regions and citizens.

The Italian regions have mainly used their Facebook pages for public communication purposes rather than for public participation. Therefore, they have conceived social pages more as an instrument of self-legitimisation and thus monologic accounting and have rarely considered them as a tool for engaging citizens who, in turn, showed low interest in participating in online debates. Nature and environment, tourism promotion and sport were the most engaging content types. Findings also confirm that posting many messages does not automatically increase engagement.

This study is one of the first to investigate the potential of social media from a dialogic accounting perspective, especially in the public sector. Additionally, it focuses on regions which are understudied in the literature, although they are critical actors in implementing public policies. Last but not least, this study offers a framework that integrates the literature on the use of social media for citizen engagement and research on such platforms as dialogic accounting tools.

This study examines the public participation in the implementation of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL), a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) approach for urban development. HUL has six Critical Steps and four Tools Categories relating to community engagement, knowledge and planning, regulatory system and financial instruments. The HUL public participation component has materialized variably across the adopting cities, challenged by the local implementation capacity. In response, we have singled out two research questions revolving around the participants’ characteristics and participation methods.

This study instrumentalizes case studies as a research methodology and thematic literature as a theoretical context. The HUL projects for Ballarat, Australia and Cuenca, Ecuador have been selected as sources of published information because they exhibit comparative differences in completing community engagement. We have compared the community engagement accounts of the two cities.

The Ballarat and Cuenca HUL project accounts point out to commonalities and variances in responding to the HUL public participation mandate. The findings for the participants’ characteristics involve project setting, participants categories and participants empowerment; the findings for the participation methods involve initial preparation, domestic and international expertise and public conversation.

The results of the study help define public participation practices in HUL project implementations. The results present an opportunity for city officials, HUL project planners and field administrators for making informed decisions particularly in relation to the two public participation domains, the participants’ characteristics and the engagement methods.

This study aims to explore to what extent stakeholder engagement affects the sustainability reporting (SR) process and if it succeeds in facilitating the encounter between demand and supply of accountability, as well as the main challenges of this practice, by focusing on a crucial and under-investigated public sector area, the judicial system.

The study adopts an action research (AR) approach. Specifically, it focuses on a specific phase (i.e. stakeholder engagement) of the broader project that was carried on from 2019 in an Italian Public Prosecutor’s Office. Data were collected from multiple sources, i.e. written notes and reports gathered during meetings, the survey administered to stakeholders and the published sustainability reports.

Stakeholder engagement may be a valuable and effective tool for improving the level of accountability, as it increases the responsiveness of SR to the informative needs of stakeholders. However, the study also highlights some critical points that must be addressed to exploit this fully. Among these is the need to act upstream of the process by working on an accounting system that goes beyond the economic dynamics and can effectively answer the accountability demand.

The study contributes to theoretical and empirical knowledge by exploring a topic and a public sphere still limited investigated, i.e. the stakeholder engagement in sustainability in the judicial sector. The AR approach also presents some originality points, as it is low widespread in management and accounting literature.

Although the development of public organisations and the continual enhancement of public services depend on the creative behaviour of public employees, it is uncertain from earlier studies how and when inclusive leadership (IL) affects innovative behaviours (IB). This study aims to resolve the inconsistency in the literature by applying social exchange theory to examine the effect of inclusive leadership on employees’ innovative behaviour, while also examining the mediating role of work engagement and the moderating effect of psychological safety within this relationship.

The research model’s analysis draws from a data set of 200 employee–supervisor dyads. Data was collected from employees across diverse public sector organisations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The results demonstrate that IL indirectly (via WE) and directly has a positive influence on employees’ IBs. This influence is enhanced when employees feel safe and do not have to be concerned about negative consequences.

Our study highlights a less-explored sector, unveiling the motivations behind IB among public sector employees. Moreover, this study provides valuable insights within a non-Western context, offering a unique perspective on the intricate relationship between IL, PS, employee engagement and IBs in the UAE public sector.

This article examines challenges and strategies related to police relationships and engagement with rural communities in England and Wales, Australia and France. It aims to bridge a gap in knowledge around how police balance public demands with organisational and contextual constraints, exploring the role of communication technology in overcoming geographical and cultural barriers in rural policing.

The research draws upon 121 semi-structured interviews conducted across three distinct jurisdictions. In the United Kingdom and Australia, interviews were conducted via Microsoft Teams, while face-to-face interviews were conducted in France. Participants were recruited through the purposive sampling of police working in rural areas. The data were thematically analysed using NVivo Software.

Rural communities have low expectations of policing services, a consequence of geography, organisational structures and limited resource allocation. Building relationships can be challenging owing to isolation and terrain, the need for officers to have local and cultural knowledge, and difficulties in recruiting officers in rural posts. Technology-mediated communication has played a part in the solutions (e.g. social media). However, this may not always be suitable owing to limited connectivity, citizen and police preferences for communication and engagement, and the institutional and cultural nuances surrounding the application of technology.

This article provides empirical insights into the attitudes and experiences of rural police officers, highlighting the distinctive policing context and engagement needs of rural communities. The research underscores the necessity for contextually aware engagement. It suggests that while technology-mediated communication offers some solutions to spatial challenges, its effectiveness may be limited by access, generational preferences and the adaptability of police institutions and cultures.

This study examines the direct impact of justice perceptions of performance appraisal practices (procedural, distributive, interpersonal and informational justice) on job satisfaction, intention to stay and job engagement. Further, it investigates the effect of job engagement on job satisfaction and intention to stay. Moreover, the study tests the mediating role of job engagement on the impact of justice perceptions of performance appraisal practices on job satisfaction and intention to stay.

A total of 650 self-report structured questionnaires were distributed among the employees of 50 information technology companies, and 503 samples were received. Partial least square-structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized model.

This study revealed that justice perception of performance appraisal practices positively affects job satisfaction, intention to stay and job engagement. In addition, job engagement positively affects job satisfaction and intention to stay. Further, job engagement significantly transfers the impact of justice perceptions of performance appraisal practices on job satisfaction and intention to stay, thus confirming the mediating role of job engagement. However, the significant direct impact of justice perceptions of performance appraisal practices on job satisfaction and intention to stay in the presence of a mediator, i.e. job engagement, revealed partial mediation.

The findings of this study augment the social exchange theory by explicating that an individual who perceives justice in performance appraisal practices is likely to have greater job engagement, which ultimately leads to higher job satisfaction and intention to stay. This study filled the research gap by examining the role of four justice components of performance appraisal practices on job satisfaction and intention to stay and the mediating role of job engagement in transferring the impact of justice perceptions of performance appraisal practices on job satisfaction and intention to stay.

This study showed the importance of four justice components of performance appraisal practices in enhancing employee job engagement. Hence, this study would motivate information technology companies to maintain fairness in performance appraisal practices to enhance employee job engagement and ultimately increase job satisfaction and intention to stay.

This study is one of its kind that tested the direct impact of comprehensive justice components (procedural, distributive, interpersonal and informational justice) of performance appraisal practices on job satisfaction and intention to stay. In addition, this is a unique study that examined the mediating effect of job engagement on the impact of justice perceptions of performance appraisal practices on job satisfaction and intention to stay.

This interdisciplinary study aims to analyze how service organizations communicate sustainable beliefs in their social media narratives and use them to generate brand awareness, customer recognition and ongoing demand for sustainable service.

A two-phase exploratory analysis of 10,342 tweets from 2019–2020 was conducted by sustainable global corporations to identify best practices for their social media teams operating within a service-based business model. First, the significant themes were identified using an unguided machine learning approach of three types of firms: services, goods and mixed. Next, the full set of tweets with linguistic sentiment analysis was analyzed followed by a deeper view of the services-based organizations based on their strategic focus (business-to-business [B2B] versus mixed).

The findings indicate that tweets that appear to create the highest customer engagement are characterized as having high levels of analytical language, high clout (i.e. are socially relevant), a positive tone, a high number of words and a high number of words per sentence. On the other hand, having complex language in terms of six-letter words does not seem to associate with customer engagement. The last level of analysis shows that B2B services-based corporations with positive tone and higher word count exhibit higher levels of retweets. Implications include providing rational and informational tweets to increase engagement and highlight societal relevance.

Climate change has negative consequences on human and physical capital, and ecosystems across the globe. This study provides specific recommendations for how services corporations can increase their sustainable communications and actions.

The key implication of our research is that corporations must strategically design social media narratives about climate change as part of their online branding and communications process.

Lean Six Sigma in public and private healthcare organisations has received considerable attention over the last decade. Nevertheless, such process improvement methodologies are not generalizable, and their effective implementation relies on contextual variables. The purpose of this study is to explore the readiness of Italian hospitals for Lean Six Sigma and Quality Performance Improvement (LSS&QPI), with a focus on gender differences.

A survey comprising 441 healthcare professionals from public and private hospitals was conducted. Multivariate analysis of variance was used to determine the mean scores on the LSS&QPI dimensions based on hospital type, gender and their interaction.

The results showed that public healthcare professional are more aware of quality performance improvement initiatives than private healthcare professionals. Moreover, gender differences emerged according to the type of hospital, with higher awareness for men than women in public hospitals, whereas for private hospitals the opposite was true.

This study contributes to the Lean Six Sigma literature by focusing on the holistic assessment of LSS&QPI implementation.

This study informs healthcare managers about the revolution within healthcare organisations, especially public ones. Healthcare managers should spend time understanding Lean Six Sigma as a strategic orientation to promote the “lean hospital”, improving processes and fostering patient-centredness.

This is a preliminary study focussing on analysing inter-relationship between perceived importance of soft readiness factors such as gender dynamics as a missing jigsaw in the current literature. In addition, the research advances a holistic assessment of LSS&QPI, which sets it apart from the studies on single initiatives that have been documented to date.

The current study aims to propose and empirically investigate a conceptual model of the most relevant antecedents and consequences of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) attribution, thus providing a practical and concise model as well as examining brand attachment as a mediator explaining the relationship between CSR attribution and its consequences.

A between-subjects experimental design was employed. The study included two experimental conditions; intrinsic and extrinsic CSR attribution and a control condition. An online self-administered survey was utilised for data collection. The sample was a convenience sample of 336 university students. Both one-way between-groups ANOVA and Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) were utilised for hypotheses testing.

The most significant antecedents of CSR attribution in order of importance are the firm's approach to CSR communication, past corporate social performance, CSR type and the firm's call for customers' participation in its CSR. CSR attribution exerted a significant direct positive impact on brand attachment and trust. Three significant indirect consequences of CSR attribution were PWOM intention, purchase intention and brand loyalty intention. Whereas trust played a significant mediating role between CSR attribution and its three indirect consequences, brand attachment exerted significant mediation only between CSR attribution and brand loyalty intention. Brand attachment might mediate the relationship between CSR attribution and purchase intention. However, brand attachment failed to play a mediating role between CSR attribution and PWOM intention.

Several studies marginally investigated CSR attribution. Despite the vital role of CSR attribution in how consumers receive firms' CSR engagement, the availability of CSR attribution-centric studies is limited. By introducing a model of the most relevant antecedents and consequences of CSR attribution, this study aids in understanding the psychological mechanism underlying consumers' CSR attribution and provides valuable implications.