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Teleworkers need to use information and communication technology (ICT) to communicate and collaborate with their team members, however, when new and complicated information systems should be used, this can lead to stress. Receiving adequate information and emotional support from team members could reduce the stress caused by technological complexity and subsequent work and occupational strains.

Participants (N = 400) teleworked at least half of their working hours and were employed in organizations with a minimum of 250 employees. Data from the online survey were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Results demonstrate that aspects of informational and emotional communication contribute to perceived social support from team members, with emotional communication explaining more variance. Stress from technological complexity is mitigated by both supportive team communication and the extent of telework. Perceived stress from technological complexity, however, still increases work and occupational strains.

The findings emphasize the importance of supportive internal communication to foster a collaborative telework environment. Practitioners in internal communication need to encourage teleworkers to help each other with adequate information and provide also emotional support to overcome the negative effects of complex ICT.

The study shows that supportive communication among team members is important for teleworkers to reduce work and occupational strains, especially when facing difficulties with complex ICT.

Austria has not yet established a single national organisation for research management and administration (RMA). Various research related institutions are organised in individual professional networks within their categories of organisational structure – public, private, and industry. Hence, the creation of a joint RMA association is a good aim to target in the near future. The obvious need of a strong networked community of RMAs across disciplines and organisational structures, especially in a setting of a growing global research arena, shall exemplify the development of such an Association of Research Managers and Administrators-Austria (ARMA-T). Furthermore, external factors play an increasingly important role in research development and RMAs. It depends on how their home organisations – universities, industry, and intermediaries – will understand the need for cooperation, platform building, and continuous development and professionalisation. Vision and foresight from several constituents and stakeholders will have to play a starring role as well as supporting the whole community. On top of it, international knowledge exchange helps to create those necessary conversations and networks for such a development.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge the disciplinary divide between international finance and international business (IB) to realign academic research with business reality in which strategy and finance align to determine firms’ success or failures.

The authors discuss theoretical differences between the fields of international finance and IB strategy that caused the fields to develop in isolation with little fertilization across disciplines. The authors review scarce interdisciplinary contributions between the fields. Finally, the authors identify complementarities that suggest fruitful avenues for future research.

The authors find a persistent disconnect between finance and strategy/IB literature that can be explained by fundamentally different aims and assumptions about the markets. While finance theory seeks to explain typical effects under functioning markets, strategy and IB theories focus inherently on exceptional effects and market inefficiencies.

The fundamental theoretical differences that isolate finance and strategy/IB create avenues for interdisciplinary research that harness the complementarities of the two disciplines. These include strategic aspects of capital structure, internal capital market inefficiencies, corporate governance, capital market liability of foreignness and institutional aspects of financial management.

With this paper, the authors not only bring academic researchers in finance and strategy closer to corporate practice. The theoretical discussion also challenges the functional blind spots of practitioners and encourages more holistic decision-making.

Challenging market functioning and recognizing market inefficiencies using strategy and IB foundations connects financial economics with non-market topics such as environment, society and governance or impact investing.

The value and originality of the paper come from the qualitative, epistemological approach to study and analyse the divide between international finance and strategy/IB scholarship.

This paper aims to depart from the premise that human capital investments and human capital outcomes are often tacit – an aspect, which is often neglected in the current literature on entrepreneurial human capital. The idea of this conceptual paper is to shed light on the social process of how human capital investments and human capital outcomes can be valued and made visible through the validation of prior learning. Thus, this study conceptualises the validation of prior learning as a post hoc, the reflective process through which an aspiring entrepreneur is guided.

This paper is conceptual and introduces a process model.

Findings indicate that the process of the validation of prior learning is well-suitable to inform aspiring entrepreneurs of their investments into human capital and their human capital outcomes. The process results in a (partial) certified qualification that provides entrepreneurial legitimacy.

Thus far, the model is conceptual and should be validated via interviews and further empirical studies in the field.

Literature in the field of entrepreneurial human capital suggests that human capital outcomes are more important for success than inputs. Furthermore, context-specific knowledge, skills and abilities are more important than generalised outcomes. These findings have implications for the design of validation procedures.

Human capital has only been recently conceptualised as consisting of human capital investments and outcomes of human capital investment. However, thus far the literature falls short in acknowledging the tacit nature of human capital investments and human capital outcomes. This paper contributes a structured process of how human capital investments and human capital outcomes are linked and assessed. In so doing, this study extends a recent model of human capital investments and outputs (Marvel et al., 2016, p. 616).

Business leaders are facing a change of role as digitalization continues to intensify in organizations. As technological change is bringing back supposedly old virtues of leadership, this study aims to explain the impact digital transformation has on leadership due to organizational size.

Cross-border study with experts from multinational enterprises (MNEs) in Austria and small and medium companies (SMEs) in Italy.

With increasing digitalization, leadership is becoming more important. In times of social distance, it is essential that leaders actively foster the management of relationships with their employees, manage social processes in their teams and shape change processes. This requires a bundle of skills consisting of effective leadership skills, strong change management skills and conceptual digitization skills.

Digital transformation is not mainly about implementing new technologies; it is about developing an appropriate strategy in which people are key. Organizations regardless of size need to recognize that digital transformation requires not less, but even more active shaping of the relationships between leaders and their team members. Consequently, they need active leaders who drive, communicate and implement technological change. As leadership and change require time, resources and, above all, attention, executive selection and qualification are critical for the broad integration of digitalization ideas into an organization.

People, not technology, drive digital transformation, and organizations require leaders, not necessarily technological specialists, to manage the complex changes that comprise an organization’s digital transformation. Technical and methodological skills can be substituted with the use of new technologies, but leaders’ interactional, social, strategic and conceptual skills are gaining in importance.

The study of shame has a long tradition in intra- and inter-personal psychology. This paper aims to investigate whether consumers can experience brand shame after self-relevant consumption incidents. Specifically, this research proposes that consumers follow a complex shame-inducing process in the aftermath of unpleasant experiences involving their favorite brand. The moderating role of relational tie strength between consumers and their favorite brand existing prior to symbolic failures is examined.

A scenario-based, online survey (n = 660) among consumers who have recently experienced a self-relevant failure with their favorite brand was conducted. Confirmatory factor analysis ensured the reliability and validity of the measurement model. For testing the conceptual model, data was analyzed by means of a moderated mediation analysis. The proposed model was tested against, among others, common method bias and alternative models. The findings were cross-validated with a scenario-based online experiment (n = 1,616).

Results show that brand shame is a key mediator between customer dissatisfaction and brand anger when self-relevant, symbolic failures happen. Moreover, strong consumer-brand identification triggers brand-detrimental effects. It is shown to influence the connection between consumers’ inward- (i.e. brand shame) and resulting outward-directed (i.e. brand anger) negative emotions on brands, which lead to consumer vengeance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to introduce the concept of situational brand shame to the literature on favorite brands. Furthermore, it shows that consumer-brand identification moderates the direct and indirect (via brand shame) unfavorable effects of failure-induced dissatisfaction on brand anger. This research adds insights to the investigation of the “love-becomes-hate” effect arising after self-relevant failures involving consumers’ most preferred brand.

This study aims to compare the humanitarian supply chains and logistics of two countries in earthquake preparedness by modifying and using a previously established preparedness evaluation framework.

A European flood emergency management system (FEMS) is a seven-dimensional framework to assess a country’s preparedness for flood emergencies. The FEMS framework was modified to apply to earthquakes. Leveraging a multiple explanatory case study approach with data analysis, the authors reconstructed the events of the earthquakes in Pakistan (2005) and Japan (2011) with an applied grading (1–5). Findings were evaluated within the adopted FEMS framework. From a practitioner’s perspective, the framework is applicable and can accelerate support in the field.

Pakistan lacked emergency plans before the 2005 earthquake. In contrast, Japan possessed emergency plans before the disaster, helping minimise casualties. Overall, Japan demonstrated considerably better emergency management effectiveness. However, both countries significantly lacked the distribution of responsibilities among actors.

Practical factors in the humanitarian supply chain are well understood. However, synthesising individual factors into a comprehensive framework is difficult, which the study solves by applying and adopting the FEMS framework to earthquakes. The developed framework allows practitioners a structured baseline for prioritising measures in the field. Furthermore, this study exemplifies the usefulness of cross-hazard research within emergency management and preparedness in a real-world scenario.

This paper aims to take stock of current knowledge on chief executive officers (CEOs) speaking out on societal issues and to position the phenomenon with and against the relevant literature on CEO communication. Ultimately, the paper seeks to arrive at a better conceptual understanding of CEO advocates and activists from a communication science perspective.

This paper is conceptual and considers findings from the literature on personalization, reputation, issues and topic management.

The paper reflects media, receptive and strategic implications for CEO advocates and activists and derives four workable propositions. It lays the foundation for treating CEO advocacy and activism as a form of strategic topic management that harnesses personalization to address a new set of stakeholder demands.

The insights gained from this paper may help researchers and practitioners understand when CEOs should speak up, what to communicate and how. The human element behind this kind of communication echoes new expectations, demands and values from stakeholders, shareholders and society at large.

Understanding the specific interdependencies between personalization, reputation, issues and topic management underlying CEO advocacy and activism can help to improve a CEO's relationship with stakeholders and guide the public discourse to actively bring about positive societal change.

The paper fills a gap by providing an understanding of advocate and activist CEOs from a communication science perspective. The insights from this paper can be used as a starting point for further research on this subject.

This paper aims to illustrate the scope and challenges of using computer-aided content analysis in international marketing with the aim to capture consumer sentiments about COVID-19 from multi-lingual tweets.

The study is based on some 35 million original COVID-19-related tweets. The study methodology illustrates the use of supervised machine learning and artificial neural network techniques to conduct extensive information extraction.

The authors identified more than two million tweets from six countries and categorized them into PESTEL (i.e. Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal) dimensions. The extracted consumer sentiments and associated emotions show substantial differences across countries. Our analyses highlight opportunities and challenges inherent in using multi-lingual online sentiment analysis in international marketing. Based on these insights, several future research directions are proposed.

First, the authors contribute to methodology development in international marketing by providing a “use-case” for computer-aided text mining in a multi-lingual context. Second, the authors add to the knowledge on differences in COVID-19-related consumer sentiments in different countries. Third, the authors provide avenues for future research on the analysis of unstructured multi-media posts.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the communicative constitution of organizational inclusion and/or exclusion through humorous acts at the expense of members of minorities and/or historically disadvantaged groups.

Semistructured interviews with 84 employees in Austria and Germany dealing with their experiences regarding diversity and inclusion (D&I) at work were conducted and analyzed in two steps. First, a thematic text analysis was performed to structure the content and identify relevant themes and anecdotes for further analysis. Second, a ventriloquial analysis sought to identify the physically absent yet present voices in these anecdotes.

The interviews revealed that jokes and quips mostly target colleagues of observable foreign origin. The analysis further identified three themes that show that disparaging humor can simultaneously reinforce inclusion/exclusion across hierarchies and create boundaries within teams – but in different ways. The findings also indicate that above all prejudices “participate” in such events and that in most cases the collective is invoked to increase the joke's “authority”.

This research is the first one that investigates humor in the context of D&I through a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) lens, which facilitates studying the constitutive character of humorous communication in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, this is one of the first empirical humor studies to draw on established theory-driven concepts of inclusion-exclusion in its analysis.