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In keeping with recent body image social trends, consumer demand for the adoption of plus-size models is increasing, although the use of thin models remains prevalent. The current study explores how consumers process information about fashion products displayed on different sizes of models in advertisements, focusing on model and consumer body sizes and both genders. As an underlying mechanism explaining how the relationship between model and consumer body sizes shapes consumer purchase intention, this study explores the role of guilt, shame and mental imagery.

The current study uses a text analytics technique to identify female consumers' general opinions of thin models in advertising. Employing a 3 (consumer body size: normal, overweight, obese) × 2 (model body size: thin, plus-size) × 2 (gender: male, female) between-subjects online experiment (n = 718), the main study comparatively analyzes the influences of plus-size and thin models on consumer responses.

The results reveal that, despite body positivity movements, thin models still generate negative emotions among female consumers. For obese female consumers, advertisements featuring plus-size models produce fewer negative emotions but not more mental imagery than advertisements featuring thin models. Conversely, for obese male consumers, advertisements featuring plus-size models generate more mental imagery but not more negative emotions than advertisements featuring thin models. The results also reveal that the relationship between consumer body size and guilt is moderated by perceived model size, which is also moderated by gender in generating mental imagery. While guilt plays a mediating role in enhancing mental imagery, resulting in purchase intention, shame does not take on this role.

This study is the first to present an integrated model that elucidates how consumers with varying body sizes respond to different sizes of models in advertising and how these responses impact purchase intentions.

Our findings only apply to contexts where consumers purchase fashion clothing in response to advertisements featuring thin versus plus-size models.

Exposing normal-size consumers to plus-size models generates less mental imagery, and thus, practitioners should seek to match the body sizes of the models featured in advertising to the body sizes of their target audience or ad campaigns that include both plus-size and thin models may help improve message persuasiveness in fashion advertising. Moreover, guilt-appeal advertising campaigns using thin models would appeal more to thin consumers of both genders than shame-appeal advertising.

This study aims to fill several gaps in the literature. First, it examines the Umrah industry from the supply side, investigating the pivotal factors for travel agencies’ performance. Second, it empirically investigates service leaders’ competencies specific to the hospital and tourism industry. Third, it clarifies whether there is a direct impact of organisational service orientation on business performance. Fourth, it explores the influence of network capabilities in a service context, specifically in travel agencies, which has rarely been discussed.

This is a mixed-method study with sequential explanatory research design. First, a quantitative approach was conducted with 150 authorised travel agencies in Indonesia, with two manager-level employees representing each agency. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics and structural equation modelling. A qualitative study was conducted to enrich the findings by interviewing the Director of Umrah and Hajj Development of the Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia and three other respondents.

Service leaders’ competencies and resource capacity significantly influence organisational service orientation, leading to enhanced perceived service quality and performance. In addition, resource capacity influences network capabilities, improving performance.

This study identifies factors affecting the performance of Umrah travel agencies in an intensely competitive environment, which has rarely been discussed. This sheds light on how travel agencies can survive and succeed in this competitive industry. Moreover, this study provides evidence regarding the role of network capabilities in the tourism industry and the impact of organisational service orientation, both directly and indirectly, on performance.

The 170-year-old Master in Business Administration (MBA) program is becoming obsolete and inefficient to address today's real-world problems, and is facing mounting criticism from business scholars, management deans, and academic scholars alike. Reviewing major criticisms, this chapter suggests a new design for the MBA program that will not only address the criticisms but also accept a paradigm shift that will spearhead it in coming decades. The redesigned MBA “structure” proposes a four-semester full-time program, during which each semester delves into deeper marketplace problems of increasing complexity (i.e., from simple to complex to unstructured to wicked problems) and deals with these problems with new levels of critical thinking skills and ethical reasoning processes tempered by corresponding entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, and values. The “content” of the redesigned program is anchored around five major themes of business learning: namely, intrinsic motivation management, creativity and innovation management, productivity management, revenue management, and eco-sustainability management, each geared to generate professional entrepreneurial knowledge, and skills and values urgently needed today. Numerous beneficial features of this newly redesigned integrated business management program (MBA) are also discussed.

This study sought to test two competing sets of hypotheses derived from two different theoretical perspectives regarding (1) the effects of leader–follower similarity and dissimilarity in psychological resilience on the follower's absenteeism in times of organizational crisis and (2) the moderating effect of relational demography (gender and age similarity) in these relationships.

Polynomial regression and response surface analysis were performed using data from 510 followers and 149 supervisors in a financial firm in Canada.

The results overall support the similarity–attraction perspective, but not the resource complementarity perspective. Dissimilarity in resilience was predictive of followers' absenteeism, and similarity in surface-level conditions (gender and age) attenuates the relational burdens triggered by resilience discrepancy.

The findings reiterate the importance of developing employees' resilience, while shedding light on the importance for managers of being aware of their potential misalignment with subordinates resilience.

The results (1) suggest that it is the actual (di)similarity with the leader, rather than leader's degree of resilience, that shapes followers' absenteeism and (2) add nuance to the resilience literature.

This study aims to develop a moderated mediation model that enables the examination of the direct relationship between brand orientation (BO) and export performance, the mediating effects of external and internal branding capabilities on the BO-export performance link, and the moderating influence of institutional environment, i.e. regulatory turbulence and policy support.

A time-lag primary data was collected from two-wave survey of 684 cross-industry exporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using an online-email based survey technique, and the research model was validated using ordinary least squares regression analysis in SPSSV.27 and Hayes’ PROCESS macroV.2.13.

Regression findings indicate that the relationship between BO and export performance is not direct, but rather mediated by means of both external and internal branding capabilities. It further helps to uncover the dual role of institutional environment, with regulatory turbulence weakening and policy support strengthening the indirect influences of BO on export performance via external and internal branding capabilities.

This study advances branding literature by conceptualizing and empirically testing the role of BO associated with internal and external branding capabilities and, subsequently, with export performance.

The research findings indicate that brand-oriented SMEs must actively engage in the development of branding capabilities to improve their export performance.

While brand creation is essential for the success and growth of SMEs competing in the worldwide marketplaces, there is a dearth of research explaining the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions through which BO influences export performance.

Today’s competitive business world presents unanticipated challenges to enterprises worldwide. So, the well-being of the employees may be a sustained competitive edge for corporations in improving employee performance. Positive psychology served as the foundation for this study, investigating the interplay between employee well-being and task performance by incorporating organizational-specific factors like organizational virtuousness (OV) and individual-specific factors such as Psychological Capital (PsyCap).

In total, 639 dyadic responses were gathered from the banking sector, encompassing employees in both private and public banks in India, along with their immediate supervisors. The hypotheses were subsequently examined by applying Structural Equation Modeling (SEM).

OV and PsyCap are considerably associated with the well-being of employees and task performance, according to the findings. Employee well-being mediates the relationships between the perceptions of Organizational Virtuousness (OV) and task performance, as well as between PsyCap and task performance.

The intense competition and series of scandals in Indian banks urge the introduction of some behavioral precautionary measures. Banks need to understand and intervene in positive organizational behavior and help the employees build strong PsyCap to enhance their well-being and task performance to gain a competitive edge.

The present study integrated Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) and Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) to enhance work performance.

This study aims to extend and explore patterns and trends of research in the linkage of big data and knowledge management (KM) by identifying growth in terms of numbers of papers and current and emerging themes and to propose areas of future research.

The study was conducted by systematically extracting, analysing and synthesizing the literature related to linkage between big data and KM published in top-tier journals in Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus databases by exploiting bibliometric techniques along with theory, context, characteristics, methodology (TCCM) analysis.

The study unfolds four major themes of linkage between big data and KM research, namely (1) conceptual understanding of big data as an enabler for KM, (2) big data–based models and frameworks for KM, (3) big data as a predictor variable in KM context and (4) big data applications and capabilities. It also highlights TCCM of big data and KM research through which it integrates a few previously reported themes and suggests some new themes.

This study extends advances in the previous reviews by adding a new time line, identifying new themes and helping in the understanding of complex and emerging field of linkage between big data and KM. The study outlines a holistic view of the research area and suggests future directions for flourishing in this research area.

This study highlights the role of big data in KM context resulting in enhancement of organizational performance and efficiency. A summary of existing literature and future avenues in this direction will help, guide and motivate managers to think beyond traditional data and incorporate big data into organizational knowledge infrastructure in order to get competitive advantage.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, the present study is the first study to go deeper into understanding of big data and KM research using bibliometric and TCCM analysis and thus adds a new theoretical perspective to existing literature.

This study aims to explore the role of the linguistic style used in the brand-posted social media content on consumer engagement in the Fintech domain.

A total of 3,286 tweets (registering nearly 1.35 million impressions) published by 10 leading Fintech unicorns in India were extracted using the Twitter API. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary was used to analyse the linguistic characteristics of the shared tweets. Negative Binomial Regression (NBR) was used for testing the hypotheses.

This study finds that using drive words and cognitive language increases consumer engagement with Fintech messages via the central route of information processing. Further, affective words and conversational language drive consumer engagement through the peripheral route of information processing.

The study extends the literature on brand engagement by unveiling the effect of linguistic features used to design social media messages.

The study provides guidance to social media marketers of Fintech brands regarding what content strategies best enhance consumer engagement. The linguistic style to improve online consumer engagement (OCE) is detailed.

The study’s findings contribute to the growing stream of Fintech literature by exploring the role of linguistic style on consumer engagement in social media communication. The study’s findings indicate the relevance of the dual processing mechanism of elaboration likelihood model (ELM) as an explanatory theory for evaluating consumer engagement with messages posted by Fintech brands.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate students' adoption intention (ADI) and actual usage (ATU) of artificial intelligence (AI)-based teacher bots (T-bots) for learning using technology adoption model (TAM) and context-specific variables.

A mixed-method design is used wherein the quantitative and qualitative approaches were used to explore the adoption of T-bots for learning. Overall, 45 principals/directors/deans/professors were interviewed and NVivo 8.0 was used for interview data analysis. Overall, 1,380 students of higher education institutes were surveyed, and the collected data was analyzed using the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique.

The T-bot's ADI’s antecedents found were perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, personalization, interactivity, perceived trust, anthropomorphism and perceived intelligence. The ADI influences the ATU of T-bots, and its relationship is negatively moderated by stickiness to learn from human teachers in the classroom. It comprehends the insights of senior authorities of the higher education institutions in India toward the adoption of T-bots.

The research provides distinctive insights for principals, directors and professors in higher education institutes to understand the factors affecting the students' behavioral intention and use of T-bots. The developers and designers of T-bots need to ensure that T-bots are more interactive, provide personalized information to students and ensure the anthropomorphic characteristics of T-bots. The education policymakers can also comprehend the factors of T-bot adoption for developing the policies related to T-bots and their implications in education.

T-bot is a new disruptive technology in the education sector, and this is the first step in exploring the adoption factors. The TAM model is extended with context-specific factors related to T-bot technology to offer a comprehensive explanatory power to the proposed model. The research outcome provides the unique antecedents of the adoption of T-bots.