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The potential contradictory impact of empowering leadership may obfuscate its effectiveness. Empowering leadership is characterized not only by increased employees' autonomy but also by additional responsibilities and work demands, which may trigger different motivational processes for employees and lead to different perceptions of job stressors. This research aims to explore such contradictory impacts of empowering leadership on employees' perceived stressors by clarifying the complex motivational processes (intrinsic/extrinsic) experienced by employees when facing empowering leadership, as well as the boundary condition of employees' regulatory focus based on regulatory focus theory and self-determination theory (SDT).

The authors examine the proposed theoretical model using a two-wave survey, with the data being collected from 294 employees working at a hotel in China.

The results show that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation mediate the relationship between empowering leadership and employees' perceived stressors and demonstrate the moderating role of an employee's regulatory focus. Specifically, a high promotion focus strengthens the relationship between empowering leadership and intrinsic motivation, while a high prevention focus strengthens the relationship between empowering leadership and extrinsic motivation.

Managers should consider the attributes of front-line service employees (e.g. are they promotion-focused or prevention-focused?) when demonstrating empowering leadership to prevent employees from misinterpreting that leadership as a source of stress.

This research helps to reconcile previously conflicting findings on empowering leadership by clarifying the complex motivational processes behind it. Furthermore, this research adopts a regulatory focus perspective to suggest that the reason why employees respond to their leaders differently is inherently associated with each employee's motivational tendencies.

Ethical decision making, business ethics.

This case is applicable to MBA, EDP and EMBA courses.

TOREAD, a professional provider of outdoor equipment in China, started in business by producing and selling tents. To meet market demand, TOREAD expanded its product line which ranges from outdoor durable tent products to “pan-outdoor” products including footwear and clothing. During the critical expansion phase, TOREAD was challenged by a quality problem in a batch of outsourced sandals that had been manufactured by a contracted supplier. By researching different options and going through an ethical decision making process, TOREAD made the choice of destroying all “problem sandals”. Since then, TOREAD has focused development on product quality improvement and product innovation to establish a sustainable brand image and generate social benefits. TOREAD's decision making in the critical development phase helped it to become the leader in the outdoor product industry in China.

This case may be used for courses such as business ethics and strategy. By learning this case, students can understand the process of making ethical decisions when facing moral dilemmas among corporate decision makers, employees and relevant interested parties, and learn how to make strategic decisions to balance company profit growth and social benefits in critical development phases.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

This paper aims to examine how and when perceived narcissistic supervision influences subordinates' work engagement and counterproductive work behavior (CWB) based on organizational justice theory.

Two-wave data were collected from 320 employees in a Chinese manufacturing company.

Subordinates' perceived interactional justice mediated the relationships between perceived narcissistic supervision and work engagement and CWB. Higher levels of subordinates' need for belonging strengthened the detrimental impacts of perceived narcissistic supervision on subordinates' outcomes.

Organizations should reduce the occurrence of narcissistic supervision, enhance subordinates' perception of interactional justice and pay more attention to subordinates' need for belonging in personnel and team arrangement.

Although research has documented the detrimental effects of perceived narcissistic supervision, little effort has been made to investigate how such effects occur and which factors might amplify such effects. This study identified the mechanism underlying the link between perceived narcissistic supervision and subordinates' outcomes and unpacked the moderating role of subordinates' need for belonging.

Examines the fifteenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of gender and strength of gender identification on employees’ perception of gender discrimination. It also explores whether gender comparison and perceived gender bias against women act as mediators in the above relationships. It aims to advance the understanding of the processes leading to individual’s perception of gender discrimination in the Chinese workplace.

Data were collected from 362 workers via an employee survey in three large companies in China. The human resource staff helped us to distribute a self-administered questionnaire to the employees, and the authors assured them of confidentiality and protected their anonymity. To test the hypotheses, the authors employed structural equation modeling. The authors first conducted confirmatory factor analysis on the measurement model, and then the authors estimated three nested structural models to test the mediating hypotheses.

The results reveal that gender and strength of gender identification are related to perceived gender discrimination. The authors further found that gender comparison and perceived gender bias against women partially mediated the relationship between gender and perceived gender discrimination, while gender comparison fully mediated the relationship between strength of gender identification and perceived gender discrimination.

The study helps managers understand why and how their subordinates form perceptions of gender discrimination. Given the findings, they should be aware of the importance of gender identity, gender comparison, and gender bias in organizational practices in affecting such perceptions.

This study is the first exploration of the complex relationships among gender, gender identification, gender comparison, perceived gender bias against women, and perceived gender discrimination. It shows the salient role of gender comparison and gender bias against women in shaping employees’ perceptions of gender discrimination, apart from the direct effects of gender and strength of gender identification.

In spite of the vehicle, magnetic field interference can be reduced by some measures and techniques in ammunition design and manufacturing stage, the corruption of the vehicle magnetic field can still reach hundreds to thousands of nanoteslas. Besides, the magnetic field that the ferromagnetic materials generate in response to the strong magnetic field in the vicinity of the body. So, a real-time and accurate vehicle magnetic field calibration method is needed to improve the real-time measurement accuracy of the geomagnetic field for spinning projectiles.

Unlike the past two-step calibration method, the algorithm uses a linear model to calibrate the magnetic measurement error in real-time. In the method, the elliptical model of magnetometer measurement is established to convert the coefficients of hard and soft iron errors into the parameters of the elliptic equation. Then, the parameters are estimated by recursive least square estimator in real-time. Finally, the initial conditions for the estimator are established using prior knowledge method or static calibration method.

Studies show the proposed algorithm has remarkable estimation accuracy and robustness and it realizes calibration the magnetic measurement error in real-time. A turntable experiments indicate that the post-calibration residuals approximate the measurement noise of the magnetometer and the roll accuracy is better than 1°. The algorithm is restricted to biaxial magnetometers’ calibration in real-time as expressed in this paper. It, however, should be possible to broaden this method’s applicability to triaxial magnetometers' calibration in real-time.

Unlike the past two-step calibration method, the algorithm uses a linear model to calibrate the magnetic measurement error in real-time and the calculation is small. Besides, it does not take up storage space. The proposed algorithm has remarkable estimation accuracy and robustness and it realizes calibration the magnetic measurement error in real time. The algorithm is restricted to biaxial magnetometers’ calibration in real-time as expressed in this paper. It, however, should be possible to broaden this method’s applicability to triaxial magnetometers’ calibration in real-time.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a coated glass fiber fabric which can be used as the outer shell of firefighters' protective clothing and replace aramid fabric.

The silicone resin with excellent heat resistance was selected as the base solution. Silica nanoparticles, mica powder and ferric oxide were added into the coating solution, which was coated on the glass fiber fabrics. The vertical burning, thermal protective performance (TPP) value, second-degree burn time and water repellency of the coated fabrics were characterized.

Results showed that the dosages of the thickening filler were in the range 4%–6%; the coating solution has good viscosity. The optimal composition of fillers added in the silicone resin is silica nanoparticles 6%, ferric oxide 5% and mica powder 6%. The TPP value of the optimum coated fabric is 413 kW·s/m². The second-degree burn time is 4.98 s, which is obviously higher than that of the original glass fiber fabric (3.49 s) and that of the aramid fabric (3.82 s). The coated fabric has better thermal stability than aramid fabric.

The production cost of this coated glass fiber fabric was much lower than that of the aramid fabric.

Projecting the population distribution in geographical regions is important for many applications such as launching marketing campaigns or enhancing the public safety in certain densely populated areas. Conventional studies require the collection of people’s trajectory data through offline means, which is limited in terms of cost and data availability. The wide use of online social network (OSN) apps over smartphones has provided the opportunities of devising a lightweight approach of conducting the study using the online data of smartphone apps. This paper aims to reveal the relationship between the online social networks and the offline communities, as well as to project the population distribution by modeling geo-homophily in the online social networks.

In this paper, the authors propose the concept of geo-homophily in OSNs to determine how much the data of an OSN can help project the population distribution in a given division of geographical regions. Specifically, the authors establish a three-layered theoretic framework that first maps the online message diffusion among friends in the OSN to the offline population distribution over a given division of regions via a Dirichlet process and then projects the floating population across the regions.

By experiments over large-scale OSN data sets, the authors show that the proposed prediction models have a high prediction accuracy in characterizing the process of how the population distribution forms and how the floating population changes over time.

This paper tries to project population distribution by modeling geo-homophily in OSNs.

The study aims to examine the effects of guanxi and harmonious leadership on acquisition performance and the role of sociocultural integration as a mediating mechanism impacting the above links, with a focus on Chinese cross-border acquisitions in The Netherlands.

Data were collected through survey questionnaire with 91 respondents who work in Dutch-acquired companies. Regression analysis was used for exploring the relationship.

The study finds that both guanxi and harmonious leadership are positive to acquisition performance, and sociocultural integration represents a significant mediating mechanism by which guanxi and harmonious leadership can result in improved acquisition performance.

This study contributes to culture research by emphasizing the clarification of specific Chinese cultural values and cultural practices in cross-border acquisitions and examining the role of guanxi and harmonious leadership in acquisition performance. Meanwhile, this study helps to unveil Chinese cross-border acquisitions in The Netherlands by examining the mediating force – sociocultural integration.

Anti-epidemic Emergency Projects (AEEPs) have unique characteristics such as a short construction period, high-quality requirements, complex construction environment, many construction participants and many uncertain affecting factors. The purpose of this paper was to propose the establishment method for the Construction Community (CC) of AEEPs (CC-AEEPs) by analyzing the management features of AEEPs, to establish the method of the Social Network Analysis (SNA) for CC-AEEPs, and to apply this method and the framework to Wuhan Huoshenshan Hospital for their verification.

According to the CC theory, this paper explored the member composition and the establishment method for CC-AEEPs. The optimal management factors of CC-AEEPs were proposed by combining the management features of AEEPs and the SNA method for CC-AEEPs was further established. Finally, the applicability of the method was verified through a case study, and some countermeasures for the CC-AEEP social networks were proposed.

The establishment of CC-AEEPs is an important guarantee to complete AEEPs with top speed and high quality. Ten types of CC-AEEP members all played different but irreplaceable roles in cooperative construction, among which the Government, the Contractor, and the Supervisor had outstanding performances. The SNA method could effectively analyze the complexity and cooperative relationship among the members in four aspects. The case study of Huoshenshan Hospital validated the important role of CC-AEEP and its social network in the AEEP research providing beneficial enlightenment for the cooperative optimization path of the AEEP construction participants.

The new establishment method for CC-AEEPs was proposed from the perspective of “cooperation among human, society, and engineering” according to the theories of the engineering sociology and the CC. In this paper, the SNA method was applied to the research on the AEEP construction for the first time and the SNA method for CC-AEEPs was purposed. The optimal management factors of CC-AEEPs and the expansion path of the CC-AEEP social networks were proposed according to the whole-process tracking of AEEPs in Wuhan.