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This paper aims to examine whether and to what extent the practical wisdom contained in classical Confucianism can provide conceptual and ethical resources for ethical leadership for Chinese companies in the twenty‐first century. The objectives of the paper are: to reconstruct the core elements of Confucianism; to account some major issues confronting corporate China; to identify the attributes of the Confucian ethical leadership through those of Junzi against such a backdrop; to identify some major challenges for Junzi leadership in today's business environment in China; and to consider some implications of this analysis for management development and management education.

The paper adopts a normative analysis.

A critical articulation of the concept of ethical leadership based on the Confucian notion of Junzi is presented, and the concept is examined against the context of problems confronting business in China. The challenges for Confucian ethical leadership are identified in the conclusion.

The paper presents a critical reference for managers who adopt or intend to adopt Confucian ideas in management.

The paper provides a critical reference for those in society who assume leadership positions to learn about Chinese ethical leadership.

Few works in the literature have made the connection between Confucian ethical leadership and the Chinese corporate context with a critical approach and rigorous analysis to help reveal the inherent challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which Chinese classical virtues act as a restraint on consumerist hedonic values and the associated priority on profit maximisation by managers.

The paper is based on a literature review and adopts a reflective approach to the topic.

The paper considers how Chinese classical virtues are related to contemporary relational or indigenous values and how a social tension is created between these values and the hedonic values now present in Chinese urban society. Implications for management and management education are reviewed in the light of this tension.

The social unrest created by the privatisation of SOEs can be mitigated by the promotion of management education sensitised to the cultural norms and expectations of the Chinese people in relation to the role and responsibilities of managers. The Junzi (gentleman‐leader) archetype and the virtues of ren‐yi‐li are offered as exemplary features of a management seeking to balance social responsibility with profitability.

The paper highlights the social turbulence created by the advent of market economics in China and the concomitant rise of consumerism and the privatisation of state‐owned enterprises.

Employees’ knowledge management, which influences creativity, is a pivotal resource in organizational innovation activities, as it helps activate the knowledge resource pool and improves knowledge flow. Using social information processing theory, this study aims to construct a cross-level model to examine how knowledge hiding plays a role in the relationship between leader–member exchange differentiation (LMXD) and employee creativity.

This study surveyed 754 leader–employee matching samples from 127 teams in China innovation enterprises at two time points. Confirmatory factor analysis, convergent analysis, hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrapping method by SPSS and AMOS were used to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results demonstrate the cross-level model’s efficiency and reveal the following findings: Team-level LMXD is negatively related to employee creativity, whereas it is positively related to knowledge hiding; knowledge hiding is negatively associated with employee creativity; thus, knowledge hiding plays a mediating role in the relationships between them.

Based on the knowledge-hiding perspective, this study analyzed an underlying mechanism between LMXD and employee creativity, thereby further enriching the literature on the influence of knowledge management. This proposed connection has not been established previously. Moreover, the findings respond to the reasons for the inconsistent conclusions of previous literature on the cross-level relationship between LMXD and employee creativity based on the social information processing theory. It thus clarifies the cross-level influence path, as well as provides a theoretical basis for further research on the relationship between the two.

Public crisis often generates new knowledge that should be incorporated into a government’s macro-control to ensure the relief supply. From the perspective of public crisis knowledge management, the Chinese system of Government relief supplies can be considered as a special case of the knowledge system. This paper aims to investigate the supply and production mechanism of relief goods and explore the advantages of the Chinese system when a sudden public crisis occurs.

Under the Chinese system, the authors construct a relief supply chain model consisting of the Chinese Government, one manufacturer and one supplier, where the supplier has no capital constraints. Given the demand for relief goods, the government purchases from the manufacturer with a guide price. Then, the manufacturer decides on its order quantity and offers a wholesale price to the supplier. The supplier has a random capacity and decides on the level of knowledge acquisition to improve its capacity.

The authors first obtain the analytical solution for the manufacturer to motivate a high level of knowledge acquisition from the supplier. Specifically, the manufacturer’s optimal order quantity is equal to the demand and the optimal wholesale price has a cost-plus form that reimburses the supplier for its production cost and knowledge-acquisition cost. Next, the authors derive the optimal guide price for the government, which should be set to subsidize the manufacturer with a proportion of the sourcing cost. Finally, the authors compare the Chinese system with the market mechanism where the supplier has capital constraints and confirm that the Chinese system is more beneficial to both the manufacturer and the government.

Quantitative research on the Chinese system of Government relief supplies is difficult to be conducted. This paper provides feasible and practical methods to quantify the benefits of the Chinese system. The results reveal that the Chinese system is an effective mechanism of public crisis knowledge management, which can be helpful to the government’s policy-making in practice.

Driven by the development of the global digital economy, knowledge management in industrial enterprises offers more possibilities for green innovation. Based on the perspective of external knowledge sources, this study aims to construct a panel regression model to explore the relationship between digital economy and industrial green innovation efficiency.

Panel data from 30 regions in China from 2011 to 2020 were selected as research samples. All data are obtained from national and provincial statistical yearbooks. Coupling coordination degree analysis, entropy method, panel regression analysis, robustness test and threshold effect test by Stata 16.0 were used to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results demonstrate the hypotheses and reveal the following findings: the digital economy is positively related to industrial green innovation efficiency and external knowledge sources, and external knowledge sources mediate the relationship between them. Moreover, based on the threshold test results, the digital economy has a double-threshold effect on industrial green innovation efficiency.

Based on the perspective of external knowledge sources, the proposed mediating mechanism between the digital economy and industrial green innovation efficiency has not been established previously, further enriching the research on the antecedents and outcomes of external knowledge sources. Moreover, this study estimated the direct influence mechanism and double-threshold effect of the digital economy on industrial green innovation efficiency from theoretical and empirical analysis, thus responding to the call of scholars and adding to existing research on how the digital economy affects the green transformation of industrial enterprises.

Prior studies on the impact of incentives on physicians’ online participation mainly focused on different incentives while ignoring the difficulty of setting monetary incentives efficiently. Based on goal-setting theory, the current research examines the relationship between incentives with goals of varying difficulty and professional health knowledge sharing (PHKS) in online health knowledge-sharing platforms (OHKSPs).

Four field experiments with different monetary incentives were conducted by one of China’s largest OHKSPs, with whom the researchers cooperated in data collection. Monthly panel data on 10,584 physicians were collected from September 2018 to December 2019. There were 9,376 physicians in the treatment group and 1,208 in the control group. The authors used a difference-in-difference (DID) model to explore the research question based on the same control group and the Chow test with seemingly unrelated estimation (sureg) to compare regression coefficients between four groups. Several robustness checks were performed to validate the main results, including a relative time model, multiple falsification tests and a DID estimation using the propensity score matching method.

The results show that the monetary incentive significantly positively affected the volume of physicians’ PHKS directly with negative spillover to the duration of physicians’ PHKS. Moreover, the positive effect of incentives with higher difficulty on the volume of physicians’ PHKS was significantly smaller than that of incentives with low difficulty. Finally, professional title had a positive moderating effect on the volume of goal difficulty setting and did not significantly moderate the effect on the duration of physicians’ PHKS.

Some limitations of this study are: firstly, because the field experiments were enterprise benefit oriented, the treatment and control groups were not balanced. Secondly, the experiments for different incentive measures were relatively similar, making it challenging to validate a causal effect. Finally, more consideration should be given to the strategy for setting hierarchical incentives in future research.

The research indicates that monetary incentives have a bilateral effect on PHKS, i.e. a positive direct effect on the volume of physicians’ contributions and a negative spillover effect on the duration of physicians’ PHKS. The professional titles of physicians also moderate such bilateral switches of PHKS. Furthermore, when a physician’s energy is limited, the goal difficulty setting of the incentive mechanism tends to be low. The more difficult the incentives are, the more inefficient the effects on physicians’ PHKS will be.

This study aims to provide an estimation of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission abatement costs in China’s industry sector during the period of 2006-2010, and additionally provide an ex-post estimation of CO₂ abatement cost savings that would be realized if carbon emission permits trading among different industry sectors of 30 provinces in China during the same period were allowed, to answer the question that whether the industrial carbon emission abatement cost can (partially) be recovered from carbon emission trading in China.

The joint production framework associated with the environmental technology is utilized for formulating the models for estimating abatement costs and simulating emission permits trading scheme. Several data envelopment analysis-based models that could deal with both the desirable and undesirable outputs within the above framework are utilized for abatement cost saving estimation. The weak disposability assumption and variable returns to scale assumption are applied in the modelling.

In China’s industry sector, during 2006-2010, the estimated CO₂ emission abatement cost was 1,842 billion yuan, which accounts for 2.45 per cent of China’s total industrial output value; the emission abatement cost saving from emission permits trading would be 315 billion yuan, which accounts for 17.12 per cent of the emission opportunity abatement cost; and additional 1,065.95 million tonnes of CO₂ emission reductions would be realized from emission permits trading, and this accounts for 4.75 per cent of the total industrial CO₂ emissions.

The estimation is implemented at the regional level, i.e. the emission permits trading subjects are the whole industry sectors in different Chinese provinces, because of the data limitation in this study. Further estimation could be implemented at the enterprise level to provide a deeper insight into the abatement cost recovery from emission permits trading.

The estimation models and calculation process introduced in this study could be applied for evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of pollutant emission permits trading schemes from the perspective that whether these market-based abatement policy instruments help to realize the potential abatement cost savings.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has provided the estimation of CO₂ emission abatement cost and the estimation of CO₂ abatement cost saving effect from emission permits trading for China’s industry sector. This study provides the first attempt to fill this research gap.

Online knowledge communities have emerged as crucial places for knowledge and risk management in the face of systemic risks. The vitality of online knowledge communities requires users’ active engagement. This research paper aims to explore how text complex level and text analytic level as effective risk knowledge design leverages encourage users’ engagement under different “riskification” levels.

This paper performs linguistic analysis on 210 TED talk transcripts and 38,377 comments from 2002 to 2018. The authors construct the variable of text complex level and conduct ordinary least squares regressions to test the relationships among text complex level, text analytic level and user engagement under different levels of “riskification” in the online knowledge community.

High text complex level decreases engagement, while high text analytic level increases engagement. A high level of “riskification” exaggerates the negative effect of text complex level but diminishes the positive effect of the text analytic level.

This research advances knowledge management by highlighting users’ engagement and responding to shared risk knowledge from a different perspective than knowledge supply. The focus on risk communication in online knowledge communities broadens the scope of knowledge management literature beyond the confines of organizations. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first studies to propose risk knowledge design approaches for communicating systemic risks.

This paper aims to explore the factors that affect housing prices as per Chinese articles indexed in the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD). There were different foci regarding what drove housing prices in China in Chinese articles, and international journal articles in English. As most previous English articles only threw light on international research, it motivated the researchers to systematically review Chinese literature’s factors that affected housing prices in China.

This paper reviewed housing price research articles indexed in the two largest Chinese academic research databases: the CSCD and China Knowledge Infrastructure Engineering Database (CNKI.NET). It systematically collected the data and adopted descriptive analysis techniques and synthesis.

This research reviewed the literature published from 2015 to 2020 and revealed some unique factors affecting China's housing prices. For example, research focused on administrative aspects such as macroeconomic regulation and control (often known as macro control). Authors of Chinese articles suggested that the two-child policy affected housing prices, which differed from that in the English journal articles. The research results implied that researchers should read top Chinese journals on top of good international journals when they study China's real estate market in the future.

Because the domestic real estate market started late, domestic real estate transaction data and real estate-related statistics are more difficult to obtain. The research is mostly based on the relationship between supply and demand, government policy and individual consumer factors, and the sample has a short time span.

As China is a planned economy country, administrative factors are one main factor that affects the housing price. There were a significant number of articles in Chinese that considered this factor to be the main driver of the real estate price. It included government investment and macro-control, i.e. direct government intervention to cool down the overheated economy. Yet, there are few English articles that threw light on this factor including the commodity housing supply and government behaviour that affect housing price. The second-child policy, which is unique in China, also played an important role in the determination of the housing price. In the articles indexed in CNKI, the second-child rate, willingness to have a second child or having a second child were mentioned in the Chinese articles but not the English ones.

In this paper, the economic, social, administrative and environmental factors were summarised, which basically covered all the factors affecting housing prices. The administrative factors were a special group of factors that affect the housing price because of the country's planned economic system. Secondly, it provided useful information to real estate development enterprises in China. To make a correct investment and management decision, real estate development enterprises must understand the actual situation and possible problems of the industry. In this study, we analysed the research literature on the real estate industry in China for the period from 2015 to 2020 one by one and determined the influencing factors of the housing price, which provided references for effective cost control. Thirdly, it allows the public to understand and grasp the real estate industry. As the housing price has been continuously increasing, the public pays increasing attention to the real estate industry. Through the literature analysis of the impact of real estate prices, this paper revealed the elements of house price expenses, which makes it convenient for ordinary people to understand the real estate industry.

This study allows foreigners who do not know Chinese to know more about factors that drove housing prices from the Chinese perspective. It also provides insights to overseas developers who wish to enter the property market in China. The results can be generalised to other non-English-speaking real estate research.

This study aims to probe the applicability of 2-mercaptobenzothiazole (MBT) functionalized ionic liquids (ILs) as additives in lithium complex grease (LCG) by researching the corrosion inhibiting, rheological and tribological performances.

Electrochemical tests such as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and potentiodynamic polarization curves were used on Gamry electrochemical workstation to research the corrosion inhibition properties of ILs in 1.0 M HCl corrosive solution. The rheological properties of different grease samples were tested on a rheometer. The tribological properties were investigated on SRV-V oscillating reciprocating friction and wear tester. Scanning electron microscope, X-ray spectrometer and X-ray photoelectron spectrometer were used to characterize the lubricating mechanism.

The 2-MBT functionalized ILs have excellent corrosion inhibition properties. When used as additives in LCG, they both exhibited enhancing effects on thermostability, colloid stability and structural recoverability, and furthermore, outstanding friction-reducing and antiwear properties were also obtained. Surface analysis indicated that the superior lubricating performances of 2-MBT functionalized ILs were mainly ascribed to the formation of tribochemical products on wear tracks, including organic compounds with C–O bond, Fe₂O₃ and FeS₂.

The 2-MBT-based ILs synthesized in this study were multifunctional additives with excellent corrosion inhibiting and tribological properties, which would have a very broad application prospect in lubricating grease industry.