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Given the susceptibility of cross‐cultural interaction to misunderstandings and disagreements, conflict management may be especially useful for helping employees develop quality leader relationships with their foreign managers. One hundred and eleven Chinese employees from various industries in Shanghai were interviewed on specific incidents where they had a conflict, defined as incompatible actions, with their Japanese manager or American manager. A qualitative analysis of the incidents and statistical tests of the data supported the hypotheses that a cooperative approach to conflict, rather than competitive or avoidance approaches, help Chinese employees and their foreign managers strengthen their relationship and improve their productivity. Cooperative conflict management may be an important way to overcome obstacles and develop an effective leader relationship across cultural boundaries.

How can governments and survivors prepare for and manage natural disasters? Post-disaster reconstruction researchers advocate that community involvement is needed to help survivors recover effectively. This study aims to propose that cooperative goals between government officials and survivors develop guanxi relationships and constructive controversy wherein survivors voice their opinions to aid disaster recovery.

The authors adopted the critical incident technique (CIT), which has proved especially useful for studying complex issues, as well as site-intensive research for interviews and participant observation. After developing a local reputation and rapport by working in a residential resettlement area for two months, an author used the CIT to ask 118 survivors of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to describe specific incidents when they interacted with government officials about recovery issues and then to rate survey items that measure independent and dependent variables.

Results, including structural equation analyses, support the reasoning that cooperative goals between government and survivors facilitate guanxi and constructive controversy, which in turn produced effective disaster recovery, as indicated by survivors’ social support, satisfaction, reduced stress and beliefs that government officials led effectively.

The data are self-reported and subject to biases and may not be accurate.

In addition to developing theoretical understanding, the results can have important practical implications for strengthening relationships and constructive controversy between government and survivors.

Results suggest that communities have practical ways to prepare for disasters. Structuring cooperative goals among survivors, encouraging guanxi relationships, and training in constructive controversy should promote effective recovery from natural disasters.

The paper develops theory and research on how leaders can promote community involvement for effective disaster management. The paper proposes that high-quality interpersonal relationships, also referred to guanxi, and the open-minded discussion of opposing ideas, labeled constructive controversy, are major components of effective community involvement. The paper adds to the literature by empirically documenting the utility of the Western-developed theory of cooperation and competition and the concept of constructive controversy for understanding the effectiveness of government leadership for disaster recovery in China.

Scholarly research provides few insights into how integrating the western values of individualism and low power distance with the eastern values of collectivism and high power distance may influence cross-cultural conflict management. Following the framework of the theory of cooperation and competition, the purpose of this paper is to directly examine the impacts of organization-level collectivism and individualism, as well as high and low power distance, to determine the interactive effects of these four factors on cross-cultural conflict management.

This is a 2×2 experiment study. Data were collected from a US laboratory experiment with 80 participants.

American managers working in a company embracing western low power distance and eastern collectivism values were able to manage conflict cooperatively with their Chinese workers. Moreover, American managers working in a company valuing collectivism developed more trust with Chinese workers, and those in a company culture with high power distance were more interested in their workers’ viewpoints and more able to reach integrated solutions.

This study is an interdisciplinary research applying the social psychology field’s theory of cooperation and competition to the research on employee-manager, cross-cultural conflict management (which are industrial relations and organizational behavior topics, respectively), with an eye to the role of cultural adaptation. Furthermore, this study included an experiment to directly investigate the interactions between American managers and Chinese workers discussing work distribution conflict in four different organizational cultures.

This study seeks to empirically examine the impact of goal interdependence and leader‐member relationship on cross‐cultural leadership in joint ventures in China.

The research question is how to facilitate leader‐member relationships between foreign managers and Chinese employees in joint ventures in China. Two hypotheses were generated. This study applies the theory of cooperation and competition and the theory of LMX to develop responses to the research questions. Completed survey questionnaires were analyzed on a valid sample of 199.

Results supported the theorizing that cooperative goals between managers and employees can strengthen their leader‐member relationships, which in turn facilitate cross‐cultural leadership. The results also extended this theorizing to cross‐cultural settings.

Although the theory of cooperation and competition and the theory of LMX were developed in the West, they could be useful in Chinese contexts for understanding cross‐cultural leadership.

Foreign managers working in joint ventures in China who develop strongly cooperative goals may be able to develop high quality relationships that in turn promote employee commitment and performance.

This study provides overall support for the theory of cooperation and competition and the theory of LMX. Although developed in the West, they have been found useful for predicating behavior in Chinese contexts regarding cross‐cultural leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors influencing small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs) adoption of innovation approaches.

The methodology involves two steps. First, all the variables relevant to the adoption of innovation in SMEs are identified. Subsequently, primary data are gathered from decision makers of 213 SMEs, and a multinomial logistic regression analysis is performed.

The results indicate that SMEs adopt both open innovation and closed innovation approaches. The firm-level factors such as firm age, firm size, education qualification, work experience and culture, and external factors such as customers, competition, technological advances and ecosystem influence adoption of open innovation approach compared to closed innovation approach. Factors such as culture among firm-level factors and competition among external factors influence the adoption of closed innovation approach.

The study helps the managers or the decision makers of the SMEs to know the suitable factors influencing the firm to adopt innovation which could potentially help the firms in their business strategy.

The study explores the adoption of innovation approaches of SMEs in emerging economies. The outcomes of this research have far-reaching implications for theory and practitioners in emerging economies.

Belief in Mazu has a crucial cultural status in Taiwan and the coastal area of Fujian, China. The design and manufacture of apparel and accessories to be placed on statues of the deity are also considered a sacred and critical part of the religion’s cultural and artistic inheritance. The crown hat of Mazu is one of the most essential elements of the deity’s apparel. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study explored the styles of Mazu crown hats using Kansei engineering (KE). People generally use adjectives words to provide aesthetic evaluations. Fuzzy theory is suitable for processing linguistic problems that include vagueness, thereby providing a reasonable method of quantifying such aesthetic evaluations. Therefore, this study first established a fuzzy positioning model (FPM) of word evaluations for analysis. Factor analysis was used to obtain representative image adjectives that represented Mazu’s image. Fuzzy analysis methods were then employed to rank the various image adjectives through evaluation words and to determine the differences between adjectives. Finally, on the basis of image analysis results and expert suggestions, the crown hat was redesigned and its suitability verified.

Four results were obtained. First, four image adjectives appropriate for representing Mazu’s image were identified, of which “noble and kind” is the most suitable. Second, fuzzy analysis was found to successfully rank style images. Third, the crown hat style and design characteristics suitable for Mazu were acquired. Fourth, the verification demonstrated that the redesign effectively enhanced the perceived image of the crown hat design.

This study employed KE to improve the design of a Mazu crown hat. The proposed FPM can aid the development of cultural and creative design.

This paper aims to review the critical technology development of avian radar system at airports.

After the origin of avian radar technology is discussed, the target characteristics of flying birds are analyzed, including the target echo amplitude, flight speed, flight height, trajectory and micro-Doppler. Four typical airport avian radar systems of Merlin, Accipiter, Robin and CAST are introduced. The performance of different modules such as antenna, target detection and tracking, target recognition and classification, analysis of bird information together determines the detection ability of avian radar. The performances and key technologies of the ubiquitous avian radar are summarized and compared with other systems, and their applications, deployment modes, as well as their advantages and disadvantages are introduced and analyzed.

The ubiquitous avian radar achieves the long-time integration of target echoes, which greatly improves detection and classification ability of the targets of birds or drones, even under strong background clutter at airport. In addition, based on the big data of bird situation accumulated by avian radar, the rules of bird activity around the airport can be mined to guide the bird avoidance work.

This paper presented a novel avian radar system based on ubiquitous digital radar technology. The authors’ experience has confirmed that this system can be effective for airport bird strike prevention and management. In the future, the avian radar system will see continued improvement in both software and hardware, as the system is designed to be easily extensible.

It is shown in natural gas proportion mixing experiments that a mixed-source natural gas is the physical combination of end member gas. Both the carbon and hydrogen isotopes in the mixed-source natural gas can be expressed by the weighted average of corresponding components content and isotopes of end member gas. Under certain geological setting, the selection of end member gas is the key to mixed-source ratio calculation. Then, it's better to estimate the mixed-source ratio with δ¹³C₁ and component data according to the weighted average calculation formula. The analysis on natural gas geochemistry characteristics show that the natural gas extracted from Jingbian Gas Field in the Ordos Basin is mainly an upper Paleozoic coal-derived gas. In the analysis of geological conditions for reservoir forming and characteristics of natural gas, natural gas from Longtan 1 Well and Tao 6 Well were selected as the end member gases of lower Paleozoic oil-type gas and upper Paleozoic coal-type gas respectively to calculate the mixed-source ratio of natural gas in Jingbian Gas Field. The ratio of upper Paleozoic coal-derived gas mostly accounts for over 70% and its average ratio reaches 81%. Therefore, the exploration of natural gas of Ordos Basin should be focused on the upper palaeozoic coal source rock, and attention should be paid to the matching of coal source rock in the exploration of weathered crust gas deposit.

Robotic wire and arc additive manufacturing (RWAAM) is becoming more and more popular for its capability of fabricating metallic parts with complicated structure. To unlock the potential of 6-DOF industrial robots and improve the power of additive manufacturing, this paper aims to present a method to fabricate curved overhanging thin-walled parts free from turn table and support structures.

Five groups of straight inclined thin-walled parts with different angles were fabricated with the torch aligned with the inclination angle using RWAAM, and the angle precision was verified by recording the growth of each layer in both horizontal and vertical directions; furthermore, the experimental phenomena was explained with the force model of the molten pool and the forming characteristics was investigated. Based on the results above, an algorithm for fabricating curved overhanging thin-walled part was presented and validated.

The force model and forming characteristics during the RWAAM process were investigated. Based on the result, the influence of the torch orientation on the weld pool flow was used to control the pool flow, then a practical algorithm for fabricating curved overhanging thin-walled part was proposed and validated.

Regarding the fabrication of curved overhanging thin-walled parts, given the influences of the torch angles on the deposited morphology, porosity formation rate and weld pool flow, the flexibility of 6-DOF industrial robot was fully used to realize instant adjustment of the torch angle. In this paper, the deposition point and torch orientation of each layer of a robotic fabrication path was determined by the contour equation of the curve surface. By adjusting the torch angle, the pool flow was controlled and better forming quality was acquired.