Search results
1 – 10 of over 1000Tingxi Wang, Yue Xu and Jie Li
The final effectiveness of employee voice largely depends on voice endorsement. This study aims to review, assess, analyze and synthesize the emerging literature on voice…
Abstract
Purpose
The final effectiveness of employee voice largely depends on voice endorsement. This study aims to review, assess, analyze and synthesize the emerging literature on voice endorsement by focusing on its antecedents to promote future research from a comprehensive perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on an integrative review of the literature, the authors conducted a content analysis of 53 peer-reviewed journal articles.
Findings
Building on the Shannon–Weaver communication model, this paper summarizes that factors influencing voice endorsement can be classified into five prominent aspects: voicer, voiced idea, contextual factors and noises, voice channel (medium) and voice receiver.
Practical implications
This research holds important implications for practice, providing practical guidelines for employees to speak up, for leaders to endorse voice and for organizations to maintain sustainable development by making full use of employee voice.
Originality/value
This review enriches voice endorsement research by introducing a communication framework to synthesize its antecedents and extends the application of the communication model in organization research. Additionally, the authors offer directions for future research.
Details
Keywords
Yue Xu, Ghazalossadat Fatemi and Eisuke Saito
This study aims to analyse the attempts of taught master course students' publications from actor-network theoretic (ANT) perspectives based on the authors' experiences.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to analyse the attempts of taught master course students' publications from actor-network theoretic (ANT) perspectives based on the authors' experiences.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, self-study was chosen as the research method. Self-study is a qualitative research approach based on autobiography, available materials, narratives or memory-work for researchers to investigate their own practice from professional and personal experiences and work with critical friends. In this study, self-study was conducted based on the reflective narratives of three authors (the students, Authors 1 and 2, and the lecturer, Author 3), which aims to examine the meanings and explanations of the authors' ordinary experiences and investigate a variety of their emotional memories.
Findings
By drawing on ANT, this study explored how the authors translated the assignment tasks into publications by negotiating and interacting with various human and non-human actors – academic journals. The journal articles, however, were not solely the outcome of the academic endevours of the authors. Instead, the journals played a role in helping the authors learn about the academic rigour and gain confidence in their own capabilities. Further, the journals also reinforced the academic partnerships between the authors through collaboration on drafting and revising their manuscripts.
Practical implications
Firstly, this process of helping students publish their papers should focus on their learning and experience rather than merely promoting competition. Additionally, the importance of reaching an agreement on role division and collaborative work ethics needs to be emphasised.
Originality/value
As publications have become increasingly important for graduate students, this study sheds light on the experience of taught master's course students (TMCSs) and their lecturer in jointly publishing papers. While doctoral student publications have received significant attention, TMCSs' publications have not been extensively studied, making this research valuable and original.
Details
Keywords
Longfei Zhang, Yanghe Feng, Rongxiao Wang, Yue Xu, Naifu Xu, Zeyi Liu and Hang Du
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) acquires effective policies by using prior collected large-scale data, while, in some scenarios, collecting data may be hard because it is…
Abstract
Purpose
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) acquires effective policies by using prior collected large-scale data, while, in some scenarios, collecting data may be hard because it is time-consuming, expensive and dangerous, i.e. health care, autonomous driving, seeking a more efficient offline RL method. The purpose of the study is to introduce an algorithm, which attempts to sample the high-value transitions in the prioritized buffer, and uniformly sample from the normal experience buffer, improving sample efficiency of offline reinforcement learning, as well as alleviating the “extrapolation error” commonly arising in offline RL.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors propose a new structure of experience replay architecture, which consists of double experience replies, a prioritized experience replay and a normal experience replay, supplying samples for policy updates in different training phases. At the first training stage, the authors sample from prioritized experience replay according to the calculated priority of each transitions. At the second training stage, the authors sample from the normal experience replay uniformly. The combination of the two experience replies is initialized by the same offline data set.
Findings
The proposed method eliminates out-of-distribution problem in an offline RL regime, and promotes training by leveraging a new efficient experience replay. The authors evaluate their method on D4RL benchmark, and the results reveal that the algorithm can achieve superior performance over the state-of-the-art offline RL algorithm. The ablation study proves that the authors’ experience replay architecture plays an important role in terms of improving final performance, data-efficiency and training stability.
Research limitations/implications
Because of the extra addition of prioritized experience replay, the proposed method increases the computational burden and has the risk of changing data distribution due to the combined sample strategy. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to use the experience replay block effectively and efficiently further.
Practical implications
Offline RL is susceptible to the quality and coverage of pre-collected data, which may be not easy to be collected from specific environment, demanding practitioners to handcraft behavior policy to interact with environment for gathering data.
Originality/value
The proposed approach focuses on the experience replay architecture for offline RL, and empirically demonstrates the superiority of the algorithm on data efficiency and final performance over conservative Q-learning across diverse D4RL tasks. In particular, the authors compare different variants of their experience replay block, and the experiments show that the stages, when to sample from the priority buffer, play an important role in the algorithm. The algorithm is easy to implement and can be combined with any Q-value approximation-based offline RL methods by minor adjustment.
Details
Keywords
Zhi-Jie Fu, Yu-Wei Chu, Yi-Sheng Cai, He-Yong Xu and Yue Xu
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the equivalent control authority of the conventional and circulation control (CC) wing of the aircraft and assess the energy…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the equivalent control authority of the conventional and circulation control (CC) wing of the aircraft and assess the energy expenditure and aerodynamic efficiency of the CC wing.
Design/methodology/approach
Four target cases with different flap deflection angles θ are set in advance for the conventional wing, and then a series of cases with different jet momentum coefficients Cμ are set for the CC wing. The lift, drag and momentum coefficient curves of the CC wing are compared to those of the four conventional wing cases. The curves with the best agreement are selected to establish the corresponding relation between θ and Cμ. The energy expenditure of the CC system is analyzed. The concept of equivalent lift-to-drag ratio for the CC wing is introduced to compare the aerodynamic efficiency with the conventional wing
Findings
The control authority of the conventional wing at θ = 0º, 10º, 20º, 30º are equivalent to the control authority of the CC wing with Cµ = 0.0, 0.005, 0.009 and 0.012. The CC system is more efficient at small Cµ than large Cµ.
Practical implications
This study could contribute to the application of the CC system on flapless aircrafts.
Originality/value
The corresponding relation between θ and Cµ is established by matching the equivalent control authority between the conventional wing and CC wing.
Details
Keywords
Xusen Cheng, Yue Xu, Bo Yang and Yu Liu
The emergence of live streaming commerce has injected promising impetus into rural development and attracted many rural streamers. This study aims to explore the influencing…
Abstract
Purpose
The emergence of live streaming commerce has injected promising impetus into rural development and attracted many rural streamers. This study aims to explore the influencing factors of rural streamers’ engagement intentions to help promote the sustainable development of rural live streaming commerce.
Design/methodology/approach
Grounded in the extended valence framework, this research employs a mixed-methods approach encompassing both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. In the qualitative phase, the authors conduct in-depth interviews with 15 rural streamers, employing data coding techniques to uncover underlying factors. Subsequently, in the quantitative phase, the authors analyze survey data from 282 rural streamers, subjecting hypotheses to validation through structural equation modeling.
Findings
The findings derived from the analysis of both interviews and questionnaires reveal that several platform qualities, including platform rural-aiding support, perceived effectiveness of dispute resolution, perceived interactivity and platform reputation, have a positive effect on trust in the platform and validate the extended valence framework in understanding rural streamers’ live streaming intention. In addition, ties with customers have a moderating effect. Specifically, the stronger the ties with customers, the stronger the positive effect of perceived benefits and the weaker the positive effect of trust in the platform on live streaming intention will be.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the rural live streaming commerce literature and trust research from the sellers’ perspective and provides practical implications for policymakers and live streaming platform managers on enhancing rural streamers’ participation.
Details
Keywords
Peng Xue, Jie Zheng, Yue Xu, Haiyang Bao and Rui Zhang
This study aims to analyze the transmission characteristics of a long-period grating (LPG) fabricated on plastic optical fibers (POFs) and its refractive index (RI) sensing.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to analyze the transmission characteristics of a long-period grating (LPG) fabricated on plastic optical fibers (POFs) and its refractive index (RI) sensing.
Design/methodology/approach
The geometric optic method is used to analyze the factors affecting the transmission characteristics of an LPG on POFs. The RI sensing performances of unbent LPGs and U-bent LPGs fabricated on POFs with different diameters are evaluated experimentally.
Findings
This study shows that the transmission loss caused by LPG strongly depends on the structural parameters of LPG and the environmental RI. For the unbent LPG, the highest RI sensitivity of 1,015%/RI unit (RIU) was obtained in the RI range of 1.33–1.45. For the U-bent LPG without cladding, the highest RI sensitivities of 1,007 and 559%/RIU are obtained in the RI ranges of 1.33–1.40 and 1.40–1.45, respectively.
Originality/value
A geometric optic method is used to analyze the transmission characteristics for an LPG on POFs, and the RI sensing of the LPGs are studied experimentally. The results show the LPG has a good RI sensing performances and is with the features of low-cost, simple structure and easy fabrication.
Details
Keywords
Yue Xu, Qingcong Wu, Bai Chen and Xi Chen
For the robot-assisted upper limb rehabilitation training process of the elderly with damaged neuromuscular channels and hemiplegic patients, bioelectric signals are added to…
Abstract
Purpose
For the robot-assisted upper limb rehabilitation training process of the elderly with damaged neuromuscular channels and hemiplegic patients, bioelectric signals are added to transform the traditional passive training mode into the active training mode.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper mainly builds a steady-state visual stimulation interface, an electroencephalography (EEG) signal processing platform and an exoskeleton robot verification platform. The target flashing stimulation blocks provide visual stimulation at the specified position according to the specified frequency and stimulate EEG signals of different frequency bands. The EEG signal-processing platform constructed in this paper removes the noise by using Butterworth band-pass filtering and common average reference filtering on the obtained signals. Further, the features are extracted to identify the volunteer’s active movement intention through the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) method. The classification results are transmitted to the upper limb exoskeleton robot control system, combined with the position and posture of the exoskeleton robot to control the joint motion of robot.
Findings
Through a large number of experimental studies, the average accuracy of offline recognition of motion intention recognition can reach 86.1%. The control strategy with a three-instruction judgment method reduces the average execution error rate of the entire control system to 6.75%. Online experiments verify the feasibility of the steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP)-based rehabilitation system.
Originality/value
An EEG signal analysis method based on SSVEP is integrated into the control of an upper limb exoskeleton robot, transforming the traditional passive training mode into the active training mode. The device used to record EEG is of very low cost, which has the potential to promote the rehabilitation system for further widely applications.
Details
Keywords
Xiaoxi Zhou, Yue Xu and Tui Chen
This paper aims to identify the relationship between users' perception image, clothing design features and users' preference and propose a clothing design scheme based on users…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to identify the relationship between users' perception image, clothing design features and users' preference and propose a clothing design scheme based on users perception image and users' preference.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, men's suit is composed into multiple design features under the design elements. Using the orthogonal experiment method, 16 schemes of the representative suit are designed. Through perception evaluation experiment, users' perception images and preference degree of the samples are obtained. By partial least squares (PLS) analysis method, the models between users' perception image, suit design features and users' preference are built.
Findings
The interrelationship between the three is identified by establishing PLS models between users' perception image, suit design features and users' preference. According to the coefficients of the models, the optimization schemes of men's suits considering users' perception image and preference are proposed. Verification results show that the optimization schemes are significantly better than other schemes.
Originality/value
The results of this paper can be used for consumer demand-oriented clothing design and provide references and methods for converting consumer's perceived needs into clothing design features.
Details
Keywords
Jinyun Duan, Émilie Lapointe, Yue Xu and Sarah Brooks
The purpose of this paper is to understand better why employees voice. Drawing on social information processing theory and insights derived from the literature on power, the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand better why employees voice. Drawing on social information processing theory and insights derived from the literature on power, the authors suggest that leader–member exchange (LMX) fosters voice by reducing the perceived risk of voicing. The authors further contend that high perceived leader power will strengthen this mediated relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors relied on a sample of 265 employee-supervisor dyads collected from Chinese organizations to test the study hypotheses.
Findings
Results indicated that perceived risk of voicing significantly mediated the positive LMX–voice behavior relationship. In addition, perceived leader power strengthened the effect of LMX on voice behavior via perceived risk of voicing. The relationship of LMX to perceived risk of voicing was more negative, and the indirect effect of LMX on voice behavior was more positive when employees perceived that leader power was high.
Practical implications
Organizations seeking to promote voice behaviors should support leaders to develop high-quality relationships with employees. Organizations should also ensure that leaders are sufficiently empowered to fulfill their roles, and ensure that employees are aware of their leaders’ influence.
Originality/value
Findings suggest that, in the context of high quality leader–member relationships, employees’ perceptions of their leaders’ power may help to overcome barriers associated with speaking up. Thus, this study helps explain the conditions that encourage employees to voice.
Details
Keywords
Pengpeng Zhi, Yue Xu and Bingzhi Chen
Most of the previous work on reliability analysis was based on the traditional reliability theory. The calculated results can only reflect the reliability of components at a…
Abstract
Purpose
Most of the previous work on reliability analysis was based on the traditional reliability theory. The calculated results can only reflect the reliability of components at a specific time, which neglects the uncertainty of load and resistance over time. The purpose of this paper is to develop a time-dependent reliability analysis approach based on stochastic process to deal with the problem and apply it to the structural design of railway vehicle components.
Design/methodology/approach
First, the parametric model of motor hanger for electric multiple unit (EMU) is established by ANSYS parametric design language, and its structural stress is analyzed according to relevant standards. The Latin hypercube method is used to analyze the sensitivity of the structure, and the uncertainty parameters (sizes and loads) which have great influence on the structural strength are determined. The D-optimal experimental design is carried out to establish the polynomial response surface function, which characterizes the relationship between uncertainty parameters and structural stress. Second, the Poisson stochastic process is adopted to describe the number of loads acting, and the Monte Carlo method is used to obtain the load acting history according to its probability distribution characteristics. The load history is introduced into the response surface function and the uncertainty of other parameters is considered at the same time, and the stress history of the motor hanger is obtained. Finally, the degradation process of structural resistance is described by a Gamma stochastic process, and the time-dependent reliability of the motor hanger is calculated based on the reliability theory.
Findings
Time and the uncertainties of parameters have great impact on reliability. The results of reliability decrease with time fluctuation are more reasonable, stable and credible than traditional methods.
Practical implications
In this paper, the proposed method is applied to the structural design of the motor hanger for EMU, which has a good guiding significance for accurately evaluating whether if the design meets the reliability requirements.
Originality/value
The value of this paper is that the method takes both the randomness of load over time and the uncertainty of structural parameters in the design and manufactures process into consideration, and describes the monotonous degradation characteristics of structural resistance. At the same time, the time-dependent reliability of mechanical components is calculated by a response surface method. It not only improves the accuracy of reliability analysis, but also improves the analysis efficiency and solves the problem that the traditional reliability analysis method can only reflect the static reliability of components.
Details