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The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between cultural distance and psychological adjustment of expatriates in Nigeria and perceived social supports moderating the relationship.

The study used a cross-sectional survey research design. Data were collected through 236 validly filled questionnaires by expatriates working in different industries in Nigeria. The research variables were measured using appropriate validated scales developed by different experts. Data collected were analyzed using frequency, percentages, mean and standard deviation. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to establish the relationships among the variables.

The study found that the distance between expatriates’ home and Nigeria on each of the dimensions of cultural values: power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance cultural value, long-term orientation and indulgence negatively influence the psychological adjustment of the expatriates in Nigeria. The study demonstrated that the larger the distance between expatriates’ home and Nigeria's cultural values, the larger the difficulties in the psychological adjustment of expatriates in the country.

This study provides useful insights and a better understanding to both present and future global human resource practitioners, multinational organizations, international institutions and local organizations operating in Nigeria with a global mindset on the cultural profiles of expatriates that are critical to adjust to working, social interactions and living environments in Nigeria.

It provides practical guidance to global human resource practitioners and employers on dimensions of cultural values distance between Nigeria and the home countries of expatriates that should be considered when deciding on, searching for, selecting, recruiting and relocating expatriates to work and live in Nigeria.

The field of service research has devoted considerable attention to the customer’s role as value creator, but there is a lack of research on understanding customers’ psychological processes in value creation. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of psychological distance in value-creation processes. Psychological distance is the customer’s perceived distance from service interactions in terms of spatial distance, temporal distance, social distance and hypothetical distance. Critically, psychological distance influences cognitive processes and can influence how customers think and feel about the service interaction. An appreciation of psychological distance within service contexts can help managers to tailor the interaction in order to facilitate value creation.

In this conceptual paper, the authors build on psychology research and service research to develop seven propositions that explore how psychological distance can operate within service interactions and how this might influence value creation.

The authors divide the propositions into three sections. The first concerns how perceived psychological distance from the service interaction can act as a barrier to entering a service interaction. In particular, the authors consider the influence of social distance and spatial distance within the context of service interactions. The second section examines how psychological distance to the expected point of service use can influence how customers construe the service and the value creation. The third aspect addresses customer-specific characteristics that can impact on value creation by influencing perceived psychological distance toward the service.

Existing research suggests that customers ultimately decide if value is created in the interaction. This paper proposes that perceived psychological distance influences customers’ value creation by examining the service interaction from the customer perspective. The authors suggest that complex context-specific features of the service interaction can be understood by considering psychological distance from the service interaction and from the service itself and evaluating how this impacts on value-creation processes.

From a practical point of view, the paper helps managers to better understand how to manage the service interaction with customers by identifying psychological antecedents of customer value creation.

The paper introduces the notion of psychological distance into service research about value, proposing that the customer’s role in creating value in interactions with the service provider is influenced by the psychological distance to the interaction and to the service offered in this interaction.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between Canadian and Indian consumers' national cultural orientations and banking service quality expectations. Using two of Hofstede's five cultural dimensions operationalized at the individual level, and five dimensions of service quality from Parasuraman et al.'s SERVQUAL scale, the aim is to develop and test hypotheses relating national culture values to service quality expectations.

The study is quantitative in nature, using surveys (online and written) from respondents in Canada and India. Data were analyzed using dummy variable regression and structural equation modeling.

The results show that the importance of various SERVQUAL dimensions is related to Hofstede's power distance and individualism cultural dimensions both at the individual and national levels. More specifically, consumers low on power distance expect highly responsive and reliable service. High power distance customers attach higher importance to tangible service attributes. Consumers high on individualism expect lower empathy and assurance from service providers. Furthermore, Indian consumers attach higher importance to tangible attributes, whereas Canadian consumers find service reliability more important. However, differences in overall service quality expectations are not significantly different across the two countries.

The results suggest that managers must be aware of the cultural values of the buyer/client in order to fully understand the most effective means of establishing and nurturing the service delivery process and, consequently, establishing service quality expectations. Banks will be more successful when service delivery is in tune with cultural imperatives, particularly sub‐group cultural imperatives.

The study provides an original insight into the manner in which national culture impacts on service quality expectations. Furthermore, the study identifies individual sub‐cultural influences that shape service quality expectations.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how multinational enterprise (MNE) subsidiary capabilities are influenced by the firm-specific advantages (FSAs) of the parent company, as well as by cultural and geographic distance between the home and host country.

This paper assesses how the effects of the parent FSAs, cultural distance and geographic distance on subsidiary capabilities vary for different value-chain activities, with an empirical application to 60 foreign subsidiaries operating in Canada.

This paper uncovers distinct, three-way interaction effects among parent-level FSAs, cultural distance and geographic distance for upstream versus downstream activities in the value chain.

We find that in special cases, high levels of distance can be positive for MNEs, in terms of driving the creation of stronger subsidiary capabilities.

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has become one of the most influential information sources for consumers' purchase decision-making. Based on construal-level theory and from the perspective of cognitive effort, this study investigated the effects of eWOM social media types and conflicting eWOM on consumers' purchase intentions and validated the mediation role of social psychological distance, perceived value, and perceived cognitive effort.

Two scenario-based experiments were conducted to validate the research model. Specifically, a 2 (eWOM social media type: strong-tie vs weak-tie) × 2 (conflicting eWOM: with vs without) between-subjects design was used. ANOVA, multiple regression analysis with PROCESS, and partial least squares (PLS) were employed to test the hypotheses.

The results showed that eWOM social media types had significant effects on both social psychological distance and perceived value. The significant chain mediating effects of social psychological distance and perceived value between eWOM social media types and consumers' purchase intentions were found. In addition, conflicting eWOM had significant effects on both perceived value and perceived cognitive effort. Indirect effects of conflicting eWOM on purchase intention through perceived cognitive effort were discovered.

These results contribute to the eWOM literature by investigating the influences of eWOM social media types and conflicting eWOM on consumers' purchase intentions. They also contribute to construal-level theory by extending its applicability to the field of eWOM.

Web users' clustering is an important mining task since it contributes in identifying usage patterns, a beneficial task for a wide range of applications that rely on the web. The purpose of this paper is to examine the usage of Kullback‐Leibler (KL) divergence, an information theoretic distance, as an alternative option for measuring distances in web users clustering.

KL‐divergence is compared with other well‐known distance measures and clustering results are evaluated using a criterion function, validity indices, and graphical representations. Furthermore, the impact of noise (i.e. occasional or mistaken page visits) is evaluated, since it is imperative to assess whether a clustering process exhibits tolerance in noisy environments such as the web.

The proposed KL clustering approach is of similar performance when compared with other distance measures under both synthetic and real data workloads. Moreover, imposing extra noise on real data, the approach shows minimum deterioration among most of the other conventional distance measures.

The experimental results show that a probabilistic measure such as KL‐divergence has proven to be quite efficient in noisy environments and thus constitute a good alternative, the web users clustering problem.

This work is inspired by the usage of divergence in clustering of biological data and it is introduced by the authors in the area of web clustering. According to the experimental results presented in this paper, KL‐divergence can be considered as a good alternative for measuring distances in noisy environments such as the web.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which procedural justice influences a manager's decision‐making behaviour and the extent to which managerial values related to power‐distance moderates the relationship between participation in decision processes and procedural justice.

A questionnaire survey was conducted in this study. Dependent variables were the degree of participation in decision making and the degree of sharing information with subordinates. Independent variables were procedural justice and power distance.

The findings suggest that procedural justice is related positively to encouraging initiatives and information sharing. The findings also indicate that power distance moderates the relationship between procedural justice and decision‐making behaviours. Although managers were inclined to share information with employees when they believed in procedural justice, high‐power‐distance values would weaken such a positive link.

The study explores the moderating role of power distance in the formation of perceptions about procedural justice but the interactive and distributive justice of managers are not included here for a comprehensive understanding of organizational justice. Another limitation is that the sample in the study was limited geographically to the regions of Southern China.

Emphasis of procedural justice among managers throughout the hierarchical system of an organization would be an effective way to improve both management effectiveness and employee performance. However, while managers develop warm relationships with their employees, they still share information reluctantly with employees in decision making when the intent is to maximize power.

The perspective of managers, which is adopted in this study, makes it original compared to previous studies of procedural justice. Such studies take the standpoint of employees or student subjects. Another contribution is that the cultural construct of power distance is analysed with managers at the individual level. Further, the study sheds light on important managerial issues related to the relationships between procedural justice, participation and the moderating effects of a manager's value orientation within the context of China.

The purpose of the development of the paper is to construct probabilistic interval-valued hesitant fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) model and to improve some preliminary aggregation operators such as probabilistic interval-valued hesitant fuzzy averaging (PIVHFA) operator, probabilistic interval-valued hesitant fuzzy geometric (PIVHFG) operator, probabilistic interval-valued hesitant fuzzy weighted averaging (PIVHFWA) operator, probabilistic interval-valued hesitant fuzzy ordered weighted averaging (PIVHFOWA) operator, probabilistic interval-valued hesitant fuzzy weighted geometric (PIVHFWG) operator and probabilistic interval-valued hesitant fuzzy ordered weighted geometric (PIVHFOWG) operator to cope with multicriteria group decision-making (MCGDM) problems in an efficient manner.

(1) To design probabilistic interval-valued hesitant fuzzy TOPSIS model. (2) To improve some of the existing aggregation operators. (3) To propose the Hamming distance, Euclidean distance, Hausdorff distance and generalized distance between probabilistic interval-valued hesitant fuzzy sets (PIVHFSs).

The results of the proposed model are discussed in comparison with the aggregation-based method from the related literature and found the effectiveness of the proposed model and improved aggregation operators.

A case study concerning the healthcare facilities in public hospital is addressed.

The notion of the proposed distance measure is used as rational tool to extend TOPSIS model for probabilistic interval-valued hesitant fuzzy setting.

COVID-19 and its measures such as physical distancing have shifted consumer payment behaviors toward cashless payment. Physical distancing is likely to remain a norm for some time to come and will be relevant in any future pandemics. This study aims to examine the impact of consumers’ perceived value of cashless payment on their use intention in the physical distancing context, with the mediating role of psychological safety and the moderating role of trust propensity.

This study used a survey method to obtain data from 690 consumers in an Asian emerging market, i.e. Vietnam. The data were analyzed using different statistical methods, including structural equation modeling.

Results show that perceived value of cashless payment positively affects use intention, and this effect is mediated by psychological safety. Furthermore, trust propensity has a positive moderating effect on the link between perceived value and psychological safety.

This study’s findings provide implications for retailers and other stakeholders in implementing and promoting cashless payment systems, especially in the physical distancing context.

This study is among the first attempt to explain the relationships between consumers’ perceptions, feelings of psychological safety and use intention toward cashless payment in the physical distancing context. The study’s findings may also be relevant to any future pandemics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between supervisor‐perceived procedural justice and subordinate‐perceived procedural justice. The moderating roles of the subordinate‐perceived interactional justice and power‐distance value are also to be examined.

Survey data were obtained from 509 supervisor‐subordinate dyads in mainland China. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to test the research hypotheses.

Results revealed that: supervisor‐perceived procedural justice is positively related to subordinate‐perceived procedural justice; the direct relationship is stronger when the subordinate perceives higher rather than lower interactional justice from the supervisor; and the direct relationship is stronger when the subordinate holds a higher rather than lower power‐distance value.

The data collected in the present study reside at two hierarchical levels, namely, the employee level and the supervisor level, and the sample size is relatively large. The results are thus less likely subject to common method bias. However, future longitudinal research will be helpful to lend stronger support for the hypothesized causal relationships.

The paper uses cognitive social learning theory in a social exchange context to explain the cross‐level relationship of procedural justice perceptions in organizations, and to identify its boundary conditions. Results support that fairness perceptions at a higher organizational level can be related to lower‐level perceptions along the organizational hierarchy.