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Social media is replete with malicious and unempathetic rhetoric yet few studies explain why these emotions are publicly dispersed. The purpose of the study is to investigate how the intergroup counter-empathic response called schadenfreude originates and how it prompts media consumption and engagement.

The study consists of two field surveys of 635 in-group members of two professional sports teams and 300 residents of California and Texas with political party affiliations. The analysis uses SEM quantitative methods.

Domain passion and group identification together determine the harmonious/obsessive tendencies of passion for an activity and explain the schadenfreude response toward the rival out-group. Group identification is a stronger driver of obsessive passion compared to harmonious passion. Schadenfreude directly influences the use of traditional media (TV, radio, domain websites), it triggers social media engagement (posting), and it accelerates harmonious passion's effects on social media posting.

The study is limited by the groups used to evaluate the research model, sports, and politics.

The more highly identified and passionate group members experience greater counter-empathy toward a rival. At extreme levels of group identification, obsessive passion increases at an increasing rate and may characterize extremism. Harboring feelings of schadenfreude toward the out-group prompts those with harmonious passion for an activity to more frequently engage on social media in unempathetic ways.

This study links the unempathetic, yet common emotion of schadenfreude with passion, intergroup dynamics, and media behavior.

This study examines the hearing students' attitudes and behaviors towards deaf students in Malaysia using the intergroup contact approach.

Purposive sampling was used to recruit 439 hearing students at secondary schools. Hearing students were asked to fill in questionnaires that contained four measurements: contact with deaf people, sources of knowledge about deaf people, attitudes towards deaf people and behaviors toward deaf people. A serial mediation model was proposed to investigate the hypothetical mediating role of knowledge and attitudes toward deaf students in the relationship.

The results of this study showed that contact frequency is negatively associated with attitudes towards deaf people. However, such a relationship is suppressed, only when knowledge is included as a mediator. In addition, mediation analysis supports that sources of knowledge and attitudes about deaf people mediate the relationship between contact and behaviors toward deaf people. Moreover, the frequency of contact indirectly contributes to behaviors through knowledge and attitudes.

The findings indicate that increasing the contact between hearing and deaf students would improve hearing students' attitudes and behaviors towards deaf students. However, this is only when the contact can improve hearing students' knowledge about deaf people and deafness.

While language is vital for a successful service exchange, it can also become a source of vulnerability if one party is a non-native speaker in an inter-culture service encounter (ICSE). Hence, the purpose of this study is to understand the relationship between language-related stigma that non-native customers perceive in an ICSE and the associated psychological and behavioral responses.

A survey-based research method and an experimental study was used to collect data from non-native speakers in the USA with English as their second language. Structural equation modeling procedure was used to test the hypothesized relationships.

The findings suggest that the customers who perceive language-related stigmatization in an ICSE context experience intergroup anxiety and lack of social belonging. In turn, intergroup anxiety influences their interaction comfort with the service provider. In the end, these experiences shape their future buying behavior, i.e. they tend to avoid direct interactions with the servers and prefer smart services.

Future research is needed to explore the focal phenomenon in other service contexts and cultures to enrich knowledge on language vulnerabilities.

The study highlights the importance of technology, not just from a convenience perspective, but also as an accommodation mechanism for linguistically vulnerable customers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to empirically examine the language-related stigmatization and associated psychological and behavioral responses from the non-native customers’ perspective in a services exchange setting.

The purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual model explicating the development of expatriate social capital and its influence on expatriate effectiveness in terms of knowledge transfer and adjustment. Drawing upon social capital theory and weak tie theory, we elucidate the process through which expatriate social capital facilitates expatriate knowledge transfer and adjustment via greater access of role information and social support.

This study reviews and distills research on expatriate social capital development and proposes a conceptual model of expatriate effectiveness and suggests potential research avenues for global mobility scholars.

This study contributes to the understanding of the development of expatriate social capital in the host country and its impacts on expatriate effectiveness as a process. With regard to expatriates’ social capital accumulation, this study also highlights the important but less-known role of accompanying spouse/family members as expatriates’ weak tie enablers. We articulate a framework that outlines the sources of social capital for expatriates and the processes through which social capital transmits (via expatriates’ access to role information and social support) and then enhances expatriate effectiveness. This conceptual model aims to establish a basic “roadmap” for use by practitioners and researchers.

Before the proposed conceptual model can be theoretically refined or extended by future research, its veracity needs to be tested empirically. Although we do not incorporate “time,” “personal characteristics” and “context” in our model, we recognize their potential importance and urge future researchers to incorporate them in studying the role of social capital on expatriate effectiveness.

A conceptual model is presented that enables multinational corporations (MNCs) to map their current (and future) strategies to enhance expatriate effectiveness by further strengthening the expatriate social capital.

Drawing upon social capital theory and weak tie theory, this paper links various sources of expatriate social capital to expatriates’ access to role information and social support in supporting expatriate effectiveness. From this, several avenues of future research are drawn.

The aim of this study is to develop a better understanding of how the transferability and recognition of host country professional experience and educational credentials impact the repatriation intentions of long-term self-initiated expatriates (SIEs). To that end, the study interviews a sample of American-educated French long-term SIEs in the United States (US) to assess how both their higher education and professional experience influence their social identity in their home country, France and their perceived repatriation opportunities.

This study applies social identity theory to the examination of the combined impact of higher education and work experience abroad on the repatriation expectations of long-term SIEs. The author interviewed twenty-one French SIEs who attended universities in the US and remained there afterward to begin their careers.

The findings of this study confirm that the repatriation intentions of long-term SIEs are strongly influenced by concerns about the ability to maintain their host country standard of living in their home country. It also finds that foreign educational credentials and professional experience can constrain the ability of long-term SIEs to repatriate easily and gain acceptance. To overcome this, long-term SIEs often feel that they must embrace alternative repatriation strategies to maintain the lifestyle that they enjoyed while abroad when returning back home.

This study examines a sample of long-term SIEs from one home country, France, who left to attend university in the same host country, the US. It assesses how the experiences of those who remained in the US afterward to start their careers impacted their repatriation intentions. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on the context of self-initiated expatriation by examining the influence of host-country educational credentials and work experience on the repatriation intentions of long-term SIEs.

Since the opening of China (aka, reform and opening-up), a great number of rural residents have migrated to large cities in the past 40 years. Such a one-way population inflow to urban areas introduces nontrivial social conflicts between urban natives and migrant workers. This study aims to investigate the most discussed topics about migrant workers on Sina Weibo along with the corresponding sentiment divergence.

An exploratory-descriptive-explanatory research methodology is employed. The study explores the main topics on migrant workers discussed in social media via manual annotation. Subsequently, guided LDA, a semi-supervised topic modeling approach, is applied to describe the overall topical landscape. Finally, the authors verify their theoretical predictions with respect to the sentiment divergence pattern for each topic, using regression analysis.

The study identifies three most discussed topics on migrant workers, namely wage default, employment support and urban/rural development. The regression analysis reveals different diffusion patterns contingent on the nature of each topic. In particular, this study finds a positive association between urban/rural development and the sentiment divergence, while wage default exhibits an opposite relationship with sentiment divergence.

The authors combine unique characteristics of social media with well-established theories of social identity and framing, which are applied more to off-line contexts, to study a unique phenomenon of migrant workers in China. From a practical perspective, the results provide implications for the governance of urbanization-related social conflicts.

This study aims to add to the understanding of the interactive nature of brand love by using a multilayer perspective that incorporates individual, group and societal contexts.

The qualitative empirical study uses abductive reasoning. Its theories and conclusions are grounded in naturally occurring data from an online brand community. The approach revealed new interactive processes of brand love.

This study extends our understanding of the interactive nature of brand love by adopting a layered perspective incorporating micro- (individual), meso- (in-group), macro- (in-group vs out-group) and mega-layer (societal) social dynamics that complements the predominant focus on individual psychological processes. It challenges the linear, monodirectional trajectory approach to brand love, suggesting that brand love is in constant flux as individuals move across the layers in their identification with the brand.

This study provides data from one destination brand in Finland. Future studies could consider other types of brands and contexts in other countries and cultures.

This study shows brand managers that brand lovers can be divided into subgroups with distinct drivers of their love to which brand managers should attend.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to describe the interactive nature of brand love through interactions between and within four layers of brand love. Furthermore, this study enhances our understanding of the contradictory aspects of brand love.

This paper aims to explore the mechanism underlying the relationship between abusive supervision differentiation (ASD) and team performance. The moderating roles of inter-team and intra-team competitive climate are also examined.

This research collects data from 419 employees and 71 supervisors from hospitals and financial companies in China. Techniques include descriptive statistics and hierarchical multiple regression are applied to analyze the data.

This research finds that (1) team relationship conflict mediated the relationship between ASD and team performance and (2) intra-team competitive climate strengthened the indirect relationship between ASD and team performance through team relationship conflict.

The results indicate that organizations should take measures to minimize the occurrence of abusive supervision. Team leaders should increase self-control and avoid abusing employees. Furthermore, organizations should establish an open and fair reward and punishment system to avoid cutthroat competition.

This study advances our knowledge of how ASD results in poor team effectiveness. This contributes to the literature by identifying team relationship conflict as a mediating mechanism linking the negative association of ASD with team performance. Additionally, competitive climate enriches the individual-focused team-level model of abusive supervision.

This study aims to explore the determinants of viewers’ gifting and social sharing behaviours in online streaming from a dual-attachment perspective and to explain how live streaming fosters attachment through a social interaction aspect.

This study conducted an online survey with 316 valid responses to test the research model. The structural equation modelling approach was applied to assess both the measurement and structural models.

The results show that both bond-based and identity-based attachments promote gifting and social sharing behaviours. Participation and cognitive communion motivate viewers to establish bond-based attachment, while group interaction among viewer crowds encourages viewers to create identity-based attachment. In addition, group interaction can moderate the relationship between participation and bond-based attachment.

This study is one of the earliest attempts to highlight the significance of viewer crowd and viewer-viewer interaction in promoting viewers’ behaviours in live streaming context. This study also indicates that viewer-viewer interaction can moderate the impact of viewer–streamer interaction, which is among the first to investigate the interaction effects of viewer-viewer interaction and viewer–streamer interaction.