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This study aims to conceptualize and test the effect of monetary and non-monetary incentives for word-of-mouth (WOM) campaigns on the brand attitude of those receiving an incentivized brand recommendation. It also studied whether or not the type of relationship between the recommender and the person who receives the recommendation and the expertise of the recommender moderate the impact of incentivization on brand attitude. The results should enable brand management to improve the design of WOM campaigns.

An experiment was conducted utilizing a sample of about 645 respondents in Thailand. In a 3 × 3 experimental design, three levels of incentivization and three types of social relationships were manipulated. All other variables were measured through a respondent-administered questionnaire. For incentivization of WOM, monetary reward and non-monetary reward are compared to a non-incentivized control state. The three types of social relationships are an authority relationship, a kinship relationship and a market pricing relationship between strangers as the control state.

The results of the experiment show that the introduction of rewards for recommendations harms the attitude of the receiver of a recommendation toward the brand. The attitude of potential buyers toward the brand can be tainted by the impression that a brand has enticed friends and relatives into profiting from their relationship. The negative effects increase further with the introduction of cash rewards. Contrary to expectations, however, the social relationship between the recommender and the new customer did not moderate the effect of incentivization. Source expertise has a direct as well as moderating effect on brand attitude.

The findings suggest that companies should use referral rewards with caution. Brand managers need to be aware that there is a trade-off between the advantages and the disadvantages of incentivized WOM campaigns. Recommendations have been derived about how to improve the design of incentivized WOM campaigns. Whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages probably depend to some extent on brand-specific factors such as brand strength and market- or industry-specific factors, such as a credence good quality within the industry. It also emphasized that WOM campaigns need to be carefully monitored by measuring customer attitudes toward the brand.

Although past research provides valuable conceptual and empirical insights into consumer responses in incentivized WOM situations, most research has focused on the immediate effectiveness of WOM by measuring purchasing intentions. There is still a lack of information about how different kinds of incentivization affect customer attitudes toward a brand that incentivizes WOM, and how various relationship types moderate the effects; in particular, authority relationships have not yet been studied in this context.

In the last 10 to 15 years, research studies have focused on the effects of differences across generations that result in differences in cultural expectations within the workplace (e.g. Arsenault, 2004). Different generations create shared attitudes to work and preferences for types of work which result in differences in their perception of, for instance, what makes a good leader or even the value of leadership within an organisation. While these generational differences are real, these analyses do not take into account differences that might result from the age, and therefore developmental stage, of the populations being assessed. The neuroscience literature clearly shows that there are maturational differences in the brain which are not complete until late teens to early 20s. It is therefore possible that some of the generational differences result from differences in processing ability resulting from structural immaturities in the brain. In particular, there are differences in the rate of maturation of areas of the brain related to reward sensitivity, threat sensitivity and regulation of behaviour which result in substantial differences in behaviour from adolescence through into adulthood. The purpose of this paper is to consider the effect of maturational changes in the brain on behaviours related to leadership and to outline ways in which these changes can be addressed in order to encourage young people to develop as leaders. This will include providing suitable experiences of leadership to encourage the faster development of the neural structures which underlie these capabilities.

Recent advances in neural imaging have resulted in a substantial increase in research investigating the development of the brain during adolescence. A literature review was conducted to find adolescent research that investigated decision making and risk taking. The data obtained were integrated and implications for leadership were drawn from an analysis of the resulting theoretical framework.

The research into decision-making processes in adolescents and younger adults points to a number of ways in which these differ from mature decision making. Younger people: (find it harder to inhibit behaviours) are more responsive to immediate reward; are more optimistic about the outcome of risky decisions; and are more responsive to social rewards (Jones et al., 2014). They also lack the experiences that adults use to distil the gist of a situation and therefore are more dependent on conscious, cost-benefit analysis of the outcome of decisions.

An understanding of the differences between adult and adolescent decision making points to the role of experience as a key factor in mature decision making. If adolescents are to make mature decisions, they have to be offered suitable challenges in safe environments from which they can gain expertise in leadership decision making. These can be designed to account for differences in sensitivity to reward and punishment in this group. In addition, young adults would benefit from learning the gist interpretations that have been extracted from situations by experienced leaders. This suggests that adolescents and adults would benefit from simulated leadership experiences and leadership mentoring.

The Baby Boomer generation who currently hold many of the leadership positions in organisations are coming close to requirement. They will have to be replaced by members of Generation X and the Millennial Generation resulting in potentially younger leaders. In addition, flatter organisational structures that are currently being implemented in many organisations will require leadership at many more levels. Thus, we need to be able to develop leadership skills in a more diverse and younger section of society. Understanding how the brain develops can help us to design appropriate leadership experiences and training for this upcoming generation of young leaders.

Recent advances in neuroscience of adolescence provide a unique opportunity to bring new evidence to bear on our understanding of decision making in young adults. This provides practical implications for how to develop leadership within this group and to support them as they gain experience in this domain. The evidence also points to a benefit for the increased risk taking seen in adolescence since this leads to greater motivation to try new, and potentially risky, ventures. Through a better understanding of the differences in decision making, we can both help adolescents to develop more mature decision making faster while benefitting from the optimism of youth.

The purpose of this paper is to study the behavior of a worker within an organization. There are two groups inside the firm that develop their work in different ways (sharing different codes). The worker will choose to converge to one of those groups, through an investment in learning the correspondent languages and skills.

The convergence process is analyzed under an optimality setup. Also, the choice among investment alternatives is addressed.

The framework allows the determination of steady state points for both investment alternatives; it is not optimal to converge to a full identification with one group, given that the worker benefits from the proximity to both groups, and therefore, the steady state is found to be an intermediate point somewhere in between the groups’ locations. Under a discrete choice setup, where adaptation and entropy are considered, one observes that the least likely investment process might be chosen (there is a positive probability associated with such an option).

The paper considers a firm where two groups share different codes and cultures. It shows that the groups develop activities that are useful for the organization and that give rise to individual rewards.

While central bankers have widely discussed the trade-offs of negative interest rates on monetary policy, the consequences of negative rates on financial stability are less well understood. The purpose of this paper is to examine the likely and possible financial stability consequences of a negative rates policy with particular focus on banks, short-term funding markets, foreign exchange markets, asset managers, pension funds and insurers.

It draws from international experience with negative interest rates to identify financial stability threats posed to any economy by negative interest rates, and it also highlights where the US experience is likely to differ.

In time, financial market threats and other logistical issues of a negative interest rate policy can be managed or overcome. Even cumulatively, these threats are likely to be small as long as the rates remain only modestly negative. However, if the rates remain negative for long periods or they become more sharply negative, the rewards of avoiding negative rates increase.

Does the negative interest rate policy directly or through these challenges of implementation present a substantial obstacle to achieving financial stability objectives? As policy rates go negative in a greater share of the global economy, the financial stability consequences remain poorly understood and under discussed.

Although we know that HRM practices can have a huge impact on employees’ innovative work behaviour (IWB), we do not know exactly which practices make the difference and how they affect IWB. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to determine the best HRM practices for boosting IWB, to understand the theoretical reasons for this, and to discover mediators and moderators in the relationship between HRM practices and IWB.

Based on a systematic review of the literature, the authors carried out a content analysis on 27 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Working with the definitions and items provided in the articles, the authors were able to cluster HRM practices according to the ability-motivation-opportunity framework. The best HRM practices for enhancing IWB are training and development, reward, job security, autonomy, task composition, job demand, and feedback.

The results of this study provide practical information for HRM professionals aiming to develop an HRM system that generates innovative employee behaviours that might help build an innovative climate.

A framework is presented that aggregates the findings and clarifies which HRM practices influence IWB and how these relationships can be explained.

Although risk culture is a key determinant for an effective risk management, identifying the risk culture of a firm can be challenging due to the abstract concept of culture. This paper proposes a novel approach that uses unsupervised machine learning techniques to identify significant features needed to assess and differentiate between different forms of risk culture.

To convert the unstructured text in our sample of banks' 10K reports into structured data, a two-dimensional dictionary for text mining is built to capture risk culture characteristics and the bank's attitude towards the risk culture characteristics. A principal component analysis (PCA) reduction technique is applied to extract the significant features that define risk culture, before using a K-means unsupervised learning to cluster the reports into distinct risk culture groups.

The PCA identifies uncertainty, litigious and constraining sentiments among risk culture features to be significant in defining the risk culture of banks. Cluster analysis on the PCA factors proposes three distinct risk culture clusters: good, fair and poor. Consistent with regulatory expectations, a good or fair risk culture in banks is characterized by high profitability ratios, bank stability, lower default risk and good governance.

The relationship between culture and risk management can be difficult to study given that it is hard to measure culture from traditional data sources that are messy and diverse. This study offers a better understanding of risk culture using an unsupervised machine learning approach.

Building on trait activation theory, theory of other orientation, and self-perception theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine how employees’ perceptions of helping efficacy and instrumentality influence the relationship between their prosocial motive and helping behavior.

Data from 304 supervisor-subordinate dyads in South Korea were analyzed. Hypotheses were tested using hierarchical multiple regression.

The results show that prosocial motive had a stronger positive influence on helping behavior among employees with high levels of helping efficacy. However, contrary to our expectation, prosocial motive was more positively related to helping behavior when employees had high levels of helping instrumentality.

Organizations need to present employees with effective, standardized work procedures to make them feel efficacy in helping others. It is also necessary for organizations to consider helping behavior an important factor in performance evaluation and to signify to employees that helping behavior will be rewarded.

Helping behavior is critical for the effectiveness of both organizations and society at large; voluntarily helping people can enhance various kinds of performance at the societal level and can contribute to people’s welfare. Thus, it is necessary to teach people how to help others and to recognize helping behavior.

This study contributes to the understanding of when the influence of prosocial motive on helping is more strongly activated by incorporating employees’ perceptions of the contexts in which helping behavior operates – efficacy and instrumentality.

The purpose of this paper is to present a neuro‐fuzzy system with a reinforcement learning algorithm (RL) for adaptive swarm behaviors acquisition. The basic idea is that each individual (agent) has the same internal model and the same learning procedure, and the adaptive behaviors are acquired only by the reward or punishment from the environment. The formation of the swarm is also designed by RL, e.g. temporal difference (TD)‐error learning algorithm, and it may bring out a faster exploration procedure comparing with the case of individual learning.

The internal model of each individual composes a part of input states classification by a fuzzy net, and a part of optimal behavior learning network which adopting a kind of RL methodology named actor‐critic method. The membership functions and fuzzy rules in the fuzzy net are adaptively formed online by the change of environment states observed in the trials of agent's behaviors. The weights of connections between the fuzzy net and the action‐value functions of actor which provides a stochastic policy of action selection, and critic which provides an evaluation to state transmission, are modified by TD‐error.

Simulation experiments of the proposed system with several goal‐directed navigation problems are accomplished and the results show that swarms are successfully formed and optimized routes are found by swarm learning faster than the case of individual learning.

Two techniques, i.e. fuzzy identification system and RL algorithm, are fused into an internal model of the individuals for swarm formation and adaptive behavior acquisition. The proposed model may be applied to multi‐agent systems, swarm robotics, metaheuristic optimization, and so on.

This study uses the ethical decision‐making model to examine underreporting and premature audit sign‐off in public accounting. Structural equation modelling results indicate that accountants view premature sign‐off activities differently from underreporting activities. For example, those accountants who use a teleological moral evaluation process, and who perceive a greater likelihood of reward are more likely to underreport. That these variables are not significantly related to the likelihood of premature sign‐off suggests that accountants may use a consequences‐based approach when making decisions having lesser ethical content (like underreporting), but employ a different decision process when faced with decisions having greater ethical content (like whether to prematurely sign‐off). The results also suggest that supervisors and managers are less likely to underreport, and to prematurely sign‐off, than senior and staff‐level accountants, and that accountants with an internal locus of control are less likely (than externals) to either underreport or prematurely sign‐off.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of power on supply chain performance (SCP) in the context of small and medium sized agribusiness enterprises (SMEs). Contrary to most of previous studies, which collect and analyze data from one side of a relationship dyad using a focal firm approach, a matched triad approach was employed in data collection and analysis.

Empirical data was collected from 150 agribusiness supply chain members from the maize supply chain in Uganda. Analysis was done using multi-group analysis and structural equations modeling.

Results highlight the differences in the perception of power use and how it influences SCP. The differences in perception suggest the existence of power asymmetry amongst supply chain members. This work contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the use of triad as a unit of analysis as opposed to a firm or a dyad.

This study only focused on one commodity chain in one country, which can limit the broad application of the findings.

The novelty of this work lies in fact that the authors assess perception of power amongst supply chain members in a triadic context, a perspective that has not been adequately tested in agribusiness supply chain management studies before.