Cultural differences in creativity and innovation: are Asian employees truly less creative than western employees?

Some Asian countries have recently announced new national slogans advocating creativity and innovation. Paradoxically, these slogans support Asians’ self-deprecating belief that they are not as creative as Westerners. To investigate whether this belief is true, especially in the management field, we review 29 articles across various levels of analysis of cultural differences in creativity and innovation. Our review demonstrates that collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance have had mixed results in influencing creativity and innovation. The aforementioned belief might be incomplete and premature because of several theoretical as well as methodological shortcomings. Finally, we make suggestions for future research.     

Hospitality leaders: Do they know how their employees feel about them?

Hospitality organizations may have a disparity between the way employees view their leaders and the leaders' own view—to the detriment of the organization.     

Motorcycle safety programmes in Malaysia: how effective are they?

This paper presents the approach taken by the Malaysian Government to contain motorcycle casualties in Malaysia. It involves the exposure control, crash prevention, behaviour modification and injury control related to humans, vehicles and the environment based on pre-crash, crash and post-crash scenarios of motorcycle accidents. These initiatives emanated mainly from the research and development carried out by the Road Safety Research Centre at Universiti Putra Malaysia. Recent outcomes from these initiatives are presented and their impact is highlighted.     

Managing negative emotions from entrepreneurial project failure: When and how does supportive leadership help employees?

Drawing on Affective Events Theory and a sample of 112 matched manager-employee dyads involved in failed corporate entrepreneurial projects, we develop and test a model of when and how managerial leadership can foster high employee performance in their subsequent endeavors. Through path analysis modeling, we show that perceptions of supportive managerial leadership behaviors can limit the detrimental effects of recalled negative emotions from prior project failures on employee job satisfaction, and through job satisfaction, on employee performance. However, the benefits of supportive managerial leadership behaviors dissipate with more time since the project has failed.     

It may be urgent,but is it important? A look at how employees evaluate their emails

This paper presents the results of a study designed to identify the cues employees use to identify an email as important and/or urgent. Taking an emic perspective, a qualitative research methodology is used to analyze interview responses from knowledge workers. Our findings support the notion that employees use strategies similar to those encapsulated in Mitchell et al.’s (1997) operationalization of stakeholder salience when evaluating an email's importance and/or urgency. Results from this study can be used to design email policies to support knowledge worker performance.     

What motivates Hong Kong's hotel employees?

“Show me the money” is not the only message from Hong Kong's hotel employees. “Show me some respect” is also high on the list.     

Entrepreneurial processes in social contexts: how are they different, if at all?

Scholars have compared and contrasted commercial and social entrepreneurship along a variety of dimensions, suggesting that entrepreneurial antecedents and outcomes differ within a social context. However, little is known about whether entrepreneurial processes differ within social contexts. In this paper, we ask to what extent the antecedents and outcomes that make social entrepreneurship unique influence entrepreneurial processes. Using an inputs–throughputs–outputs framework, we assess the relationship between four antecedents (social mission/motivation, opportunity identification, access to resources/funding, and multiple stakeholders) and three outcomes (social value creation, sustainable solutions, and satisfying multiple stakeholders) to the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation (innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy) (Lumpkin and Dess, Acad Manag Rev 21(1):135–172, 1996). Our analysis suggests that many entrepreneurial processes remain essentially the same or are affected only slightly. However, autonomy, competitive aggressiveness, and risk-taking are influenced to some extent by the presence of multiple stakeholders and access to resources/funding. Entrepreneurial processes may also differ when applied to efforts to satisfy multiple stakeholders and achieve sustainable solutions. We subsequently discuss the implications of our analysis for future social entrepreneurship research and practice.     

Is your C-suite risk literate?

Managing risk effectively is essential for business success, and thus understanding risk is vital for business executives. Effective risk management increases firm value, whereas poor risk management will damage shareholder wealth. In this article, we examine the risk literacy of business executives and find significant variation among the leaders we sample. Our findings suggest that business executives would be well served to evaluate their own risk literacy, and remediate, if necessary; to work to increase risk literacy in the company’s employees; and to include risk literacy as an important and routine part of the firm’s overall culture. Because the importance of risk literacy increases with business complexity, we believe that risk literacy will only become more important in the future.     

You are charging your friend a fee? The influence of brand relationship norms on consumer judgments

Prior research has found that consumer interpersonal relationship norms influence how consumers view marketing actions by a brand. Exchange relationships (e.g. payment for benefit received) and communal relationships (e.g. altruistic concern for a partner’s welfare) were studied. Violating relationship norms negatively affected consumer judgments. We replicate and extend this finding. We show general support for the proposed interaction across a range of dependent measures, manipulations and with an Australian sample. We also show that the negative effects of norm transgression by charging consumers a fee can be attenuated when the fee is modest and that exchange participants can also regard fees as violations of relationship norms.     

Why do good employees stay in bad organizations?

Family and work are two of society's most important institutions. It is understandable, then, that some similarities would exist between the two. One unfortunate aspect of such relationships is that families and organizations may be abusive to members. When this occurs in familial relationships, research has identified dynamics that keep people in the abusive situation. We consider here how those same dynamics can occur in abusive organizations to identify factors that keep employees in unhealthy work environments. We then examine intervention techniques and concepts that can be used to enable people to recognize an abusive organization, the long-term damage such organizations can inflict on employees, and ways to assist individuals in exiting an abusive organization setting. Our intention is to create awareness of the harm that can be caused by abusive organizations and provide a framework that will enable people caught in a pattern of organizational abuse to understand their choices and behaviors.     

Stakeholder: Essentially Contested or Just Confused?

The concept of the ??stakeholder?? has become central to business, yet there is no common consensus as to what the concept of a stakeholder means, with hundreds of different published definitions suggested. Whilst every concept is liable to be contested, for stakeholder research, this is problematic for both theoretical and empirical analysis. This article explores whether this lack of consensus is conceptual confusion, which would benefit from further debate to try to reach a higher degree of elucidation, or whether the stakeholder concept is essentially contested, rendering the quest to seek a singular definition unfeasible. The theory of essentially contested concepts was proposed by Gallie (Proc Aristot Soc 56:167?C198, 1956). The seven criteria Gallie prescribes for evaluating essentially contested concepts are applied to the stakeholder concept. The analysis suggests that this concept is an essentially contested concept and this explains the degree of definitional variation.     

Just How Undervalued is the Chinese Renminbi?

Given that the value of China's currency has been a hot topic recently, this paper explores the equilibrium levels of China's real and nominal exchange rates. Employing a Johansen cointegration framework, we focus on the behavioural equilibrium exchange rate (BEER) and permanent equilibrium exchange rate (PEER) models. Our results suggest that, while the renminbi is somewhat undervalued against the dollar, the misalignment is not nearly as exaggerated as many popular claims.     

Does gay-themed advertising haunt your brand?

This study is designed to investigate the effect of gay-themed advertising as well as consumers’ gender, tolerance towards homosexuality (low vs high tolerance) and consumers’ brand commitment (low vs high commitment) on attitude towards ad and attitude towards brand. The study result suggests that people exposed to non-gay-themed ads had more positive attitudes towards the brand than did people exposed to gay-themed ads. The study findings suggest that ads featuring homosexual imagery could lead to negative brand evaluation. The study finds that heterosexual males exposed to such ads had less favourable attitudes towards the advertising and brand as well. The study finds that subjects with high tolerance towards homosexuality have more positive attitudes towards the ad and brand, and have higher purchase intention than do subjects with low tolerance. Furthermore, the results suggest that people with high brand commitment had more favourable attitudes towards ad and brand. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Are your cash-flow tools recession ready?

In good times like those most businesses have enjoyed for the past decade, business owners have typically watched their income statements with pleasure, as year-to-year performance gains have fattened their dividend payouts and increased the valuation of the companies they own and run. All too often in such times, scant attention is paid to what’s between the top line and the bottom line of the income statement. Worse, most business owners, in my experience, give little more than a cursory nod to the balance sheet. Why does this matter? When a recession lands on their doorstep with a sudden thud, as it apparently just has, many of these same people will find themselves having sailed too close to the wind, with cash running out and a dearth of tools to help them weather the storm and understand what has gone wrong. But it need not be so, for there are four simple tools to help any business owner answer these four important questions: (1) Where is cash going in my business, and where is it coming from? (2) To what extent are my profit margins improving or declining, and why? (3) To what extent am I effectively managing the cash-flow relationships with my customers and my suppliers? (4) What, if anything, can I do to better manage the cash that flows into and out of my business? If your business is threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic, here are some tools to help it survive.     

Customer's angry voice: Targeting employees or the organization?

Poor service encounters have the potential to leave customers feeling angry at the frontline service employee who serves them, angry at the organization, or angry at both parties. The 25 in-depth interviews (Study 1) and experimental work (Study 2) demonstrate how distributive (outcome fairness), procedural (response time) and interactional (treatment received) justice dimensions differentially affect where the customer targets her or his anger, either at the frontline employee or at the organization as a whole. Further investigation reveals sins-of-omission (when the service provider failed to act) and interactional justice mediate the effect of response time on anger at the employee. Interactional justice also partially mediates the effect of outcome fairness on anger at the organization whereas sins-of-omission do not.