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The link between SME performance, growth and development is well established; however, the characteristics of SMEs that allow firms to be successful in the long run in an underdeveloped country context, i.e. Pakistan, are still unclear. This paper aims to bridge this gap by identifying the SMEs’ characteristics that set them apart from their rivals and become successful.

This study uses Storey’s development framework to identify the SMEs’ characteristics. Data is gathered using the case study method from SMEs with a metropolitan context in Pakistan. A narrative methodological framework was used during the data gathering and analysing stages.

Findings of this study indicate that the prosperity of SMEs in Pakistan is dependent on a combination of characteristics, including entrepreneurial characteristics of owner–managers, knowledge of business operating models, social networks and relationship building and innovation in business style. Additionally, other factors such as governance structure, strategic planning of market diversification and export characteristics also influence the prosperity of an SME. These findings may have several important implications for key stakeholders, including entrepreneurs, SMEs and policymakers in the government.

This research provides evidence about factors that can help an SME to become successful in uncertain situations surrounding a business environment. Theoretically, the contribution of this research is that it demonstrates that entrepreneurial characteristics and the effective leadership style of owner–managers can help SMEs achieve prosperity in external unforeseeable situations.

This study investigates the brand selfies that have the capability to help brands thrive through crises. The brand selfies spark a self-inferential process that makes customers feel connected to the brand and makes them biased toward a specific brand during an uncertain situation.

A total of 166 questionnaires were analyzed through structural equation modelling (Smart PLS) and a niche group of young millennials from Thailand was selected based on their luxury items usage, frequency of visits to leisure spas and hotels, expensive car showrooms, branded jewelry stores and luxury watch shops.

The study highlights the emergence of brand selfies during the crisis and the priority given by customers as compared to brand-generated content or promotional campaigns. The results indicated a positive influence of brand selfies on brand preferences directly and through the mediation of brand signature.

It is fascinating for brands that customers voluntarily include their products in their carefully crafted and staged selfies that deliver their image and massages as social signifiers during a chaotic situation.

The research classifies the impacts of brand selfies in the luxury, leisure and tourism market of Thailand and its assistance in thriving through crises. The study is one of the rare studies that present brand selfies as a hassle-free promotional tool for brand signature and a game-changing strategy to deal with crises.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of affiliative-based humorous leadership on hotel employee outcomes (i.e. resistance to change and upward voice), underpinned by affective events theory. Further, this paper investigates psychological capital as a mediation effect and emotional intelligence as a moderation effect.

Using a structured questionnaire, 554 supervisors of 20 four- and five-star hotels in Sharm El-Sheikh responded based on a time-lagged approach. A Smart-partial least squares (Smart-PLS) v. 3.3.9 was used to analyze the data set.

The findings revealed that affiliative-based humorous leadership has a positive effect on psychological capital, and psychological capital has a positive association with employee upward voice. Psychological capital partially mediated the linkage of humorous leadership with employees' upward voices and resistance to change. According to the results, emotional intelligence strengthened the linkage of psychological capital with employee resistance to change and upward voice.

The findings contribute to the body of knowledge on humor and the development of new ideas in the hospitality literature. This paper adds to the hospitality literature on humorous leadership in developing countries, specifically in Egypt. This paper also provides practitioners with new perspectives as they develop strategies and use humor-related wise leadership styles in the workplace.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first studies to assess affiliative-based humor in leadership in the hospitality industry. This paper contributes to future studies on the crucial effect of workplace engagement and its association with employees’ novel and intriguing actions and offers a good guideline for organizations and enterprises wishing to better leverage leader humor.

The e-health services came up as an effective tool to mitigate effects of COVID-19 and following social distance norms. This study highlighted an issue of contentious usage intentions of e-health services among Thai older citizens. This study aims to examine the relationship of social influence (SI), information quality (IQ) and the digital literacy (DL) to contentious usage intentions.

This study follows quantitative techniques, and the sample size is 140 to analyze, that is collected from the older Thai citizens. The convenient sampling technique was used to collect the data and the items were measured by using a five-point Likert scale.

The findings of this study are having mixed results. The effect of DL and satisfaction (SAT) on continuous usage intention (CUI) is significant. The effect of IQ and SI on CUI is non-significant. The effect of IQ and SI on SAT is significant. Further, the mediating effect of SAT between IQ and CUI is non-significant. However, the mediating effect of SAT between SI and CUI is significant.

This study contributes to knowledge by empirical testing of DL and usage of the medicine. Furthermore, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the rare studies that incorporate technological intervention for drug usage intentions.

The purpose of this paper is to study the thermal behavior of radial porous fin surrounded by water-base copper nanoparticles under the influence of radiation.

In order to optimize the response variable, the authors perform sensitivity analysis with the aid of response surface methodology (RSM). Moreover, this study enlightens the applications of artificial neural networks (ANN) for predicting the temperature gradient. The governing modeled equations are firstly non-dimensionalized and then solved with the aid of Runge–Kutta fourth order together with the shooting method in order to guess the initial conditions.

Numerical results are analyzed and presented in the form of tables and graphs. This study reveals that the temperature of the fin is decreasing as the wet porous parameter increases (m₂) and the temperature for 10% concentration of nanoparticles are higher than 5 and 1%. Physical parameters involved in the study are analyzed and processed through RSM. It is come to know that sensitivity of temperature gradient to radiative parameter (Nr) and convective parameter (Nc) is positive and negative to dimensionless ambient temperature (θ_a). Furthermore, after ANN training it can be argued that the established model can efficiently be used to predict the temperature gradient over a radial porous fin for the copper-water nanofluid flow.

To the best of our knowledge, only a few attempts have been made to analyze the thermal behavior of radial porous fin surrounded by copper-based nanofluid under the influence of radiation and convection.

There has been substantial research on branding globally. However, there is a dearth of studies empirically investigating branding strategies during the pandemic to mitigate COVID-19 effects on the airline industry. The paper considers three factors which are brand familiarity, brand communication and brand reputation to develop the brand trust of customers and that ultimately influence their brand preferences.

The study is based on self-administrative surveys as 450 questionnaires were spread, received 339 responses and a total of 301 questionnaires were selected for data analysis by structural-based modeling after the deletion of outliers and partially filled questionnaires. The data was collected through purposive sampling from Malaysian airports.

The findings confirm the relationship of brand communication, brand familiarity and brand reputation to brand trust and brand preference through mediation and directly except direct relationship of brand familiarity to brand preference. The study is limited to the provided dataset of surveys. The present study couldn't interview respondents which can be done by future studies and also effects of COVID-19 can be examined on related industries or through comparative studies among countries.

The present study is the first to investigate the effects of COVID-19 on airline brands and explored the strategies to respond to crises. The study is one of the rare studies that consider branding strategies to the uplift airline industry and mitigate post-pandemic effects from the airline sector.

Given the prevalence of protecting geoheritage tourism sites, Ladakh has enormous potential. However, Ladakh’s potential and developments in its growth as a geotourism destination have received scant consideration. As such, this paper aims to explore Ladakh’s key drivers as a potential geotourism destination through cognitive dissonance and protection motivation theories.

This paper conducted in-depth interviews with 86 geoscientists and tourism professionals to assess Ladakh’s potential as a geotourism destination. This paper used a qualitative approach to congregate four constructs based on the image difference of the consensus map.

Because of the interviewees’ heterogeneity and uniqueness, meaningful constructs in the consensus were included for each figure and cloud words. This paper concluded that four drivers are the main forces behind geotourism development.

This paper explores the drivers – geotourism services, legislative requirements, experiential geotourism and SPARC (scientific, preservation, aesthetic, recreational, cultural) values – affecting geotourism in Ladakh. It is feasible to lessen the negative effects of overtourism and make sure that Ladakh’s distinctive nature is preserved for future generations by implementing sustainable tourism practices.

Underpinned by sensation-seeking theory (SST) and regulatory focus theory (RFT), this paper highlights the crucial role of adventurousness in self-protective behavior and future travel avoidance. Furthermore, this paper investigates safety-seeking tendency as a moderator and travel anxiety post-COVID-19 as a mediator.

Data were gathered from 574 potential visitors to St. Catherine post-COVID-19 and analyzed using Smart-PLS approach.

Adventurousness negatively and significantly affected travel anxiety, while the latter negatively influenced self-protective behavior and positively influenced future travel avoidance. Besides, the findings proved that travel anxiety partially mediated the adventurousness linkage with self-protective behavior and future travel avoidance. Moreover, safety-seeking tendencies dampened travel anxiety's connection with self-protective behavior and future travel avoidance.

This paper provides valuable insights into travel research in theory and practice to revive tourist attractions post-COVID-19 in developing countries via an adventure tourism pattern. The study helps figure out how to deal with the pandemic and restore the monument of heavenly religions, St. Catherine—sacred mountain peaks, mosques, churches and many monasteries—in addition to its charming and picturesque nature.

The current paper examines a traveler's adventurous nature and post-COVID-19 behavior when visiting St. Catherine and their behaviors related to future avoidance and self-protection. This paper adds the first investigation of travel anxiety and safety-seeking through the lens of SST and RFT theories in the Egyptian tourism context.

This study aims to examine the influence of performance appraisal on Innovative work behavior of employees in public sector universities of Pakistan, by using the Ability, Motivation, and Opportunity framework.

A newly developed framework has been created to explore how performance appraisal, self-efficacy, and organizational climate influence employees' innovative work behavior. The study collected data using a self-administered questionnaire from employees who work in public universities in Pakistan.

The findings of this study revealed a positive correlation between performance appraisal and innovative work behavior. It is observed that self-efficacy mediates the relationship between performance appraisal and innovative work behavior and organizational climate moderates the relationship between self-efficacy and innovative work behavior.

The current study is novel and unique for several reasons. But the main contribution of this study is the validation of self-efficacy's mediating impact on innovative work behavior as well as the validity of the organizational climate as moderating effect in Pakistan’s public sector universities, where a large number of students have been enrolled and they can get advantage from their teacher's improved innovative behavior.

Existing gender inequality across all sectors has weakened women’s resilience to risk management. The chaos heightens if they are not only breadwinners of their family but roaring the entrepreneurial world. Disasters and crises hit entrepreneurs equally but post-disaster damages following ripple effects hit hardest to women ruling the one-third portion of the entrepreneurial world. Surprisingly, the post-disaster entrepreneurial challenges of women are overlooked, and the study aims to fill the gap by explaining the right way of empowering women through entrepreneurial initiatives.

The research is based on data collected from 372 women entrepreneurs in the tourism industry of the Andaman Sea coastal area in Thailand by following the cluster sampling technique. The women entrepreneurs of Thailand were chosen as target respondents because women’s participation is more than 40% in entrepreneurial businesses.

The findings revealed that entrepreneurial marketing, entrepreneurial opportunity and entrepreneurial tenacity have a significant influence on entrepreneurial initiatives and the entrepreneurial mindset successfully mediates between dependent variables and entrepreneurial initiatives.

This study has important insights for policymakers, women entrepreneurs, institutions and the tourism industry. However, it focuses solely on women entrepreneurs participating in the tourism industry of Thailand. Therefore, future studies are invited to incorporate male entrepreneurs and be conducted in other developed and Asian countries.

This study contributes to the entrepreneurial field by proposing entrepreneurial factors that can help women entrepreneurs restart their businesses, mitigating or minimizing natural disaster effects and proposing pioneering suggestions to uplift the tourism entrepreneurial sector.