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The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of leaders’ use of motivational language on psychological relatedness and its effect on employee well-being in flexible and remote working conditions.

A survey among 375 full-time working professionals in the US was conducted with varying frequencies of remote work arrangements. For the analysis, we used a series of PROCESS analyses to examine the moderating effect of leaders’ motivational language use on the relationship between participants’ remote work status and relatedness, with employee well-being as the dependent variable.

The findings revealed a significant moderating effect of leaders’ perlocutionary (direction-giving) language use on the relationship between employees’ remote work status and relatedness. Specifically, the relationship between remote work status and relatedness was stronger when the use of perlocutionary (direction-giving) language gradually increased. Such enhanced relatedness, in turn, generated higher satisfaction and psychological well-being. The study shows the strategic advantage of direction-giving language in enhancing relatedness, thereby contributing to higher levels of employee satisfaction and psychological well-being in remote work environments.

The originality of this article lies in its integration of motivational language theory and self-determination theory to explore the well-being of employees within flexible and remote work status. Furthermore, we conceptualize remote work as a continuous variable with different degrees of flexibility, ranging from occasional telecommuting to fully remote work, allowing for a nuanced understanding of how leaders’ use of motivational language interacts with varying levels of remote work arrangements to influence employee well-being.

The purpose of this study is to explore the motivations and experiences of university academics who engage in open access publishing for survival and academic development.

This study employs a multiple-case qualitative approach, drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice to investigate the activities and experiences of seven academics as they strived to publish in indexed open access journals. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and observation, focusing on the academics’ strategies for obtaining cultural capital.

Findings reveal that they viewed this publishing community more as an imagined or virtual community from which they could obtain cultural capital and seek the sense of belonging to compensate for the outsider identity and peripheral positioning within their institutions. The acquired cultural capital not only helped them feel more connected but also influenced their institutional status, as increased visibility and recognition from publishing successes began to alter how they were perceived within their professional environments, sometimes enhancing their standing but also occasionally reinforcing marginalisation.

This study contributes to the existing literature by providing a refined understanding of the motivations and experiences of academics engaged in open access publishing. It offers a unique perspective on the formation and functioning of non-institutional communities in academia, highlighting the role of cultural capital and identity negotiation in shaping these communities. Furthermore, it sheds light on the challenges and opportunities faced by academics seeking to publish open access and provides insights for institutions seeking to support their faculty in this endeavour.

Because a large number of employees now work remotely, either completely or partially (e.g. flexible), it is imperative that scholars and practitioners understand the implications of remote work, such as how employee satisfaction is impacted.

This study examined leadership communication styles to understand how they may be perceived differently for remote workers. Results from an online survey (N = 403) revealed that while higher perceptions of leadership communication styles (responsive, vigilant and motivating language) were related to increased employee satisfaction, the amount of time spent working remotely did not moderate these relationships.

The findings suggest that the benefits of demonstrating leadership communication strategies can be extended from physical environments into online spaces.

This study is unique in that it centers on communication-forward leadership styles and applies them to remote contexts. Furthermore, remote work is conceptualized as a continuous variable as opposed to a binary, allowing for increased nuance.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical historical analysis of the business (mis)behaviors and influencing factors that discourage enduring cooperation between principals and agents, to introduce strategies that embrace the social values, economic motivation and institutional designs historically adopted to curtail dishonest acts in international business and to inform an improved principal–agent theory that reflects principal–agent reciprocity as shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, strategic and ideological forces

The critical historical research method is used to analyze Chinese compradors and the foreign companies they served in pre-1949 China.

Business practitioners can extend orthodox principal–agent theory by scrutinizing the complex interactions between local agents and foreign companies. Instead of agents pursuing their economic interests exclusively, as posited by principal–agent theory, they also may pursue principal-shared interests (as suggested by stewardship theory) because of social norms and cultural values that can affect business-related choices and the social bonds built between principals and agents.

The behaviors of compradors and foreign companies in pre-1949 China suggest international business practices for shaping social bonds between principals and agents and foreign principals’ creative efforts to enhance shared interests with local agents.

Understanding principal–agent theory’s limitations can help international management scholars and practitioners mitigate transaction partners’ dishonest acts.

A critical historical analysis of intermediary businesspeople’s (mis)behavior in pre-1949 (1840–1949) China can inform the generalizability of principal–agent theory and contemporary business strategies for minimizing agents’ dishonest acts.

With the help of a quasi-natural experiment on Chinese policies, this study aims to understand the actual contribution of Smart City (SC) policies to the development of information and communications technology (ICT) in different cities. It also discusses the social and digital differences that such policies may generate, with a particular focus on the potential for exacerbating urban inequalities.

To achieve this, the study employs a principal component analysis (PCA) to develop an ICT development indicator system. It then employs a difference-in-differences (DID) model to analyze panel data from 209 Chinese cities over the period from 2007 to 2019, examining the impact of SC policies on ICT development across various urban settings.

Our findings show that SC policies have significantly contributed to the enhancement of ICT development, especially in ICT usage. However, SC policies may inadvertently reinforce developmental disparities among cities. Compared to less developed areas, the benefits of SC policies are more pronounced in economically booming cities. This is likely due to the agglomeration of the ICT industry and the strong allure of developed urban centers for high-caliber talent.

This study contributes to the related literature by explaining the role of SC policies in driving ICT development and by focusing on the often-overlooked impact of SC policies on urban inequality. These findings can provide guidance to policymakers on the need to recognize and address existing urban inequalities.

Nucleic acid testing is an effective method of accurate prevention and control and a key measure to block the spread of the epidemic. However, the fraud in nucleic acid testing occurred frequently during epidemics. This paper aims to provide a viable scheme for the government to strengthen the supervision of nucleic acid testing and to provide a new condition for the punishment for the negative act of the government and the upper limit of the reward for nucleic acid testing institution of no data fraud.

This paper formulates an evolutionary game model between the government and nucleic acid testing institution under four different mechanisms of reward and punishment to solve the issue of nucleic acid testing supervision. The authors discuss the stability of equilibrium points under the four distinct strategies and conduct simulation experiments.

The authors find that the strategy of dynamic reward and static penalty outperforms the strategies of static reward and static penalty, dynamic reward and static penalty, static reward and dynamic penalty, dynamic reward and dynamic penalty. The results reveal the appropriate punishment for the negative act of the government can enhance the positivity of the government's supervision in the strategy of dynamic reward and static penalty, while the upper limit of the reward for nucleic acid testing institution of no data fraud cannot be too high. Otherwise, it will backfire. Another interesting and counterintuitive result is that in the strategy of dynamic reward and dynamic penalty, the upper limit of the penalty for data fraud of nucleic acid testing institution cannot be augmented recklessly. Otherwise, it will diminish the government's positivity for supervision.

Most of the existing evolutionary game researches related to the reward and punishment mechanism and data fraud merely highlight that increasing the intensity of reward and punishment can help improve the government's supervision initiative and can minimize data fraud of nucleic acid institution, but they fall short of the boundary conditions for the punishment and reward mechanism. Previous literature only study the supervision of nucleic acid testing qualitatively and lacks quantitative research. Moreover, they do not depict the problem scenario of testing data fraud of nucleic acid institution regulated by the government via the evolutionary game model. Thus, this study effectively bridges these gaps. This research is universal and can be extended to other industries.

This study aims to deeply understand customer experiences toward Internet of Things (IoT) applications in retail by developing machine learning models for aspect-based sentiment analysis (SA). It includes creating a related terms dictionary and proposing implications for retail businesses in Vietnam based on these analyses. The ultimate goal is to gain insights into customer opinions and assist administrators in formulating effective digital transformation and business strategies within the Vietnamese market.

Initially, this research uses qualitative methods to identify different aspects of customer experience at stores equipped with IoT applications. Then, quantitative methods were applied through classification machine learning models which were trained on the annotated data set to classify comments into aspects and sentiments. Finally, the classification results were analyzed and visualized to draw implications about customer opinions of these stores.

This study collected 77,042 customers’ comment from potential and actual customers who have ever shopped at retail stores with IoT applications deployed worldwide, identified ten new aspects of customer experience in this field and built a dictionary of related terms. Furthermore, this study contributed two efficient ensemble models with an accuracy of 81% and 89% for analyzing aspects and customer sentiments, respectively. This study also proposes implications for managers regarding the use of IoT technology in retail stores to improve shopping experiences for customers.

This study’s findings help managers develop appropriate digital transformation and business strategies for integrating IoT technology into retail stores, especially for retail businesses in the Vietnamese market based on the analysis results and proposed model.

This paper examines to what extent blockchain creates legitimacy and trust in different modes of public governance. It posits that while blockchain aims for political legitimacy through decentralising, immutable and consensus-based mechanisms, the execution of these mechanisms is limited in legitimating governance, which has knock-on effects on trust. It provides an original contribution by recontextualising and reframing blockchain as a governance mechanism that should, and must, perform a legitimating function in order to engender trust.

The research adopts a comprehensive framework for understanding the legitimacy of blockchain governance, positioning it in terms of co-governance, self-governance and hierarchical governance modes. It systematically analyses blockchain whitepapers, legislation, government documents and other sources in three paradigmatic case studies where blockchain governance failed. These cases are then used to assess blockchain according to three key characteristics of decentralisation, immutability and consensus.

The research finds that blockchain’s use in governance settings still relies on legitimacy conferred from other sources – namely state – in order to generate trust. Significant limitations in its de facto political decentralisation, immutability and consensus protocols can create failures in co-governance, self-governance and hierarchical-governance applications, thus limiting the legitimation function of blockchain in facilitating political trust.

These findings are significant in highlighting blockchain’s limitations as a decentralised, immutable and consensus-driven legitimating tool, which has knock-on effects on trust in technology and governance more broadly. It also has broader implications in more clearly highlighting the interconnectedness of political trust and legitimacy in governance processes.

The use of enterprise social media (ESM) can promote knowledge sharing within project teams. However, the potential mechanism of ESM affordances influencing knowledge sharing has not been fully studied. This paper aims to develop a theoretical model to explore how individual psychological cognition and environmental factors affect ESM affordances.

An empirical research using ESM applications was conducted in China, and 214 valid responses were collected for data analysis. Partial least squares structural equation modeling method was performed to test the theoretical model and hypotheses.

The results suggest the following implications: (1) the visibility, persistence, editability and association of ESM affordances all have a positive effect on the effectiveness of knowledge sharing in project teams. (2) The psychological safety and psychological empowerment of team members have a significant positive influence on ESM affordances. (3) The project task complexity positively moderates the positive effects which the visibility and association have on the effectiveness of knowledge sharing, and negatively moderates the positive relationship between the editability and knowledge sharing.

Based on the social cognitive theory, this paper highlights the roles of psychological cognitive factors and project task context in the effect of ESM affordances having on knowledge sharing within project teams. Moreover, it provides valuable suggestions for project managers in project and knowledge management.