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Brand crises are widespread in the marketplace and how consumers perceive and respond to such crises is crucial for brand survival. This paper aims to elucidate the critical role of brand age in shaping consumers’ negative responses to competence-related versus ethics-related crises, with a particular focus on the Eastern cultural context. In addition, the roles of information diagnosticity and culture are investigated.

In a series of four studies conducted across China and the USA, the authors use a rigorous between-subject experimental design to delve into the dynamics of how the interplay between brand age and brand crisis impacts consumers’ negative responses, specifically negative word-of-mouth and boycott tendency, toward brands perceived as guilty.

Results show that brand age helps mitigate the negative responses of consumers in competence-related crises, yet exacerbates such reactions in ethics-related crises. In addition, information diagnosticity mediates the interactive effect of brand crisis and brand age on consumers’ negative responses. However, the results of the cross-cultural comparison study suggest that brand age exaggerates consumers’ negative responses to ethics-related brand crises only in Eastern cultures, but not in the Western contexts.

The research reveals the dual-edged impact of brand age during crises, enriches the literature that draws on information diagnosticity within the hierarchical restrictive schema theory. It also clarifies the boundary mechanisms related to cultural differences.

The findings of this research provide meaningful implications for brand managers by communicating the oldness of a brand may serve to buffer negative consumer responses to competence-related crises but can exacerbate the consequences of ethics-related crises.

This research offers a novel perspective on the nuanced influence of brand age on consumers’ adverse reactions to brand crises. It clarifies why emphasizing the oldness of brands in Eastern-culture markets is effective in mitigating competence-related crises but often counterproductive for ethics-related crises.

The present study purports to unravel the mechanism in relationship among leadership behaviour integrity, organisational career development and employee engagement. Further, it also aims to understand if the employee feedback self-efficacy has any moderating influence on the relationship between leader behavioural integrity and organisational career development.

Pre-existing questionnaires are used for collecting data from a total of 417 employees working in the information technology industry operating within India. Analysis of the data is done using structural equation modelling technique.

Results of the study show that organisational career development partially mediates the relationship between leadership behavioural integrity and employee engagement. It is also found that feedback self-efficacy plays a moderating role in the relationship between leadership behavioural integrity and organisational career development.

The study helps to understand the mechanism of the relationship between leadership behavioural integrity and employee engagement through organisational career development with the support of ethical theory and social exchange theory. It also shows the moderating role played by feedback self-efficacy in the relationship between leadership behavioural integrity and organisational career development using social learning perspective.

This study aims to deepen our understanding of how chatbots’ empathy influences humans–AI relationship in frontline service encounters. The authors investigate the underlying mechanisms, including perceived anthropomorphism, perceived intelligence and psychological empowerment, while also considering variations between different stages of the customer journey (before and after purchase).

Data collection was conducted through an online survey distributed among 301 customers who had experience using AI-based service chatbot in frontline service encounters in China. The hypotheses were examined through structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis.

The findings of this study revealed the positive impacts of emotional and cognitive empathy on humans–AI relationship through perceived anthropomorphism, perceived intelligence and psychological empowerment. Furthermore, this study verified the moderating effect of the customer journey stages, such that the impacts of anthropomorphism and intelligence on humans–AI relationship displayed more strength during the pre- and post-purchase phases, respectively.

This research offers practical implications for companies: recognize and enhance empathy dimensions in AI-based service chatbot to empower human–AI relationships; boost customer empowerment in human–AI interactions; and tailor anthropomorphic features in the pre-purchase stage and improve problem-solving capability in the post-purchase stage to enrich user experiences.

This study extends relationship marketing theory and human–AI interaction frameworks by investigating the underlying mechanisms of the effect of two-dimensional empathy on human–AI relationship. This study also enriches service design theories by revealing the moderating effect of customer journey stages.

Although various stakeholder groups frequently advocate and call for greater heterogeneity among directors and managers, it remains unknown whether team heterogeneity can be beneficial for audit committee to exercise the auditor selection functions. This study aims to address this question.

Drawing on a sample of domestically listed nonfinancial A-share firms in China from 2008 to 2022, the authors empirically examine whether and how firm’s audit committee heterogeneity associates with the selection of auditors.

Firms with higher levels of audit committee heterogeneity are more likely to be associated with lower-quality auditors. Further examination reveals the mediating role of risk-taking: higher levels of heterogeneity are associated with higher levels of risk-taking, influencing firms to employ lower-quality auditors. Moreover, the authors document that increased audit committee heterogeneity is associated with more audit committee meetings and lower audit efficiency, and that hiring lower-quality auditors can influence the market value of firms with high audit committee heterogeneity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine whether and how audit committee erogeneity associates with the selection of auditors. Moreover, because China is a high-power distance, collectivism-oriented, more relations-based (i.e. guanxi-based) than rules-based society, it is critical to examine the influence of team heterogeneity based on the unique cultural context and transitional nature of China’s business environment.

Purpose: This chapter identifies performance factors that have the strongest impact on companies’ sustainable outcomes and compares the obtained results across different sectors.

Methodology: About 3,384 observations were gathered from 2015 to 2022 from companies in communication services, energy, financials, real estate, and utilities sectors that comprise the ‘STOXX Global ESG Leaders Select 50’ index. The multiple regression model is constructed with companies’ ESG scores as dependent variables and independent variables representing operational, financial, and market performance.

Findings: Companies that tend to have higher operational and financial performance in the financial sector are more likely to have higher ESG performance. The financial performance results of companies showed the strongest statistically significant relationship with environmental and the weakest with governance scores.

Implications: Results benefit private and institutional investors aiming to create more sustainable portfolios. The obtained results indicate that these investors should focus on companies operating in the financial and energy sectors with higher performance results. Better ROE, ROA, and Tobin’s Q may have a negative impact on sustainable outcomes for companies operating in the real estate and utility sectors.

Limitations: Firstly, not all ESG index providers disclose information about their index constituents. Secondly, within the chosen ‘STOXX Global ESG Leaders Select 50’ index, not all constituents had complete ESG data available on the Bloomberg platform. When selecting the analysis period, it was observed that the accessible ESG data on Bloomberg covers a relatively short time span, only from 2015 onwards.

Future research: A larger number of companies by choosing a more comprehensive available ESG index.

Cybersecurity has received growing attention from academic researchers and industry practitioners as a strategy to accelerate performance gains and social sustainability. Meanwhile, firms are usually prone to cyber-risks that emanate from their supply chain partners especially third-party logistics providers (3PLs). Thus, it is crucial to implement cyber-risks management in 3PLs to achieve social sustainability in supply chains. However, these 3PLs are faced with critical difficulties which tend to hamper the consistent growth of cybersecurity. This paper aims to analyze these critical difficulties.

Data were sourced from 40 managers in Nigerian 3PLs with the aid of questionnaires. A novel quantitative methodology based on the synergetic combination of interval-valued neutrosophic analytic hierarchy process (IVN-AHP) and multi-objective optimization on the basis of a ratio analysis plus the full multiplicative form (MULTIMOORA) is applied. Sensitivity analysis and comparative analysis with other decision models were conducted.

Barriers were identified from published literature, finalized using experts’ inputs and classified under organizational, institutional and human (cultural values) dimensions. The results highlight the most critical dimension as human followed by organizational and institutional. Also, the results pinpointed indigenous beliefs (e.g. cyber-crime spiritualism), poor humane orientation, unavailable specific tools for managing cyber-risks and skilled workforce shortage as the most critical barriers that show the highest potential to elicit other barriers.

By illustrating the most significant barriers, this study will assist policy makers and industry practitioners in developing strategies in a coordinated and sequential manner to overcome these barriers and thus, achieve socially sustainable supply chains.

This research pioneers the use of IVN-AHP-MULTIMOORA to analyze cyber-risks management barriers in 3PLs for supply chain social sustainability in a developing nation.

By adopting learning theory and a guanxi perspective, this study aims to investigate the effects of interpersonal guanxi (interpersonal networks or connections) and relationship learning on companies’ business performance when operating in a large emerging market.

Using a sample of 294 sales managers and salespeople in the Chinese hotel sector, the authors empirically test the authors' arguments through a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach.

The authors' findings indicate that strong interpersonal guanxi tends to generate more positive business performance. Furthermore, the authors find that relationship learning plays a mediating role in the association between interpersonal guanxi and hotel companies’ business performance in a Chinese context. Finally, the authors empirically explore the moderating effect of inter-firm dependence on the contribution of interpersonal guanxi to relationship learning. Findings demonstrate that this effect varies significantly based on inter-firm dependence, with interpersonal guanxi exhibiting a greater positive impact if such dependence is high.

This study enriches our understanding of interpersonal guanxi and of how companies can enhance the companies' business performance in an emerging market context.

Although a growing body of research has found evidence of anti-public sector bias – a negative stereotype that the performance of the public sector is worse than that of the private sector, whether this phenomenon is universal across situations is still an unknown topic to be further discussed. The purpose of this study is to examine how citizens assess the public sector in Chinese context, as well as the source and deep logic of this evaluation.

Through two survey experiments (N = 1,375), this paper empirically explores how citizens evaluate the public sector in the Chinese context and the cross-context stability of this attitude. At the same time, two focus group interviews (N = 12) are used to deeply analyze the source and internal logic of this attitude.

In China, there is no anti-public sector bias in the public evaluation of the public sector. On the contrary, there is a certain degree of pro-public sector preference, that is, the public has a more positive view of the public sector than the private sector. We also find that this preference has strong cross-context stability, which will not be affected by different performance information or failure public events with different severity. The study also finds that Chinese citizens' preference for the public sector is not only the product of traditional political culture, but also the result of authoritarian propaganda. More importantly, it is a personal rational choice based on institutional performance.

This study provides a good example to explore how the public views the public sector in countries where the proportion of public sector supply far exceeds that of non-public sector. The results increase the academic understanding of how citizens assess the public sector and why this evaluation comes into being. The results enlighten significance for future theoretical research on the main body of public service providers and their performance views. It also provides micro-evidence of behavioral public performance for cross-sectoral comparison between public sector and private sector.

Based on the moral licensing theory, this study aims to reveal the mechanism of self-sacrificial leadership inducing abusive supervision from two paths of leader moral credit and leader moral credential. At the same time, it also discusses the moderating effect of leader behavioral integrity on the two paths.

In this study, 434 employees and their direct leaders from six Chinese companies were investigated in a paired survey at three time points, and the empirical data was analyzed using Mplus 7.4 software.

Self-sacrificial leadership has a positive effect on leader abusive supervision through the mediating role of leader moral credit and leader moral credential. In addition, this study also finds that leader behavioral integrity is the “gate” for self-sacrificial leadership to promote abusive supervision, and the leader behavioral integrity has a moderating effect on the process of self-sacrificial leadership influencing on leader moral credit and leader moral credential.

This study explores the evolution of self-sacrificial leadership from “good” to “bad” from the perspective of moral licensing and broadens the research on the mechanism and boundary conditions of self-sacrificial leadership. At the same time, it also provides important reference value for preventing the negative effects of self-sacrificial leadership in organizations.

Purpose: Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors indeed play a vital role in sustainability efforts across various sectors and industries. ESG factors are often aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which provide a framework for addressing global challenges related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and more. Countries that prioritise ESG considerations in their operations and decision-making processes contribute to achieving the SDGs, thus advancing sustainability. The study explores the interplay between ESG practices and overall sustainability outcomes. This involves examining how ESG considerations influence environmental conservation, social equity, and economic resilience and how these factors collectively contribute to sustainability goals.

Methodology: Data envelopment analysis (DEA), which is performed in order to find out the most efficient countries, which will provide valuable insights into the complex relationship between ESG factors and sustainability, informing decision-making and driving positive change towards a more sustainable future.

Findings: ESG practices transform to sustainable development efficiently in half of the EU countries; however, the efficient countries differ depending on the model. Demonstrating the efficient transformation strengthens the country’s case for sustainability. Countries that embrace ESG practices not only contribute to environmental and social well-being but also enhance their competitiveness and long-term value-creation potential.

Implications: Policymakers can use the findings to advocate for policies and regulations that promote ESG integration and sustainable development. This may include measures to incentivise responsible business practices, enhance corporate transparency and disclosure, support sustainable finance initiatives, and strengthen regulatory frameworks to address emerging ESG risks.