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The purpose of this paper is to unveil the efficacy of coaching leadership within Chinese organizations and bolster employees’ work engagement.

The sample data were collected through employing the questionnaire method. The participants consisted of 234 employees and 53 supervisors in Chinese enterprises. Hypothesis testing was conducted using multiple regression analysis and the Bootstrap method.

The coaching leadership exhibited a positive association with employees’ work engagement, psychological safety and self-efficacy. It was observed that employees’ psychological safety and self-efficacy played a dual-mediation role between coaching leadership and work engagement. Additionally, employees with power distance orientation (POD) amplified the positive effects of coaching leadership on psychological safety and self-efficacy.

This study contributes to the literature on coaching leadership and work engagement by elucidating their direct influence, as well as the dual-mediating roles of psychological safety and self-efficacy. Besides, our findings underscore the moderating effect of POD in amplifying the impacts of coaching leadership. However, the nonlongitudinal survey design adopted by our study should be noted for its potential limitations in establishing causality.

The findings demonstrate that coaching leadership, psychological safety and self-efficacy play a crucial role in fostering work engagement. Employees with higher POD are more likely to benefit from coaching leaders.

This study contributes to coaching leadership literature and provides insights into how and when coaching leadership affects work engagement in Chinese organizations.

This article aims to investigate the impact of the Lesson Study (LS) model on students' mathematics achievement and attitudes toward mathematics.

The study employs a concurrent embedded design, a type of mixed methods design. Within this framework, a quantitative pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design is applied for quantitative data, while qualitative data is gathered through interviews and observations. A 2×2 mixed ANOVA is used for the analysis of quantitative data, and content analysis is employed for qualitative data analysis.

The findings reveal that the LS model has a significant positive impact on the mathematics achievement and attitudes of students in the experimental group. Quantitative analysis shows a meaningful improvement in mathematics achievement for the experimental group, which is notably superior than the control group. Additionally, students in the experimental group found mathematics lessons more enjoyable and easier, and their attitudes toward mathematics improved positively. Students' feedback supports these results, with many expressing that LS-based lessons were more engaging and effective. Observations by the researcher, mathematics expert and teacher in the experimental group also corroborate these positive changes.

The results of the study suggest that the LS model should be more widely implemented in mathematics education. This recommendation highlights the potential of the LS model to enhance the teaching process and improve students' mathematics achievement. Furthermore, the study also indicates that LS has a positive impact on students' attitudes toward mathematics, as evidenced by their increased motivation and more positive outlook toward the subject. These findings underscore the LS model’s effectiveness in both improving academic performance and transforming students' attitudes toward mathematics.

To contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, this study aims to explore how to encourage innovative green behaviors among college students and the mechanisms behind the formation of green innovation behavior. Specifically, this study examines the influences of schools, mentors and college students themselves.

A multilevel, multisource study involving 261 students from 51 groups generally supported this study’s predictions.

Proenvironmental and responsible mentors significantly predicted innovative green behavior among college students. In addition, creative motivation mediated the logical chain among green intellectual capital, emotional intelligence and green innovation behavior.

The study findings offer new insights into the conditions required for college students to engage in green innovation. In addition, they provide practical implications for cultivating green innovation among college students.

The authors proposed and tested a multilevel theory based on the ability–motivation–opportunity framework. In this model, proenvironmental and responsible mentors, green intellectual capital and emotional intelligence triggered innovative green behavior among college students through creative motivation.

This study aims to explore the relationship between energy management practices – specifically energy consumption targets, energy efficiency improvement measures and energy consumption monitoring – and firm performance in the developing economies of Egypt and Tunisia. It seeks to determine how these practices impact total sales performance, providing insights for regional firms and policymakers.

This study uses data from the World Bank’s 2020 Enterprise Survey, focusing on firms in Egypt and Tunisia. This study uses partial least squares structural equation modeling to analyze the impact of energy management practices on total sales performance.

The findings reveal that, while energy consumption targets do not directly affect total sales performance in Tunisia, they significantly enhance energy efficiency improvement measures and energy consumption monitoring, indirectly influencing total sales performance. This finding highlights the critical role of comprehensive energy management strategies in improving firm performance.

This study is limited to firms in Egypt and Tunisia, with cross-sectional data that do not capture the dynamic interactions of the variables over time. Future research should consider longitudinal data and expand this study to other developing economies. Using single-item measures for each variable suggests that more nuanced, multi-item measures could offer more profound insights.

For firms in Egypt and Tunisia, adopting comprehensive energy management practices, such as setting energy consumption targets, implementing energy efficiency measures and monitoring energy consumption, can lead to better sales performance by reducing energy costs, which can be reinvested in core business activities. Policymakers should support these practices through incentives and policies that promote energy efficiency and sustainability.

This study contributes to the literature by offering empirical evidence of the indirect impact of energy consumption targets on firm performance in developing economies. This underscores the importance of integrated energy management strategies to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), mainly SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), providing valuable insights for both policymakers and practitioners.

This study developed an online lesson study, investigated teacher professionalism after following an online lesson study and examined students' environmental literacy.

This study used a mixed-method research design. The qualitative approach entailed observing science learning focussing on environmental issues during Zoom meetings and interviews with teachers to gain insight into the online lesson study design. The quantitative approach involved testing learning outcomes, focussing on students' environmental literacy after one year of learning science by integrating environmental issue.

The result reveal that the online lesson study design is both asynchronous and synchronous. The teachers' teams asynchronously conduct the planning sessions. The implementation, observation and discussion sessions are conducted synchronously using an online meeting platform. Analysis of online learning during the lesson study shows that mind-on activities are performed using an online meeting platform. By contrast, hands-on activities are performed asynchronously with homework assignments. The relationship between teachers’ participation in lesson study and students' environmental literacy acquisition is positive. To improve the students' environmental literacy, online or hybrid lesson study in the future should synergise with environment-based co-curricular activities and science learning using a problem-based approach.

The limitations of this study are linked to the research subjects, who were situated in South Tangerang, an urban area in Indonesia. The outcomes may differ if the teachers and students are situated in rural areas. Additionally, an online lesson study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Indonesia was under lockdown. Consequently, students and teachers must be required to engage in remote learning from their homes using digital devices. Online teaching has caused suboptimal environmental literacy among students (64.55 ± 9.04), especially in terms of knowledge, skills and participation. Therefore, it is imperative to strategize for an enhanced teaching approach towards environmental issues in the classrooms. Teaching methods that actively engage students with their surrounding environment positively affect their environmental knowledge and awareness (Kalyanasundaram et al., 2024). In future lesson plans, educators should create learning activities within the classroom (intra-curricular) and involve family members at home (co-curricular). It is pivotal to incorporate tasks into online teaching that facilitate direct interaction between students and nature to shape their attitudes, behaviours and concern for the environment (Douglas et al., 2024).

This study’s practical implication is that integrating environmental issues with science learning by framing them as crucial problems for students significantly influences students’ environmental literacy. Teachers strive to meet environmental education objectives that encompass knowledge, awareness, attitudes, skills and participation. Furthermore, teachers use problem-based learning to further improve their students' environmental literacy.

This study focuses on an analyses of an online lesson study design for science learning integrated with environmental issues. It examines the direct impact of online lesson study on increasing teacher professionalism and its influence on students' environmental literacy.

Value, also known as co-creation, is recognized as the outcome of collaborative efforts between both parties. However, knowledge is currently limited regarding the motivations and mechanisms driving customers to engage in co-production and value co-creation. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate co-production in enhancing value co-creation. Previous research has predominantly explored the linear effects of commitment and asset specificity on co-production. To expand on this foundation, our study goes a step further by including the potential quadratic effects of commitment and asset specificity on co-production. Although moderate levels of commitment and asset specificity may enhance co-production, higher levels are implied to possibly impede it. Considering that co-production requires collaboration between customers and service employees, this study includes the characteristics of service employees, such as self-monitoring and self-efficacy, identifying their moderating roles in aiding active co-production and ultimately enhancing the value co-creation.

We employed linear, nonlinear and hierarchical moderated regression analysis to test our hypotheses.

Our findings provide evidence for the positive linear effects and negative quadratic effects between commitment, asset specificity and co-production. The inverted-U relationships suggest an existing optimal commitment and asset specificity that maximize co-production. Results also suggest that co-production influences value co-creation and self-efficacy and self-monitoring positively moderates the relationship between co-production and value co-creation.

By applying the core provisions of S-D logic, this study contributes to marketing literature by analyzing the dyadic process of co-production. Dyadic data collection from both customers and service employees provides a comprehensive understanding of the co-production process, allowing academics to recognize service employees’ self-efficacy and self-monitoring that contribute to effective co-production and value co-creation in service processes.

This study aims to explore the influence of extra-workplace factors, specifically work−family interpersonal capitalization, on employee green behavior. Based on the conservation of resources theory, the research sought to understand how resources gained from positive family interactions spill over into the workplace, enhancing green behavior. In addition, the study investigated the mediating role of relational energy and the moderating effects of work green climate and environmental self-accountability, providing a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms involved.

This study used a multiwave field study combined with an experimental study to investigate the impact of work−family interpersonal capitalization on employee green behavior. Data were collected in several phases to capture changes over time and to understand causal relationships. The multiwave design allowed for observing the dynamic interplay between family and work domains, while the experimental component provided controlled conditions to validate the findings. This approach ensured robust and comprehensive analysis, integrating both real-world and experimental data.

The study revealed that work−family interpersonal capitalization significantly enhances employee green behavior. Relational energy emerged as a crucial mediator in this relationship. Furthermore, the study found that both work green climate and environmental self-accountability positively moderated the relationship between relational energy and green behavior. Notably, the interaction of work green climate and environmental self-accountability further strengthened this relationship, ultimately influencing the indirect effect of relational energy on employee green behavior. These findings highlight the complex interplay between personal and organizational factors in promoting sustainable practices at work.

This study provides valuable insights into the spillover effects from family to work, emphasizing the importance of considering “nongreen” factors in understanding employee green behavior. By identifying relational energy as a key mediator and uncovering the moderating roles of work green climate and environmental self-accountability, the research contributes to the broader literature on environmental sustainability and organizational behavior. The findings suggest practical implications for organizations aiming to foster green behavior, highlighting the potential of enhancing family−work interactions and cultivating a supportive green work environment.

Continuum robots offer unique advantages in various specialized environments, particularly in confined or hard-to-reach spaces. Inverse kinematics and real-time shape estimation constitute crucial aspects of closed-loop control for continuum robots, presenting challenging problems. This paper aims to present an inverse kinematics and shape reconstruction method, which relies solely on the knowledge of base and end positions and orientations.

Based on the constant curvature assumption, continuum robots are regarded as spatial curves composed of circular arcs. Using geometric relationships, the mathematical relationships between the arc chords, points on the bisecting plane and the coordinate axes are established. On this basis, the analytical solution of the inverse kinematics of the continuum robots is derived. Using the positions and orientations of the base and end of the continuum robots, the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm is used to solve the positions of the cubic Bezier curves, and a new method of spatial shape reconstruction of continuum robots is proposed.

The inverse kinematics and spatial shape reconstruction simulation of the continuum robot are carried out, and the spatial shape measurement experimental platform for the continuum robot is constructed to compare the measured and reconstructed spatial shapes. The results show that the maximum relative error between the actual shape and the reconstructed shape of the continuum robot is 2.08%, which verifies the inverse kinematics and shape reconstruction model. Additionally, when the bending angle of a single bending section of the continuum robot is less than 135°, the shape reconstruction accuracy is higher.

The proposed inverse kinematics solution method avoids iterative solving, and the shape reconstruction model does not rely on mechanical models. It has the advantages of being simple to solve, highly accurate and fast in computation, making it suitable for real-time control of continuum robots.

Predicting commodity futures trading volumes represents an important matter to policymakers and a wide spectrum of market participants. The purpose of this study is to concentrate on the energy sector and explore the trading volume prediction issue for the thermal coal futures traded in Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange in China with daily data spanning January 2016–December 2020.

The nonlinear autoregressive neural network is adopted for this purpose and prediction performance is examined based upon a variety of settings over algorithms for model estimations, numbers of hidden neurons and delays and ratios for splitting the trading volume series into training, validation and testing phases.

A relatively simple model setting is arrived at that leads to predictions of good accuracy and stabilities and maintains small prediction errors up to the 99.273th quantile of the observed trading volume.

The results could, on one hand, serve as standalone technical trading volume predictions. They could, on the other hand, be combined with different (fundamental) prediction results for forming perspectives of trading trends and carrying out policy analysis.

Illegitimate tasks are pervasive in organizations, presenting a challenge for employees to mitigate their impact. However, despite their significance, there has been limited research on when and how employees can adapt to these tasks successfully. To address this gap, this study aimed to discover the relationship between illegitimate tasks and adaptive performance, drawing upon the job demands-resources theory. Specifically, this study aimed to examine the moderating role of general self-efficacy and the mediating roles of employee problem-focused and emotion-focused coping.

To examine our hypotheses, we conducted a time-lagged survey, comprising 3 waves and involving 313 employees from twenty enterprises situated in Guangzhou and Sichuan, China. Ordinary least squares (OLS) was adopted to examine our hypotheses.

Our results suggested that general self-efficacy played a crucial role in determining how employees would cope with illegitimate tasks and their subsequent adaptive performance when confronted with illegitimate tasks. Notably, employees who possess high levels of general self-efficacy utilize problem-focused coping, improving adaptive performance in handling illegitimate tasks. Conversely, employees who possess low levels of general self-efficacy rely on emotion-focused coping, leading to lower levels of adaptive performance.

This research contributes to the literature on illegitimate tasks by uncovering when and how such tasks can either promote or hinder adaptive performance. These findings offer practical insights into ways to assist employees in managing illegitimate tasks effectively.