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This study examines the growing trend of age-related workplace violence (WPV), focusing on its employee and organizational impacts, while highlighting the role of HR practices in addressing generational tensions. It aims to raise awareness of the issue and provide practical recommendations for fostering a safer, more inclusive work environment.

Through a review of recent research and government reports, the study presents a conceptual framework surrounding the growing presence of older workers in the United States, examining how this shift amplifies risks of generational tensions contributing to WPV.

Findings show that age intimidation and WPV are significant issues. HR interventions such as training, team building, diversity awareness, and conflict management can help address violence and build a more resilient and cohesive workforce.

More research and a deeper examination of WPV is warranted. Research on human resource practices could assess their long-term impact on reducing WPV. Further exploration of generational dynamics and their role in workplace conflicts could provide valuable insights.

Organizations can better support employees coping with WPV by taking a proactive approach, ensuring strong leadership, and giving employees a safe place to voice their concerns.

Intimidation is not only present in our society but also manifest as a form of workplace violence. As a society, we must find ways to not only live together but also work together more harmoniously.

The study adds to our understanding of age intimidation, provides a deeper examination of the underlying dynamics of WPV, and outlines the role of HR in addressing such issues.

Digital political advertising has been essentially unregulated for a long time. More recently, a number of notable scandals, such as the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica affair and the external meddling in Brexit and the 2016 US elections, have compelled the European Union to take regulatory action. After discussing the growing role of political advertising for political parties and candidates and the major challenges this implies in terms of electoral integrity, this chapter explores the genesis, significance as well as the limitations of the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) Regulation. Introduced in 2024, the TTPA establishes a common regulatory framework across EU Member States ensuring minimum transparency requirements that digital platforms must comply with, including disclosure about the origins, parameters and funders of political advertisements directed to European citizens. While emphasising the important step forward of this Regulation for the countering of information manipulation and foreign interference in elections and the relevant shift in the EU relationships with platform services, we point to a number of problems that remain unaddressed, including the manipulative and deceptive use of political content, hate speech, misinformation and political polarisation.

To maximize the benefits of intercultural mentoring relationships, which are increasing in today’s diverse higher education environment, the current article conceptualizes the connection between intercultural mentoring and cultural competence among mentors and mentees as a learning process.

The conceptual paper discusses the nuanced aspects of intercultural mentoring. Ultimately, the current article presents a framework for a bidirectional relationship between intercultural mentoring and cultural competence through experiential learning theory and intergroup contact theory, resulting in implications for practitioners and actionable research directions.

The article highlights the interplay and interdependence of cultural competence and intercultural mentoring through experiential learning and intergroup contact theory. Cultural competence influences the quality of intercultural mentoring relationships. Conversely, intercultural mentoring relationships can develop cultural competence in mentors and mentees through experiential learning, producing positive intergroup contact behaviors. Findings suggest the need for active learning and unlearning among mentors and mentees in intercultural mentoring relationships to maximize developmental outcomes (e.g. cultural competence).

The proposed framework emphasizes that (1) the possession of cultural competence is a critical success factor for intercultural mentoring relationships, (2) the development of cultural competence is an outcome of successful intercultural mentoring relationships, and (3) intercultural mentoring relationships should be regarded as experiential learning platforms that can produce positive intercultural traits such as cultural competence.

This study investigated the prevalence of food color utilization in 20,382 pre-packaged foods available for sale in Hong Kong in 2019.

Ingredient lists from the 2019 cross-sectional FoodSwitch Hong Kong database were screened to identify the presence of 35 common food colors, based on their name or respective E-number. Descriptive statistics were computed for the prevalence (%) and the number of food colors (total, natural and synthetic) used.

Food colors were found in 19.8% of the audited sample. Natural variants were more prevalent than synthetic ones (17.2 vs 3.9%). The majority (89.5%) of colored foods used one to two types, though some included more than four types of food colors. Notably, E160 (carotenoids) appeared most frequently (8.4% of all foods; 42.4% of colored foods), followed by E150 (caramel; 7.4 and 37.4%, respectively) and E102 (tartrazine; 2.1 and 10.8%, respectively). Regional disparities were observed, with Asian products more likely to incorporate at least one food color.

This audit suggests that one in five pre-packaged foods in Hong Kong contains food colors, emphasizing the need for updated risk assessments due to their widespread use in the food supply.

Challenges of conducting site visit activities, a vital component of architecture learning during the recent pandemic have proved our unreadiness in facing the digital future. The lack of understanding of learning technology has affected the education experience. Thus, there is a need to investigate immersive learning technology such as immersive virtual reality (IVR) to replace students’ concrete experience in the current learning setting. This study aims to answer: (1) What is the influence of IVR in experiential learning (EL) in enhancing the personal spatial experience? (2) Does IVR in EL influence students' approach to learning during the architecture design process?

The research was conducted as an action research design approach. Action research was employed in the first-year architecture design studio by the lecturer as a practitioner-researcher. The personal spatial experience survey was performed in the earlier phase to identify the students’ prior spatial experience. Architectural Spatial Experience Simulation (ASES) a learning tool was implemented and assessed with Architecture Design Learning Assessment (ADLA) rubric, which was developed to evaluate EL and student’s approach to learning during the architecture design learning process.

The outcomes revealed that ASES as a learning tool in EL could improve the participants’ spatial experience, particularly those with minimal prior personal spatial experience. ASES was recognized to enhance the participants’ EL experience and encourage changes in student’s approach to learning from surface to deep learning.

This research benefits the architecture design learning process by offering a learning tool and a framework to resolve challenges in performing site visit activities and digital learning. It also contributes by expanding the EL theory and students’ approach to learning knowledge in the architecture education field.

This paper aims to further the understanding of the motivation to learn (ML) among an organisation’s older cohort of employees. It is proposed that age diversity climate (ADC) will positively impact ML by improving employees’ subjective age (SA) perception. Such a climate will indicate that the organisational climate is fair and inclusive regardless of the employee’s age.

Salaried Indian workers were administered a questionnaire on SA, ML and ADC.

ADC was positively related to ML, with SA acting as a mediator. The relationship is stronger for employees with higher chronological age (C.Age).

Policymakers and managers can draw from the findings and develop HR programs aimed at managing an age-diverse workforce and can incorporate measures that enhance the employability of the chronologically ageing but subjectively younger cohort to prevent premature departure from the labour market.

The present article contributes to the literature on work and ageing by investigating the subjective relationship of workers to their age. The findings also focus on successful ageing, thus contributing to the life span developmental theories.

The paper investigates factors that contribute to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) surviving major exogenous shocks. Global crises such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have increasingly heightened scholarly interest in post-crises responses. However, studies that compare the relative responses to external shocks and the outcomes for SMEs operating in different institutional settings are limited. We examine the relative degrees of success European and African SMEs experienced in avoiding the worst consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We use the resource dependency theory (RDT) with variants of institutional theory since the RDT has been shown in practice to have greater explanatory power when used in this way. We augment our framework with a feminist theory dimension. To test our hypotheses, we apply regression analyses using cross-sectional data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES), which include responses from private enterprises in 26 European and eight African countries. We construct our data by combining the COVID-19 follow-up surveys with relevant firm-specific characteristics from the WBES conducted in 2020–2021 using firm-specific unique IDs. After removing the firms with missing observations, the sample number of SMEs is 15,178.

Our empirical findings support the theoretically posited positive effects of innovativeness, institutional connectedness and governance capability on SMEs’ survival in the face of external shocks. Further, we confirm the importance of firm-specific characteristics (financial status, size and age) for SMEs’ survival. Female-owned SMEs are more likely to suffer during COVID-19, especially in Africa. The results are more nuanced when we consider industry specificity and heterogeneity of government support.

Our article helps answer the theoretical (and policy-relevant) question of whether SMEs that are resilient to major exogenous shocks may share certain characteristics despite operating in different institutional environments. If that is so, then it may be that lessons from one continent may have at least some relevance for the other. Our approach’s broad value lies in its capacity to test the degree to which established bodies of theory developed in the Northern Hemisphere may be deployed in Africa, well beyond the contexts which provided their initial empirical basis. This paper also contributes to the literature on the effect of environmental-change shocks on entrepreneurship performance outcomes.

Investment decisions hold immense significance for investors and eventually affect their portfolio performance. Investors are advised to weigh the costs and benefits associated with every decision in order to make rational investment decisions. However, behavioral finance research reveals that investors' choices often stem from a blend of economic, psychological and sociological factors, leading to irrationality. Moreover, environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors, aligned with behavioral finance hypotheses, also sway opinions and stock prices. Hence, this study aims to identify how individual equity investors prioritize key determinants of investment decisions in the Indian stock market.

The current research gathered data from 391 individual equity investors through a structured questionnaire. Thereafter, a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) was used to meet the purpose of the research.

Information availability, representative heuristics belonging to psychological factors and macroeconomic indicators falling under economic factors were discovered to be the three most prioritized criteria, whereas environmental issues within the realm of ESG factors, recommendations of brokers or investment consultants of sociological factors, and social issues belonging to ESG factors were found to be the least prioritized criteria, respectively.

Only active and experienced individual equity investors were surveyed in this study. Furthermore, with a sample size of 391 participants, the study was confined to individual equity investors in one nation, India.

This research has implications for individual investors, institutional investors, market regulators, corporations, financial advisors, portfolio managers, policymakers and society as a whole.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, no real attempt has been made to comprehend how active and experienced individual investors prioritize critical determinants of investment decisions by taking economic, psychological, sociological and ESG factors collectively under consideration.

This study aims to investigate the influence of supervisor knowledge sharing on the task performance and the overall evaluation of employees in the context of supervisor-subordinate relationships, a prevalent yet underexplored mode of knowledge transfer.

Drawing on the social exchange perspective, we propose a framework integrating supervisors’ self-sacrificial leadership and employees’ supervisor-directed organizational citizenship behavior (OCB-S) as critical drivers of efficient knowledge transfer. By bridging micro- and macro-level organizational behavior, this study addresses a key research gap and provides a holistic understanding of factors that enhance knowledge transfer within organizations. To empirically test the hypotheses proposed in our study, we employed the PROCESS macro Model 7 to validate the moderated mediation model and conducted bootstrapping analyses to confirm the statistical significance of the predicted relationships.

This study offers insights into the micro-processes underlying interpersonal knowledge transfers within supervisor-subordinate relationships. It highlights the significance of self-sacrificial leadership and OCB-S in facilitating effective knowledge sharing, ultimately influencing the task performance and the overall evaluation of employees.

This study contributes to the existing literature on knowledge management by exploring the understudied area of knowledge sharing within supervisor-subordinate relationships. It provides a framework that integrates leadership and OCB as key factors influencing knowledge transfer efficiency. The findings offer practical implications for organizations seeking to optimize knowledge management practices, leadership development and performance appraisal processes.

Numerous attempts at installing Six Sigma (SS) have faced challenges and fallen short of the desired success. Thus, it becomes vital to identify the critical factors and characteristics that play a pivotal role in achieving successful adoption. Research has highlighted that a considerable number of corporate Six Sigma initiatives, around 60%, fail primarily due to the improper incorporation of essential elements and flawed assumptions.

To validate the influence of CSFs on Six Sigma accomplishment, the study employed a research design combining exploratory and mixed-methods approaches. The analysis focused on 260 completed questionnaires, and statistical methods including SEM, EFA, and CFA were utilized for data analysis.

The study acknowledged four essential components of CSFs that are imperative for sustaining the success of Six Sigma (SS): (1) Competence of Belt System employees; (2) Project management skills; (3) Organizational economic capability; and (4) Leadership commitment and engagement. These factors were identified as significant contributors to the maintenance of Six Sigma’s success.

The practical implications of this research imply that institutions, practitioners, and researchers can utilize the four identified factors to foster the sustainable deployment of SS initiatives. By incorporating these factors, organizations can enhance the effectiveness and longevity of their Six Sigma practices.

The investigation’s originality lies in its contribution to assessing critical success factors in Six Sigma deployment within the European automobile industry, utilizing a mixed-methods research design supplemented by descriptive statistics.