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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the mechanism of how Machiavellian corporate culture (MCC) affects employees’ counterproductive work behaviours.

Through a three-phase grounded study on the data of a single case amounting to over 170,000 words, this qualitative study explores why employees exhibit counterproductive work behaviours.

The results indicated that the implications of the MCC of family businesses in China include the following three dimensions: low trust, control orientation, and status orientation. In this corporate cultural context, employees exhibit counterproductive work behaviours because they perceive low organisational justice, psychological contract violation, and low trust. Among them, psychological contract violation serves as a triggering mechanism due to the organisational context and trust is crucial to employee counterproductive work behaviour.

In this study, the results are derived merely from the observation of and generalisation about one case; more therefore, empirical studies are required.

Numerous family business owners in China exhibit a high level of Machiavellian personality traits, and this personality tends to determine the implications of corporate culture. In order to establish a diverse culture, a heterogeneous top manager team must be developed and a new organisational culture must be established from top down.

This study extends the research scopes of employee personality and behaviours as well as leaders’ personality traits and employee emotions, and proposes a theoretical framework of leaders’ personality-culture-employee behaviours as a contribution to studies on organisational behaviour, theories of corporate social responsibility, and development of corporate culture.

Deepening supply-side structural reform is the main objective of the economic work since the Chinese economy entered a new stage of development. By adopting the fundamental principles and methodologies of Marxist political economy, the authors can provide clarifications on the three basic theoretical issues concerning the supply-side structural reform. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

First, the essential starting point for understanding the supply-side structural reform is the primacy of production, as well as the organic connection between production and consumption in social reproduction, rather than the supply and demand as superficially seen in exchanges. By identifying the right starting point, the authors can avoid alternating between demand and supply management, and between liberalism and interventionism.

Structural problems, which are closely related to the institutional structure of production and the purpose and nature of production, cannot be solely attributed to the imbalance caused by market failures. Chinese economy has suffered prolonged structural contradictions and structural problems.

To decide whether the financial and the real estate sectors are real economy or virtual economy, the key is to examine whether the monetary capital used in financial activities and real estate commodity (capital) go through the capital circulation process of from monetary capital to productive capital and further to commodity capital, and whether the capital gain is generated by the value appreciation of capital or the value transfer and distribution as a result of the transfer of ownership. With its emphasis on developing the real economy, the supply-side structural reform should foster both development of manufacturing, and parts of financial and real estate sectors that are the real economy.

Slaughter has proposed futures in which interior human development matches that of technological development as the best prospect for avoiding catastrophic collapse through overshoot of the Earth's carrying capacity. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of the primary energy resource context in making sense of the prospects for such futures, and to consider how subtle changes to conceptual models for understanding the nature of human development can offer alternate pathways for proceeding in light of the fundamental limits this imposes.

Conceptual models for the relationship between energy and social complexity are reviewed, and proposals for connecting social complexity with interior human development are discussed. Popular models of interior human development are critiqued in light of recent clarifications relating to Integral Theory; and specific reconceptualisations are proposed.

Technological and interior human development are intimately linked. There are important interdependencies between energy and social complexity that must be taken into account in establishing expectations for the way that these realms might evolve together. This presents significant challenges for realising on a society‐wide scale development of the nature commonly associated with Integral Theory. However, alternative ways of conceptualising such development offer fresh opportunities for confronting the spectre of environmental and social breakdown.

The implications of models relating social complexity and resource context are extended to questions of human interior development; the unit of development is extended from the individual in relative isolation to the organism‐in‐environment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how empowering consumers by means of co-designing activities influences both positive and negative consumer engagement with new service innovations.

Two experimental studies tested the proposed hypotheses. Participants were asked to imagine co-designing a hypothetical innovation, and then respond to scales that measured intervening variables. The first study measured participants’ valuation of the innovation as well as the intention to recommend it. The second study partially replicated the first one but measured participants’ perceived severity after a scenario where the innovation failed to deliver its promised performance.

Empowerment triggered a higher sense of engagement through the mediating effects of sense of power and psychological ownership. Subsequently, this effect not only drove more positive evaluations of the innovation but also exacerbated negative evaluations if the service innovation was not delivered successfully.

The current study highlights the importance of adopting a psychological perspective toward engagement and shows a balanced view of empowerment in the context of new service innovations.

With the advancements of Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years, smart objects (SOs) have been widely applied in the lives of consumers to fulfill a variety of functions. This research aims to explore the new interaction experience between consumers and a smart speaker that can create the effect of customer engagement by enhancing the gendered voice and product smartness.

This study conducted a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subject experiment to validate the research model and the hypotheses.

The results indicate that a high level of interaction experience between the users and smart speaker devices increases customer engagement. Smart speaker devices that present female voices have a high product smartness, whereas high levels of interaction experience are more effective in customer engagement. Furthermore, the results also show a moderate effect of gendered voice and product smartness between the interaction experience levels and customer engagement.

This study contributes to the assemblage theory and the interaction experience levels between users and smart speaker devices in IoT. Based on the results, suggestions on enhancing the smartness ability and application services of new smart speaker devices are proposed. The findings of this study can promote a more continuous interaction between users and smart speakers.

Tests the prediction that there will be sex differences in how middle managers perceive promotion requirements, and that such differences will be influenced by societal expectations of gender appropriateness, in which women are expected to display communal (nurturing, interpersonally sensitive) and men agentic (independent, assertive and ambitious) qualities and behaviour. Results from 351 male and 156 female managers indicated that sex does not strongly influence the belief that every manager receives the same opportunities for advancement. However, there were sex differences in the reasons given for unequal career advancement, personal career progress, achievement of the last promotion received, and why a future promotion may not occur. Additionally, although male and female managers have similar aspirations to obtain a senior management position, women are less likely to expect a promotion. The results partially support the predictions of social‐role theory.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to determine the impact of interpersonal identification on sales performance; second, to uncover whether or not that relationship changes direction based on levels organizational prestige; and third, to test the antecedent of managerial support on salesperson interpersonal identification. Ultimately, the authors want to provide sales managers with tangible ways to nurture the self-concept of their sales force while optimizing sales performance.

The authors test the hypotheses using a data set of 196 B2C retail salespeople in the shoe industry. Respondents answered a printed questionnaire, which was analyzed using multiple linear regression and response surface analysis.

The authors find that managerial support does positively influence interpersonal identification among salespeople which, in turn, increases sales performance. However, the relationship is curvilinear, becoming negative when over-identification occurs. This inverted U-shaped relationship is moderated by organizational prestige such that the negative influence is overcome by employees who have pride and confidence in their organization.

Managers should balance the level of support that they provide their employees. While this mentorship generally leads to positive results, too much can lead to over-identification, and consequently reduce sales performance. However, this negative effect can be overcome if the salesperson perceives his organization as prestigious. Therefore, a mix of guidance and autonomy may foster the strongest self-concept among the sales team and generate the most positive outcomes. Further, managers should monitor their employees’ perceptions of the company, communicating its strong reputation internally to generate organizational prestige.

The authors extend social identity theory in a sales context to provide a better understanding of how self-concept can be altered – for better or worse – by the sales manager. The authors also show the importance of communicating your company’s social value to employees. While over-identification in the manager–employee dyad can create a “tipping point” where sales performance begins to decrease, organizational prestige may be able to overcome this effect, demonstrating the power of prestige. Together, the authors present the importance of contextual and external influences on individual sales performance.

In theorizing the dynamics of social processes, dialectical thinking informs Marx's historical materialist inquiries and both – dialectics and historical materialist principles – inform his political–economic analysis. In conceptualizing empirical observations during this work, Marx (1973b, p. 101) assumes that the “concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” and that “With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too” (Marx, 1992, p. 28). This methodological tack strives for the flexibility needed for analyzing patterns in long-term social development (the structure of history) as well as the logic of specific systems in their totality and flux (the history of structures).

This paper documents the EU integration process using the uneven and combined development framework. Because capitalist social relations are territorially defined and politically built, unevenness between countries is not unconnected with that within countries and both involve antagonism between capital and labor. This is manifest in the ‘state form’ of the EU and its anti-democratic tendencies: public institutions at the community level play a major role in reinforcing unevenness in favour of leading countries, in both the productive and financial spheres.