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In the past few years, research focusing on misinformation, referred to broadly as fake news, has experienced revived attention. Past studies have focused on explaining the ways in which people correct it online and on social media. However, fewer studies have dealt with the ways in which people are able to identify fake news (i.e. fake news literacy). This study contributes to the latter by theoretically connect people’s general social media use, political knowledge and political epistemic efficacy with individuals’ fake news literacy levels.

A diverse and representative two-wave panel survey in the United States was conducted (June 2019 for Wave 1, October 2019 for Wave 2). We performed cross-sectional, lagged and autoregressive regression analyses to examined how social media us, people’s political knowledge and political epistemic efficacy are related to their fake news literacy.

Results suggest that the more people used social media, were politically knowledgeable and considered they were able to find the truth in politics (i.e. epistemic political efficacy), the more likely they were to discern whether the news is fake. Implications of helping media outlets and policy makers be better positioned to provide the public with corrective action mechanisms in the struggle against fake news are discussed.

The measurement instrument employed in the study relies on subjects’ self-assessment, as opposed to unobtrusive trace (big) digital data, which may not completely capture the nuances of people’s social media news behaviors.

This study sheds light on how the way people understand politics and gain confidence in finding political truth may be key elements when confronting and discerning fake news. With the help of these results, journalists, media outlets and policymakers may be better positioned to provide citizens with efficient, preemptive and corrective action mechanisms in the struggle against misinformation.

Recent literature highlights the importance of literacy education to contest fake news, but little is known about what specific mechanisms would contribute to foster and reinvigorate people’s fake news literacy. This study helps address this gap.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-03-2024-0140

Interventions to develop leadership have attracted the interest of both the professional world and academia. The latter through review papers has highlighted the need to incorporate organizational performance outcomes when evaluating the effectiveness of programs for leadership development, because they have been particularly scarce. Keeping this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of an intervention aimed at direct supervisors, on the basis of social skills and transformational/transactional leadership, in order to improve organizational climate (OC) perception and objective outcomes of organizational performance.

A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was used, with no quasi-control group. Intervention was applied to all direct supervisors (n=8) of a private company in the industrial sector, with national implementation. The intervention covered a period of two months, with a total of eight sessions. The frequency of the intervention was a weekly session of 90 minutes each. The impact was measured in their direct subordinates (n=34). The outcome variables were OC perception and various indicators of organizational performance.

The results showed a statistically significant increase, moderate-to-high magnitude (d_MR=0.38-1.21), in most sub-dimensions of OC. The various organizational performance indicators (e.g. volume of sales, positioning of the company, etc.) also showed improvements.

Results suggest that the authors’ intervention program, based on social skills and leadership, aimed to develop leadership, has an effect on organizational efficacy outcomes, such as OC perception and organizational performance. The implications of this study’s findings for HR managers are that there is a direct relation between improvement in outcomes associated with organizational effectiveness and the training of direct supervisors; this is because the leadership in the levels that deal directly with workers is responsible for carrying out the main tasks of the organization.

The overall objective of this research was to analyze the effectiveness of an intervention aimed at direct supervisors, on the basis of social skills and transformational/transactional leadership, in order to improve OC perception and objective outcomes of organizational performance.

A comprehensive operational framework is proposed to explain young consumers’ (i.e. generations Y and Z) engagement with brands on social media sites (SMSs). This paper aims to synthesize two motivational theories: uses and gratifications (U&G) theory and the technology acceptance model (TAM).

A selective literature review was conducted to examine recent publications related to young consumers’ brand-driven engagement behavior on SMSs in which either TAM or U&G theory was applied. A three-stage method was used: an initial search was followed by vertical and horizontal searches and then a targeted search of scholarly publications. At each stage, the university’s library databases and Google Scholar were searched for relevant, mainly peer-reviewed articles, using appropriate filters and keywords. The articles’ references and the studies that cited those articles were added to the initially identified research pool (vertical search), coupled with publications of a similar nature based on keywords (horizontal search). The final stage, the targeted search, involved identifying and adding specific articles (e.g. literature reviews and integrated models).

After a review of a significant number of U&G and TAM studies, similarities and differences of the two theories were identified, and an integrated operational framework was developed. Based on empirical findings of existing U&G and TAM studies, testable propositions were presented.

The proposed hybrid model and the associated propositions provide a research opportunity to empirically examine how young consumers’ motivational (i.e. motivating and demotivating) drivers, normative influence, perceived value and attitudes (toward brand content and engagement) predict intention or actual brand-related behavior on SMSs.

Much of current research indicates that generations Y and Z (“digital natives”) spend considerably more time on SMSs than any of the older generations (“digital immigrants”). Thus, brands that aim to target this cohort need to develop successful engagement strategies (e.g. gamification and influencer marketing) on current and emerging SMSs. The suggested conceptualization provides guidelines for companies to effectively use such communication strategies to motivate young people to engage with their brands on sites such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

A review of TAM research indicates that it lacks rich motivating/demotivating constructs, and thus borrows from other theories to complement this weakness. An examination of U&G frameworks, particularity Ducoffe (1996)-based models, indicates that these frameworks mainly test engagement with social media advertising but seldom other types of brand-driven engagement on SMSs. In addition, many U&G studies focus less than TAM studies do on outcome variables such as behavioral intentions and behavior. Thus, the authors propose a synthesized U&G and TAM framework that mitigates both theories’ weaknesses and builds on their strengths, enriching the growing research on brand-driven engagement behavior via SMSs.

Suggests that most managers (other than those in marketing) take the view that too much money is spent on marketing. Adumbrates that the accountant may be able to contribute to improved decision making in marketing with regard to expenditure as an investment outlay rather than current expenses. Stresses, herein, that the concern for accounting is with marketing assets and their intangibility. Discusses further assets, valuation and investment and portrays these with the aid of tables and figures. Sums up by saying that a strong case can be made for recognizing many examples of marketing outlay as investments in assets rather than current operating expenses, showing new light on attitudes towards marketing decision‐making and financial reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating relationship between organizational culture, informal learning and work engagement of older workers in a public organizational setting. More specifically, this study aimed to investigate if informal learning is a pivotal component connecting an organizational-level factor (culture) to work engagement, which, in turn, directly influences business performance in the workplace.

After a careful review of the selected and relevant literature, four hypotheses were developed to test the structural relationships between the selected variables.

The data analysis indicated that informal learning mediated the relationship between organizational culture and work engagement for older employees working in a public organizational setting.

The findings from this study provide a solid justification for promoting informal learning in organizations to ensure knowledge transfer between younger and older generations while minimizing knowledge and financial loss for organizations.

In previous research, little emphasis has been placed on the impact of informal learning on work engagement. This study presents a valuable finding about the role of informal learning to facilitate work engagement for older workers.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to identify leaders and trends in branding research studies, undertaken during 2000-2019. Identification was made in the following categories: most popular subjects; most productive countries; most productive institutions; most productive scholars; most productive sources; most cited publications and most cited scholars.

Bibliometric analysis based on data from Scopus and Dimensions.

The majority of branding publications belong to business and management. The interest toward this research field, however, declines mostly in favor of cultural studies, psychology, sociology, etc. The majority of publications on branding are concentrated in the USA, UK and Australia. Griffith University has become a leader in the number of branding publications within 2000-2019. T C Melewar is a leader by the number of branding publications among scholars. Journal of Brand Management has been a leader among sources. Journal of Marketing is a leader by the number of the most cited papers.

The authors analyze the automatically formed results on search query without human meddling.

For the first time, bibliometric analysis was carried out simultaneously upon the two bases – Scopus and Dimensions.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on social network theory to develop a new theoretical model to explain how experience and leadership influence critical network position. Broad analyses of the mediating role of leadership between experience and critical network position calls attention to the need to investigate the direct relationship between leadership and critical network position. Empirical examinations of the roles of leadership and experience within the social network context are lacking. The authors seeks to fill this gap by constructing a new theoretical model and testing it in the knowledge-intensive sector.

The authors made 3,356 observations involving 427 faculty members in business and management departments in Taiwanese universities. To test the model, the authors performed two different regression models using the Baron and Kenny (1986) procedure and the Sobel test.

The results that the authors obtained lead to three conclusions. First, scholars’ experience positively relates to leadership in grouping the followers toward the common goal and to their publications. Second, scholars’ leadership predicts occupying the critical network position, which, in turn, facilitates acquiring more information and resources. Third, experience relates to critical network position through influence on personal leadership.

Although the insights gained from the study are important in theoretical and empirical implications, this study has its limitations. The research examined the professional interaction networks of business management scholars of Taiwanese universities. Although the authors believe that the findings are generalizable to other fields of similar phenomena settings, there are also settings where the generalizability of the study is probably quite limited. Future research could study samples in other fields, such as biomedical research and chemical research, and samples in other knowledge-intensive industries.

The results imply that managers can reap the benefits of their leadership either informal or informal organizations by occupying a critical position to control the flow of resources and information. In other words, the results indicate that leadership can be developed through experience. As well, leadership plays an important mediating role between experience and critical network positions. This may seem to contradict the evidence from research on network concepts and resources control, which primarily draws attention to leadership being a helpful quality for those in critical network positions.

This research extends beyond previous studies that focussed on the value of critical network positions. Furthermore, the paper also examines how the relationship between prior relevant experience and leadership plays a role in academic network settings. To the authors’ knowledge, no studies explore this perspective. Finally, studies that examine the relationship between business management academic networks and different methodology used to measures the network position are few in number, and those that use such longitudinal empirical work are particularly lacking. This study addresses these issues.

In a recent reference to changes brought about by the local government reorganisation of 1974, we criticised some of the names given to the new areas. Some of these name changes have made difficulties for those who follow from afar the doings of local authorities, as well as raising the ire of local people. Local names, however, are not the only casualty. The creation of new and larger governmental organisations rarely, if ever, results in economy and as anticipated, it was not long before the new local authorities were being directed to embrace financial stringency and all that it incurs. One such other casualty has been the loss of so many of the annual reports of local authority departments, very few now arriving at BFJ offices. In every case, the reason has been the same—severe restrictions on spending. Not that this was not necessary in many fields, but in respect of annual reports, we are convinced it was false economy. For so many of the reports, it was our pleasure to review them in the pages of BFJ. A prominent Labour politician was once heard to refer to them as “hard and dry reports for hard and dry officials”. It all depends probably on what you are looking for in them. Statistics there must be but most enforcement officers and public analysts, endeavour to keep these to the minimum, the general impression being that these are “dry”. If you are looking for trends, for comparison of the year under review with preceding years and then for comparing the results reported in one part of the country with another, where the population, eating habits, consumer reactions may be different, the tables of statistics are highly important.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that co-operation is a vital behavioral skill that should be developed in educational systems, particularly business and management programs, because it is an intangible factor that boosts productive output.

The paper explains why co-operation is an important intangible factor for organizations and the larger economy. It recommends the development of educational designs to remediate the pedagogical lack of focus on the cooperative disposition.

Co-operation is contingent on trust – an indispensable factor to engage in distant relations, accept rule of law across nations, and confer in intermediaries the authority to arbitrate unresolved differences between organizations. In other words, without co-operation, people within organizations commit themselves to parochial concerns, inhibiting efforts to combine resources toward a collective goal. The lack of a cooperative attitude is not destiny – it can be forged through careful educational designs and organizational strategy.

There is little empirical data available to measure co-operation in a diverse environment and co-operation is an intangible concept that is difficult to pin to specific organizational habits. The concepts developed here based on broad social science data would do will to be tested in an empirical framework at the micro level.

Low co-operation arises in an environment which does not foster trust. Management might inadvertently reward low organizational capacity by not evaluating co-operation and monitoring narcissism. Recruiters need to adapt recruitment strategies that pinpoint individuals capable of managing the specific co-operation needs of situational organizations, especially in diverse situations. A successful managerial education program will target training that optimizes thoughtful and sustainable co-operation.

Co-operation is a factor of sustainability for development but also for the modern organization. It is both a moral and methodological disposition that fosters collective action positively, while inhibiting in-group interests.

Formal management training to instill a thoughtful sense of co-operation would complement the current emphasis on teamwork and leadership. Without the moral and methodological goal of being co-operative for the greater good, organizations waste human resources and fail to reap benefits from collective productions.