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The purpose of this study is to identify and explain the role of individuals’ awareness and motivation in facilitating knowledge sharing (KS) in the real world of practice, as well as to establish areas of convergence between theory and practice that can be of use to both academics and practitioners involved in knowledge intensive organisations.

This study used Grounded Theory (GT) as an inductive methodology to collect, analyse and interpret data from multiple case-studies. 44 participants from Chinese software organisations were selected on the basis of their role in SW design and development and were interviewed using a semi-structured interview script. The data analysis followed a Straussian approach to coding, which consists of open coding, axial coding and selective coding. The analysis focused on the impact of individuals’ awareness and motivation to share knowledge.

The findings of this research show that the motivation for KS – a time consuming and demanding activity – is indeed related to awareness by managers and developers of the benefits of KS in their professional practice. Practitioners shared their experiences and tacit knowledge with others, partly because it was required by their companies, but also because they have a sound awareness of the need to share knowledge both inside and outside their organisations.

As a typical social science inductive study, this research is bounded by the context in which the theory proposed emerged from. Further research should be conducted into a richer variety of organisational and national contexts, as suggested by good theoretical sampling practice, which could provide further insights or contrasts.

Despite a number of theoretical propositions found in the literature, there is a clear lack of implementation strategies and models that explain the role of awareness and motivation in facilitating KS in the world of practice. This issue of applicability of theoretical propositions is now recognised as one of the fundamental key issues in KS. This study provides new and practice grounded insights in this area and is of interest to both practitioners and theoreticians as it explains and bridges the individuals’ awareness and motivation for tacit KS.

For decades organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has been of interest to scholars and practitioners alike, generating a significant amount of research exploring the concept of what citizenship behavior is, and its antecedents, correlates, and consequences. While these behaviors have been and will continue to be valuable, there are changes in the workplace that have the potential to alter what types of OCBs will remain important for organizations in the future, as well as what types of opportunities for OCB exist for employees. In this chapter we consider the influence of 10 workplace trends related to human resource management that have the potential to influence both what types of citizenship behaviors employees engage in and how often they may engage in them. We build on these 10 trends that others have identified as having the potential to shape the workplace of the future, which include labor shortages, globalization, immigration, knowledge-based workers, increase use of technology, gig work, diversity, changing work values, the skills gap, and employer brands. Based on these 10 trends, we develop propositions about how each trend may impact OCB. We consider not only how these trends will influence the types of citizenship and opportunities for citizenship that employees can engage in, but also how they may shape the experiences of others related to OCB, including organizations and managers.

The current research studies are inconclusive about the positive or negative effects of group faultlines, especially in the Chinese context. To address this issue, this study aims to adopt an interactive perspective to explore the group interaction process. Specifically, this study proposes a new construct “interactive faultlines” to integrate overall faultlines and separate faultlines, and based on categorization-elaboration model (CEM), develops an integrated moderated mediation model to examine when and how interactive faultlines facilitate or inhibit group creativity.

This study tests the model with the samples of 405 employees from 95 groups in China, carrying out confirmatory factor analysis, regression analysis and process.

This study finds that the indirect effect of informational faultlines on group creativity through information elaboration is positive when social faultlines are low, but negative when social faultlines are high.

This research provides some practical implications on how to manage group compositions and coordinate group interaction process to make full use of the potential benefits of diverse information and avoid the possible detriment from social categorization.

This study adopts an interactive perspective to consider informational faultlines and social faultlines simultaneously, and constructs a focal concept “interactive faultlines.” Based on CEM, it also offers a fine-grained picture of the double-edged relationship between informational faultlines and group creativity by identifying social faultlines as a moderator and information elaboration as a mediator, which advances knowledge about the linkages between interactive faultlines and group creativity. Particularly, this study is rooted in the Chinese context and brings in indigenous attributes derived from an analysis of Eastern cultures to elucidate the particular effect of informal social connections.

Proactive career behavior (PCB) is an effective form of career self-management that has positive impacts on individual career development and career success, and therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the driving factors of PCB.

Drawing on the interactionist perspective and situational strength theory, this study examined the independent and joint effects of role commitment and pay-for-performance (PFP) on employees' PCB based on data collected from 298 Chinese private enterprise employees at two time points.

The authors found that occupational role commitment (ORC), parental role commitment (PRC) and PFP were positively related to PCB. Furthermore, PFP moderated the relationship between ORC/PRC and PCB, such that the two relationships were stronger when PFP was low.

Drawing on the interactionist perspective, the authors contribute to the literature on PCB by revealing novel antecedents of PCB: ORC, PRC and PFP. The authors also contribute to the situational strength theory by examining how role commitment and PFP may interact to impact employees' PCB. Finally, the authors are among the first to consider the effects of role commitment on individual career behaviors, thus extending the nomological network of role commitment.

The demand for long-term home care services has been increasing in Taiwan due to the significant growth of the older population. In order to understand the crucial roles that language and communication play in providing better long-term home care services in Taiwan, this study aims to adopt a gerontological sociolinguistic perspective to investigate how professional care workers communicate with older people in this context.

Interviews were conducted with 58 long-term home care workers to identify their communication accommodation strategies for older people, considering their health conditions (dementia), personalities (grumpiness), living status (loneliness) and general principles of long-term home care communication.

The study's findings provide practical insights for long-term home care workers to enhance their communication skills while interacting with older people.

The results could contribute to improving the quality of care services provided to older people and address their specific communication needs.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to identify contextually specific communication accommodations to older people in existing literature of gerontological sociolinguistics that addresses language, communication and older age. The salience of the findings in this study can be further enhanced if they were applied in the development of training programs for future Taiwanese long-term home care workers.

To improve the apparel e-customized system and meet consumers’ personalized requirement in the e-customization, the purpose of this paper is to develop an e-customized co-design system on garment design (ECS-GD) that enables users to co-design garment and communicate with stakeholders.

The e-customized co-design system mainly consists of function and modular structure, communication and evaluation modular. Based on the evolutionary algorithm and fuzzy theory, the e-customized system model is proposed with a presentation of garment interface. Based on the parameters of skirts, technical sketches, fabrics, color, patterns, comments and scores, the decision is made by consumers.

For the system to be effective, the system was conducted by multi-individuals co-work (consumers, designers, manufacturers and experts). The data flow was congruent to the design knowledge. The expert evaluation and communication were involved in the proposed system.

The limitation of this study is that the system is not tested in experiments. The model, main function and data flow are proposed in this study, which is important in the e-customized co-design system development.

Compared to the e-shopping and garment recommendation, the proposed ECS-GD is a good approach to improve the existing e-customized system and a well solution to help consumers with design knowledge recommending, professional suggestions and evaluations. Besides, the sketches and knowledge recommendation are provided to consumers which is a learning process.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and explain the role of individual learning and development in acquiring tacit knowledge in the context of the inexorable and intense continuous change (technological and otherwise) that characterizes our society today, and also to investigate the software (SW) sector, which is at the core of contemporary continuous change and is a paradigm of effective and intrinsic knowledge sharing (KS). This makes the SW sector unique and different from others where KS is so hard to implement.

The study employed an inductive qualitative approach based on a multi-case study approach, composed of three successful SW companies in China. These companies are representative of the fabric of the sector, namely a small- and medium-sized enterprise, a large private company and a large state-owned enterprise. The fieldwork included 44 participants who were interviewed using a semi-structured script. The interview data were coded and interpreted following the Straussian grounded theory pattern of open coding, axial coding and selective coding. The process of interviewing was stopped when theoretical saturation was achieved after a careful process of theoretical sampling.

The findings of this research suggest that individual learning and development are deemed to be the fundamental feature for professional success and survival in the continuously changing environment of the SW industry today. However, individual learning was described by the participants as much more than a mere individual process. It involves a collective and participatory effort within the organization and the sector as a whole, and a KS process that transcends organizational, cultural and national borders. Individuals in particular are mostly motivated by the pressing need to face and adapt to the dynamic and changeable environments of today’s digital society that is led by the sector. Software practitioners are continuously in need of learning, refreshing and accumulating tacit knowledge, partly because it is required by their companies, but also due to a sound awareness of continuous technical and technological changes that seem only to increase with the advances of information technology. This led to a clear theoretical understanding that the continuous change that faces the sector has led to individual acquisition of culture and somatic knowledge that in turn lay the foundation for not only the awareness of the need for continuous individual professional development but also for the creation of habitus related to KS and continuous learning.

The study reported in this paper shows that there is a theoretical link between the existence of conducive organizational and sector-wide somatic and cultural knowledge, and the success of KS practices that lead to individual learning and development. Therefore, the theory proposed suggests that somatic and cultural knowledge are crucial drivers for the creation of habitus of individual tacit knowledge acquisition. The paper further proposes a habitus-driven individual development (HDID) Theoretical Model that can be of use to both academics and practitioners interested in fostering and developing processes of KS and individual development in knowledge-intensive organizations.

Laser cleaning, as a new type of cleaning technology, has the advantages of environment-friendliness, better selectivity, better controllability and higher efficiency compared to traditional chemical cleaning or grinding. This paper aims to use ultra-fast surface laser cleaning equipment built in laboratory to study the influence of different energy density (7.6, 11.5 and 15.3 J/cm²) on corrosion resistance of the aluminum alloy A7N01P-T4, a high-speed train body material.

SEM, white light interferometer, EDS and XPS were used to analyze the surface morphology, roughness, element content and oxide layer composition of aluminum alloy before and after cleaning. The corrosion resistance was studied by electrochemical experiments and exfoliation corrosion experiments.

The results showed that new oxide scale was formed on the surface after laser cleaning. The changes of surface roughness and chemical composition of oxide scale made a significant influence on corrosion behaviors. Better corrosion resistance was obtained with the energy density increased, and at the energy density of 11.5 J/cm², aluminum alloy exhibited the best corrosion resistance.

The paper only studies specific aluminum alloys and is not universal. Laser cleaning equipment is set up for the laboratory and has not yet been put into industrial production.

This paper indicated that ultra-fast laser processing was a new direction for the development of industrial equipment surface cleaning and carried out ultra-fast laser of aluminum alloy surface cleaning had certain research significance for its corrosion resistance.

Compared with the conventional cleaning methods such as air abrasives grinding or chemical cleaning, laser cleaning has advantages of environment-friendliness, better selectivity, better controllability and higher efficiency. Laser cleaning can not only protect the environment, but also improve cleaning efficiency.

Changes in the surface of aluminum alloys after ultra-fast surface laser treatment were found, and the mechanism of changes in aluminum alloy corrosion properties was clarified.

Integrating transaction costs economics and task-technology fit theory, this study distinguishes two categories of social media–enabled interactions, namely task-related interactions and tie-related interactions, and explores the match between these two and firms' use of contracts in achieving safeguarding and coordinating purposes in interfirm governance.

Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, this study collaborated with a professional market research firm and collected responses from Chinese manufacturing firms in a survey. In Study 2, this study designed a scenario-based experiment and collected 239 participants from the Credamo platform.

This study categorized social media–enabled interactions into task-related interactions and tie-related interactions and conducted two studies to reveal that the safeguarding purpose of contract specificity is amplified by tie-related interactions, whereas the coordinating purpose of contract specificity is strengthened by task-related interactions.

This study assumes that firms permit and encourage the use of social media. However, some firms might prohibit the use of social media due to risk issues, or their partners may be prohibited from using social media.

Given that social media–enabled interactions have joint effects with contracts in achieving safeguarding and coordinating purposes, a firm's employees should match their goals with an appropriate type of social media–enabled interactions.

This study enriches the interfirm governance literature by uncovering the roles of these two types of interactions in matching contract specificity to achieve safeguarding and coordinating purposes, which provides actionable insights for managers in governing interfirm relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to promote the corrosion resistance of the 5083-111H aluminum alloy by laser cleaning.

Laser with 2 ns pulse width was adopted in this project and the corrosion resistance of cleaned samples was tested by copper-accelerated salt spray (CASS). The surface morphology, elemental composition and distribution were then characterized by SEM. Moreover, surface morphology, elemental composition and distribution were also tested.

Results suggested a higher corrosion resistance was successfully obtained by laser cleaning. Compared with samples cleaned by 2000 grit sandpaper, mechanical cleaning resulted in a 53% larger height difference between the peak and valley. The content of the oxygen is 8.85% on the surface cleaned mechanically and the distribution is dependent on the distribution of aluminum whereas that of the laser cleaning sample is 24.41% and the distribution existed even in the Al-poor area.

In this project, the 2-ns laser cleaning was proved to have the capability to remove the oxide layer on the aluminum alloy surface while retaining an excellent corrosion resistance and smooth surface. Meanwhile, a thorough elemental distribution and smaller grain size lead to a smaller difference in elemental concentration. This retards the diffusion of oxygen into the substrate and hence increases the corrosion resistance of the surface.