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Turnover intention is a critical predictor of an employee’s turnover behaviour. A high level of turnover rate significantly affects the productivity and morale of an enterprise. Previous research has indicated that job satisfaction plays a critical role in influencing an employee's turnover intention, but the underlying factors related to job satisfaction remain under-explored, which impedes the development of effective strategies for reducing turnover intention. In addition, little research examined job satisfaction and turnover intention in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically in the Chinese construction industry. This study aims to investigate the impact of job satisfaction on turnover intention among professionals in the construction industry.

A questionnaire survey was employed to collect viewpoints from 449 professionals in the Chinese construction industry, followed by descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and structural equation modelling analysis to derive results.

The findings indicate that professionals in the industry generally have a slightly high level of job satisfaction while a slightly low level of turnover intention in the special period of the pandemic outbreak. Leadership and management, training and career development and interpersonal relationships are critical underlying factors leading to their turnover intention. Although demographic factors have no moderating effect between job satisfaction and turnover intention, among them, age, marital status and years of working experience have strongly positive relationships with job satisfaction while significantly negative relationships with turnover intention.

The findings provide valuable insights to fully understand the critical factors leading to turnover intention from the perspective of job satisfaction, which is helpful in developing effective measures to address the turnover problems for enterprises in the Chinese construction industry and those industries with similar characteristics in other regions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how book group recommendations can be used as a meaningful way to suggest suitable books to users, given the increasing number of individuals engaging in sharing and discussing books on the web.

The authors propose reviews fine-grained classification (CFGC) and its related models such as CFGC1 for book group recommendation. These models can categorize reviews successively by function and role. Constructing the BERT-BiLSTM model to classify the reviews by function. The frequency characteristics of the reviews are mined by word frequency analysis, and the relationship between reviews and total book score is mined by correlation analysis. Then, the reviews are classified into three roles: celebrity, general and passerby. Finally, the authors can form user groups, mine group features and combine group features with book fine-grained ratings to make book group recommendations.

Overall, the best recommendations are made by Synopsis comments, with the accuracy, recall, F-value and Hellinger distance of 52.9%, 60.0%, 56.3% and 0.163, respectively. The F1 index of the recommendations based on the author and the writing comments is improved by 2.5% and 0.4%, respectively, compared to the Synopsis comments.

Previous studies on book recommendation often recommend relevant books for users by mining the similarity between books, so the set of book recommendations recommended to users, especially to groups, always focuses on the few types. The proposed method can effectively ensure the diversity of recommendations by mining users’ tendency to different review attributes of books and recommending books for the groups. In addition, this study also investigates which types of reviews should be used to make book recommendations when targeting groups with specific tendencies.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of product innovation novelty on the relationship between customer involvement and new product development (NPD) cost performance.

The authors use organizational information processing theory and adopt hierarchical regression and slope difference test to assess the relationships between constructs and test the hypotheses.

The authors evaluate the concept of product innovation novelty from the perspectives of suppliers and customers and infer that these two types of product innovation novelty exert a moderate effect on the relationship between customer involvement and NPD cost performance. First, product innovation novelty for customers strengthens the positive effects of customer involvement on the NPD cost performance. Second, product innovation novelty for suppliers weakens the positive impact of customer involvement on the NPD cost performance. The authors also find that the interaction between product innovation novelty for suppliers and product innovation novelty for customers weakens the positive impact of customer involvement on NPD cost performance.

The findings of this study explain the reasons for the controversies surrounding the impact of customer involvement on cost performance and discuss the role of product innovation novelty in customer involvement in NPD process. The results of this study can be used to establish whether customer involvement improves or weakens NPD cost performance and identify the role of product innovation novelty in NPD. The conclusions derived from this study can provide theoretical knowledge and managerial insights for both academicians and corporate professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the wear resistance behavior of the striated tool for cross wedge rolling (CWR).

A mechanical-thermal coupled, temperature-dependent FE wear model was developed to explore the wear behaviors for striated CWR tools. To verify the proposed FE model, a newly developed measuring device was also developed to measure wear on the tool ridge. To find the impact order of the parameters of striate unit, orthogonal experiment was carried out.

The experimental and numerical results both indicate that the wear resistance of striated tool is better than that of smooth tool. Minimum tool ridge wear can be achieved by choosing proper tool contact temperature with striated units on crossed ridge. The order of the striation geometrical factors’ impact on ridge wear is striation width > striation interval > striation length.

Because of the specified tool, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.

It is shown that the wear resistance of striated CWR tool is better than that of smooth tool. The information may help CWR manufactures to design and produce tools with less wear.

This paper aims to determine whether relationship quality should be measured as a disaggregated or as a composite construct, and investigate the causal relationship between relationship quality and customer involvement. The authors also explore the role of customer involvement in relationship quality-performance linkage in B2B settings.

This study is based on 214 Chinese manufacturers and uses the structural equation model to examine this conceptual model and hypotheses.

As a reflective second-order construct, relationship quality not only has positive effects on performance but also positively affects customer involvement. More importantly, customer involvement partially mediates the relationship between relationship quality and performance.

This study only focuses on customer relationship, but neglects the supplier relationship.

When assessing the relationship quality with customers, suppliers must consider trust, commitment and investment dimensions simultaneously. In addition, to increase performance, suppliers must involve customers who are trusted and invested in training and logistics facility and then cooperate with them in new product design.

These findings contribute to this understanding on the relationship quality in B2B settings and provide theoretical contributions and managerial insights for both academics and practitioners.

From the dedication–constraint perspective, this study aims to complement ongoing discussions on the effects of switching costs on performance and explain the role of customer involvement and relationship quality in the relationship between switching costs and performance.

After collecting data from Chinese manufacturing firms, the authors employed structural equation modeling to test their theoretical model incorporating switching costs, new product development performance, relationship quality and customer involvement.

The findings show that switching costs negatively affect three dimensions of new product development performance covering new product development market performance, new product development speed, new product development cost. More importantly, relationship quality positively moderates the relationship between switching costs and new product development performance, while customer involvement takes positive moderation effects.

These conclusions contribute to the knowledge of switching costs and supplier–customer relationship, and provide theoretical contributions and managerial insights for both academics and practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the feature of soot in diesel engine oil and provide a method to stably disperse these soots using effect additives which is benefical for lubricants to pass related engine tests.

This paper designed experiments to investigate the dispersant type, treat level and different dispersant interactions which influence on lubricant soot-related viscosity increase. The research work developed an effective dispersant package which can well solve the soot-related viscosity increase, allowing pass Mack T-11 and Mack T-8 engine tests and demonstrated the helpfulness of using a quickly screening method developed by a steel piston diesel engine CA 6DL2-35.

The effect of dispersant treat level on the viscosity increase of the oil samples was negligible. Dispersant booster can effectively improve the soot handling ability of heavy-duty diesel engine oils (HDDEO), and the appropriate treat level of dispersant booster can help HDDEO pass Mack T-8 and Mack T-11 engine tests.

The test results are useful for formulators to select the appropriate dispersants or dispersant booster to develop the HDDEO packages which can meet the modern diesel engine lubrication requirements.

Most previous studies in this field were carried out on soot formation mechanism and soot-related wear rather than how to solve the soot-related viscosity increasing of HDDEO. This paper describes the soot dispersing requirements of different HDDEO specifications and developed an effective dispersant package which can well deal with Mack T-11 and Mack T-8E standard engine tests soot handling ability requirements.

45 steel is a common material for the manufacture of various components such as shafts or gears. However, its poor surface properties often limit its applications. The purpose of this paper is to find a way to enhance the surface performance of 45 steel, which is expected to improve the wear resistance of 45 steel.

Double glow plasma surface metallurgy technique was used to prepare hafnium carbide (HfC) coatings on the surface of the 45 steel with two preparation process; one is to diffuse two elements together, while the other is to diffuse step by step. The scanning electronic microscopy and the X-ray diffraction were used to analyze the morphology and phase of the HfC coatings. And then the wear tests were carried out for this coating.

Coating diffused step by step shows better performance; it has a 15-µm alloyed layer which is uniform and dense and its hardness can reach up to 1326.5 Vickers-hardness (HV). While the coating fabricated by diffusing elements together owns a 10-µm alloyed layer and its hardness is 1204.1 HV. According to the wear test results, both coatings have a protective effect on the substrate and the coating prepared by step-by-step diffusion process has less wear volume, indicating that it possesses better friction reduction.

A new method which diffuses elements together was successfully used to prepare compound HfC coating, which can reduce the cost of coating preparation and improve the efficiency of coating preparation.

This paper aims to investigate the motivational drivers for knowledge sharing (KS) through the application of mobile social networking (MSN) and their influence on employee productivity in the Malaysian construction industry.

The data was collected by distributing a self-administered questionnaire among employees working in the construction industry. A total of 250 questionnaires were collected and analysed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. This study used a variety of analysis methodologies including correlation analysis, reliability and validity testing, as well as a structural model in evaluating the relationships between KS, motivational factors and influence on productivity.

The empirical results of this study reveal that utilitarian motivation is positively related to internal and external KS. Similarly, internal and external KS have a positive influence on productivity, while internal and external hedonic motivation does not show any significant relationship with productivity.

Considering the paucity of evidence regarding the determinants of KS motivational drives on employee productivity in the Malaysian construction industry, this study enriches the social cognitive theory-based literature on KS.

This study provides some insights to the players in the construction industry in implementing the most appropriate KS promotion strategies that could potentially influence employee productivity. Organisations in the construction industry that place great emphasis on utilitarian motivation including competency, reward and incentives are more likely to have a better influence on KS and, in turn, positively impact employee productivity.

This study meaningfully contributes to enhancing the understanding of the motivational drivers for sharing knowledge on MSN and its influence on productivity. The findings of this study potentially assist construction practitioners in developing a holistic blueprint for managing their KS towards improving the overall productivity of their employees.