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This paper aims to investigate relationship portfolio management in a Chinese context. It has an electronic component manufacturing company active in China's business‐to‐business markets as its focus.

As the research was exploratory, a qualitative approach to data collection was taken. This involved taking a case study approach and conducting a number of individual depth interviews with a range of sales engineers and sales managers.

The findings showed that although some of the relationship portfolio dimensions used in Western research were mentioned by the interviewees, the most important dimensions in a Chinese context are sales volume, customer's strategic importance, and trust. Additionally, emphasis on a network perspective is needed and it was found that although guanxi is important in a Chinese business context, it is a supporting factor rather than a dimension of customer assessment.

The research was exploratory in nature and the findings should not be generalised to the population as a whole.

The findings stress the importance of considering cultural elements such as the importance of personal trust and understanding network effects when doing business in China. They also show that relationships portfolio analysis can be transferred to culturally dissimilar contexts.

This research was conducted in mainland China among Chinese nationals and provides insight into the elements they consider important in business relationships.

Project complexity is a critical issue that has increasingly attracted attention in both academic and practical circles. However, there are still many gaps in the research on project complexity, such as the differentiated conceptualization of complexity and disjointed operationalization in the measurements. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct a systematic and detailed literature review on the concept, dimensions, assessment, and underlying mechanisms of project complexity.

A systematic literature review methodology was applied to search and synthesize the research on project complexity, and a final sample of 74 journal articles was identified.

This study first summarizes the concepts of project complexity from three different theoretical perspectives, and then identifies different approaches of measurement, evaluation, or simulation to assess project complexity. This paper finally establishes an integrative framework to synthesize the antecedents, mediators and moderators, and outcomes of project complexity, generating four suggestions for future research.

This study summarizes the definition and operationalization of project complexity to reduce the discrepancies in the existing research and offers an integrative framework to offer a broad overview of the current understanding of project complexity, providing a potential way forward for addressing project complexity.

In the absence of previous work, this study investigates how the psychological contract (PC) influences the safety performance of construction workers in China.

The literature is first consulted to obtain a set of PC and safety performance measures that fits the specific situation of construction workers, which is then moderated by five construction experts. A questionnaire survey of 206 workers from 4 different construction sites is followed by a descriptive statistical analysis of the nature of the PC and level of the safety performance of the respondents. Finally, a regression analysis is used to ascertain the level of influence of the PS, and an analysis is made of the influence of PC on safety performance.

A set of PC and safety performance measures is identified that fits in the construction workers' specific situation. The PC of the respondents is found to be intact and well-performed, and their safety performance is maintained at a high level. Safety performance is highly influenced by the state of the PC, with the three dimensions of safety performance (safety result, safety compliance and safety participation) positively correlated with the three dimensions of the PC (normative, interpersonal and developmental).

Suggestions are made to improve safety production management and safety performance by providing adequate material and economic conditions, helping the workers establish good interpersonal relationships and realize their personal values.

This paper aims to use the crankshaft-bearing system of a four-cylinder internal combustion engine as the studying object, and develop a multi-objective optimization design of the crankshaft-bearing. In the current optimization design of engine crankshaft-bearing, only the crankshaft-bearing was considered as the studying object. However, the corresponding relations of major structure dimensions exist between the crankshaft and the crankshaft-bearing in internal combustion engine, and there are the interaction effects between the crankshaft and the crankshaft-bearing during the operation of internal combustion engine.

The crankshaft mass and the total frictional power loss of crankshaft-bearing s are selected as the objective functions in the optimization design of crankshaft-bearing. The Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm based on the idea of decreasing strategy of inertia weight with the exponential type is used in the optimization calculation.

The total frictional power loss of crankshaft-bearing and the crankshaft mass are decreased, respectively, by 26.2 and 5.3 per cent by the multi-objective optimization design of crankshaft-bearing, which are more reasonable than the ones of single-objective optimization design in which only the crankshaft-bearing is considered as the studying object.

The crankshaft-bearing system of a four-cylinder internal combustion engine is taken as the studying object, and the multi-objective optimization design of crankshaft-bearing based on the crankshaft-bearing system is developed. The results of this paper are helpful to the design of the crankshaft-bearing for engine. There is universal significance to research the multi-objective optimization design of crankshaft-bearing based on the crankshaft-bearing system. The research method of the multi-objective optimization design of crankshaft-bearing based on the crankshaft-bearing system can be used to the optimization design of the bearing in the shaft-bearing system of ordinary machinery.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the joint congruence effect of leadership styles and organizational culture on project members’ innovative behaviors in the construction projects setting.

The proposed hypotheses are tested using polynomial regression with a sample of 217 project managers and employees of different construction projects in China, and plotted through response surface analysis.

The results of polynomial regressions support the congruence effect hypothesis, indicating that more innovative behaviors of the project members could be elicited by a high level of congruence between transformational or transactional leadership styles and organizational culture. Furthermore, asymmetrical incongruence effects are found wherein project members with lower levels of innovative behaviors when project organizational culture is stronger as compared with when two leadership styles are at higher levels. Specifically, the condition is found under the innovation dimension of organization culture, but higher level of innovative behavior conversely displays when the harmony culture is weaker than two leadership styles.

The conceptual model and hypotheses are examined by analyzing cross-sectional and self-reported data collected in China. The findings could be further examined through multi-source or longitudinal, more systematic research.

The findings highlight the pivotal role played by the value congruence of leaders-organizations in motivating employees to be innovative in project organizations. This paper provides knowledge for project managers to help them understand whether and how project members’ innovative behaviors are better motivated by the fit or misfit between the styles of leadership and project organizational cultures. Besides, this study provides the approach or direction for the project leaders training.

This study is one of the first to examine the joint effects of leadership styles and organizational culture on innovative behavior based on the person-organization fit theory and from the perspective of value congruence.

The purpose of this paper is to explore mechanisms of the overseas marketing assets needed for marketing dynamic capability in Chinese multinational enterprises (MNEs) settings. Marketing assets of foreign subsidiaries contribute to the dynamic capability of MNEs, which are crucial for their sustained competitiveness. This kind of mechanism attracts much attention in academia and industry. However, there are few studies on how dynamic capabilities are developed in MNEs considering the organizational structure of geographically dispersed assets in multiple locations. This paper aims to examine the effect of knowledge-based and relational-based marketing assets on dynamic marketing capabilities and the mediating effect of customer orientation on Chinese MNEs.

Integrating the dynamic capability approach and the international marketing literature, this study examines the impact of two types of marketing assets of foreign subsidiaries, focusing on knowledge-based and relationship-based marketing assets, on the dynamic marketing capabilities of Chinese MNEs. A large-scale empirical study of Chinese MNEs operating in overseas markets was performed, and the questionnaires were distributed and collected.

The results suggest a positive impact of knowledge-based and relationship-based marketing assets on marketing dynamic capability. We find that customer orientation has a positive mediating effect on the relationship between marketing assets and marketing dynamic capability. We also find that the competitive strength of the overseas market negatively moderates this relationship.

This study aims to contribute to the existing literature with a more fine-grained understanding of marketing assets and marketing dynamic capability, then provides theoretical guidance and management suggestions for the formulation and implementation of internationalization strategies of Chinese MNEs.

The findings outline several important implications for MNEs seeking into expand to overseas markets.

This paper contributes a novel, combined perspective on marketing assets and marketing dynamic capability.

Questionnaire studies of knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) are effective research in the field of health, which have many shortcomings. The purpose of this research is to propose an automatic questionnaire-free method based on deep learning techniques to address the shortcomings of common methods. Next, the aim of this research is to use the proposed method with public comments on Twitter to get the gaps in KAP of people regarding COVID-19.

In this paper, two models are proposed to achieve the mentioned purposes, the first one for attitude and the other for people’s knowledge and practice. First, the authors collect some tweets from Twitter and label them. After that, the authors preprocess the collected textual data. Then, the text representation vector for each tweet is extracted using BERT-BiGRU or XLNet-GRU. Finally, for the knowledge and practice problem, a multi-label classifier with 16 classes representing health guidelines is proposed. Also, for the attitude problem, a multi-class classifier with three classes (positive, negative and neutral) is proposed.

Labeling quality has a direct relationship with the performance of the final model, the authors calculated the inter-rater reliability using the Krippendorf alpha coefficient, which shows the reliability of the assessment in both problems. In the problem of knowledge and practice, 87% and in the problem of people’s attitude, 95% agreement was reached. The high agreement obtained indicates the reliability of the dataset and warrants the assessment. The proposed models in both problems were evaluated with some metrics, which shows that both proposed models perform better than the common methods. Our analyses for KAP are more efficient than questionnaire methods. Our method has solved many shortcomings of questionnaires, the most important of which is increasing the speed of evaluation, increasing the studied population and receiving reliable opinions to get accurate results.

Our research is based on social network datasets. This data cannot provide the possibility to discover the public information of users definitively. Addressing this limitation can have a lot of complexity and little certainty, so in this research, the authors presented our final analysis independent of the public information of users.

Combining recurrent neural networks with methods based on the attention mechanism improves the performance of the model and solves the need for large training data. Also, using these methods is effective in the process of improving the implementation of KAP research and eliminating its shortcomings. These results can be used in other text processing tasks and cause their improvement. The results of the analysis on the attitude, practice and knowledge of people regarding the health guidelines lead to the effective planning and implementation of health decisions and interventions and required training by health institutions. The results of this research show the effective relationship between attitude, practice and knowledge. People are better at following health guidelines than being aware of COVID-19. Despite many tensions during the epidemic, most people still discuss the issue with a positive attitude.

To the best of our knowledge, so far, no text processing-based method has been proposed to perform KAP research. Also, our method benefits from the most valuable data of today’s era (i.e. social networks), which is the expression of people’s experiences, facts and free opinions. Therefore, our final analysis provides more realistic results.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of varying concentrations of nano-SiO₂ particle doping on the structure and properties of the micro-arc oxidation (MAO) coating of 7075 aluminum alloy. This research aims to provide novel insights and methodologies for the surface treatment and protection of 7075 aluminum alloy.

The surface morphology of the MAO coating was characterized using scanning electron microscope. Energy spectrometer was used to characterize the elemental content and distribution on the surface and cross section of the MAO coating. The phase composition of the MAO coating was characterized using X-ray diffractometer. The corrosion resistance of the MAO coating was characterized using an electrochemical workstation.

The results showed that when the addition of nano-SiO₂ particles is 3 g/L, the corrosion resistance is optimal.

This study investigated the influence of different concentrations of nano-SiO₂ particles on the structure and properties of the MAO coating of 7075 aluminum alloy.

This paper aims to develop flame-retardant (FR) polyamide 12 (PA12) nanocomposite from regenerated powder via selective laser sintering (SLS), an additive manufacturing technique.

First, the morphology, processibility, thermal and mechanical properties of PA12 regenerated powder, consisting of 50 wt% new and 50 wt% recycled powder, as well as corresponding printed specimens, were evaluated to characterize the effects of previous SLS processing. Second, flame-retardant PA12 was developed by incorporating both single and binary halogen-free flame retardants into the regenerated powder.

It was found that the printed specimens from regenerated powder had much higher tensile and impact properties compared to specimens made from new powder, which is attributed to better particulate fusion and coalescence realized in higher temperature SLS printing. The effect of FRs on thermal, mechanical and flame retardant properties of the PA12 composites/nanocomposites was investigated systematically. It was found that the nanoclay, as a synergist, improved both flame-retardant and mechanical properties of PA12. UL94 standard rating of V-0 was achieved for the printed nanocomposite by incorporating 1 wt% nanoclay into 15 wt% phosphinates FR. Moreover, on average, the tensile and impact strength of the nanocomposite were increased by 26.13% and 17.09%, respectively, in XY, YZ and Z printing orientations as compared to the equivalent flame retardant composite with 20 wt% of the phosphinates FR.

This paper fulfills the need to develop flame retardant parts via SLS technology with waste feedstock. It also addresses the challenge of developing flame retardant materials without obviously compromising the mechanical properties by making use of the synergistic effect of nanoclay and organic phosphinates.

User resistance to change has been identified as a significant cause of information system (IS) implementation failure. Previous studies have proposed antecedents of user resistance to change. However, whether project leadership (e.g. authoritarian leadership) can lead to user resistance to change remains unclear. By drawing on project leadership, affective event theory and contingency theory of leadership, the authors address this void by empirically examining whether authoritarian leadership can lead to user resistance to change through the mediation of negative emotion and whether the magnitude of this mediation depends on the power distance level.

This study examines the authors’ research model that integrates authoritarian leadership, negative emotion, power distance and user resistance to change using data from a matched-pair survey of 278 users and their supervisors involved in IS project implementation in China.

Negative emotion plays a mediating role in the relationship of authoritarian leadership and user resistance to change. In addition, power distance moderates the relationship between authoritarian leadership and negative emotion and the indirect effect of authoritarian leadership on user resistance to change in IS project implementation through negative emotion.

The authors’ research provides a comprehensive understanding of the antecedents of user resistance to change in IS project implementation and ultimately contributes to the IS project implementation literature and practice.