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The literature on downsizing and downsizing through early retirement programs lead to a clear conclusion: managers must take a very thoughtful approach to downsizing. Poor planning, knee‐jerk reactions, miscommunication with employees and the mishandling of remaining employees can lead to failure. Despite all the benefits, early retirement incentive programs have received harsh criticism on a number of fronts. The legal, societal, and individual implications of early retirement incentive programs are numerous. The key to reducing this uncertainty and potential negative outcomes is the ability to predict beforehand which employees will accept the early retirement packages. Many factors influence the decision to retire and are examined. Predicting who or why someone will retire is extremely difficult. One of the missing ingredients for the success of these programs can be found in the Human Resources Department and its activities. This is the linking pin for all training, development and education efforts intended to socialize the existing management team responsible for this activity and its success as well as failures to deal with the new changes and culture of a downsized organization. Attention is given to the role and major issues of this intervention.

In 2010, Vintage Radio, a community radio station in Birkenhead set up and run entirely by older people for older people, received funding from communications charity Media Trust as part of the Community Voices scheme – a nationwide campaign that aims to support disadvantaged and isolated communities to get their stories told. The purpose of this paper is to record and document the creation and development of Vintage Radio and its outcomes to date. The paper seeks to outline the importance of inspiring, engaging, and supporting older communities to get their voices heard through digital media.

Data were gathered via interviews with listeners, members, and volunteers from Vintage Radio via phone and e‐mail to find out about their involvement with the station and what it means to them. Quotes were recorded and included in this paper. Information was also gathered from the Vintage Radio web site.

The findings demonstrate that Vintage Radio has made a significant difference to the local community in a number of ways. A greater number of older volunteers have learned new digital and technical skills and this has improved the quality of the station's programming. Participants have forged new friendships and enabled other older people to overcome the sense of invisibility they sometimes suffer from. The radio station has reached out to those in care homes giving isolated and lonely residents a sense of belonging.

Owing to geographical distance, face‐to‐face interviews are not possible.

This paper demonstrates how important it is to inspire, engage, and support older communities to get their voices heard through digital media and aims to encourage further similar activity in the UK.

This study investigates the effects of social media as a social networking tool for donation-based crowdfunding by considering the factors affecting donation intention in the Philippines, such as social influences, motivations, strategic positioning and creative marketing efforts.

A mixed-method approach was used through a survey questionnaire and short focus group discussions (FGD). The researchers used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) as a statistical tool and qualitative data was analyzed through thematic analysis.

The study found that social experience, perceived donor effectiveness, intrinsic motivation and leveraging creativity positively affected donation intention. In contrast, extrinsic motivation and strategic positioning were found to have no significant effect on donation intention. The qualitative findings support the conclusion by discovering the need to be authentic and transparent to achieve fundraising goals.

Existing research has mainly focused on crowdfunding websites. Also, research regarding the use of social media as a social networking tool for crowdfunding is scarce.

This study provides a deeper understanding of donation crowdfunding and offers insights into developing effective strategies for crowdfunding campaigns through social media.

The findings contribute to the literature on donation crowdfunding by identifying the determinants of a successful campaign through advertised crowdfunding.

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of online reviews on answer adoption in virtual Q&A communities, with an eye toward extending knowledge exchange and community management.

Online reviews contain rich cognitive and emotional information about community members regarding the provided answers. As feedback information on answers, it is crucial to explore how online reviews affect answer adoption. Based on signaling theory, a research model reflecting the influence of online reviews on answer adoption is established and empirically examined by using secondary data with 69,597 Q&A data and user data collected from Zhihu. Meanwhile, the moderating effects of the informational and emotional consistency of reviews and answers are examined.

The negative binomial regression results show that both answer-related signals (informational support and emotional support) and answerers-related signals (answerers’ reputations and expertise) positively impact answer adoption. The informational consistency of reviews and answers negatively moderates the relationships among information support, emotional support and answer adoption but positively moderates the effect of answerers’ expertise on answer adoption. Furthermore, the emotional consistency of reviews and answers positively moderates the effect of information support and answerers’ reputations on answer adoption.

Although previous studies have investigated the impacts of answer content, answer source credibility and personal characteristics of knowledge seekers on answer adoption in virtual Q&A communities, few have examined the impact of online reviews on answer adoption. This study explores the impacts of informational and emotional feedback in online reviews on answer adoption from a signaling theory perspective. The results not only provide unique ideas for community managers to optimize community design and operation but also inspire community users to provide or utilize knowledge, thereby reducing knowledge search costs and improving knowledge exchange efficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the two effects (flow effect and resonance effect) during a group complaint based on the emotional contagion theory.

This study uses an experimental research design in which participants’ negative emotions dynamically change driven by group emotional interactions when they are experiencing a group complaint.

Flow effect and resonance effect can occur during the process of group emotional contagion. Specifically, when group customers’ negative emotional similarity is low in a group complaint, group emotional contagion leads to flow effect (i.e. negative emotions flow from customers with higher levels of negative emotions to those with lower levels of negative emotions). By contrast, when group customers’ negative emotional similarity is high in a group complaint, group emotional contagion leads to resonance effect (i.e. group customers’ negative emotions increase significantly).

Most of the previous research studies the process of emotional contagion from one with higher levels of emotional displays to the other with lower levels of emotional displays, which is named as the “flow effect” of emotional contagion. However, when two individuals with the same levels of negative emotional displays interact with each other, the flow effect of emotional contagion is very likely not to occur. It is interesting to find that both individuals’ negative emotions increase significantly during the process of emotional contagion. The authors propose the “resonance effect” of emotional contagion to explain this phenomenon.

One of the main research themes reoccurring in our research projects is the globalization process of a company. It is now well documented that a company's globalization occurs gradually, as firms gain international experience and expand their operations (Johanson & Vahlne, 1990; Townsend, Yeniyurt, & Talay, 2008; Yeniyurt, Townsend, Cavusgil, & Ghauri, 2008). The globalization process is a long and treacherous path that consists of incremental steps towards global rationalization. Usually firms first engage in exporting activities, then establish foreign subsidiaries and engage in strategic partnerships, developing first a regional international presence, gradually evolving into a multi-regional and finally into a global company. We explored the path towards globalization in the context of international marketing alliances (Yeniyurt et al., 2008), new product development (Townsend, Yeniyurt, Deligonul, & Cavusgil, 2004), product launch (Yeniyurt, Townsend, & Talay, 2007), and global brand architecture (Townsend et al., 2008).

Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

A key challenge for cost-effective Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) is the ability to create generalizable domain, learner, and pedagogical models so they can be re-used many times over. Investment in this technology will be needed to succeed in developing ITSs for team training. The purpose of this chapter is to propose an instructional framework for guiding team ITS researchers in their development of these models for reuse. We establish a foundation for the framework with three propositions. First, we propose that understanding how teams develop is needed to establish a science-based foundation for modeling. Toward this end, we conduct a detailed exploration of the Kozlowski, Watola, Jensen, Kim, and Botero (2009) theory of team development and leadership, and describe a use case example to demonstrate how team training was developed for a specific stage in their model. Next, we propose that understanding measures of learning and performance will inform learner modeling requirements for each stage of team development. We describe measures developed for the use case and how they were used to understand teamwork skill development. We then discuss effective team training strategies and explain how they were implemented in the use case to understand their implications for pedagogical modeling. From this exploration, we describe a generic instructional framework recommending effective training strategies for each stage of team development. To inform the development of reusable models, we recommend selecting different team task domains and varying team size to begin researching commonalities and differences in the instructional framework.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.