Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a company’s symmetrical internal communication efforts could influence its employees’ perception of relationship outcomes with the company and the subsequent employee communication behaviors about the company to others and their turnover intention. Additionally, the mediation effects of employee-organization relationship (EOR) quality between symmetrical internal communication and employee engagement were tested.

The study collected the data from a survey of randomly selected 438 individuals who work as sales representatives of the case organization. Respondents were randomly selected through stratified sampling. For the overall statistical procedure, this study adopted the two-step structural equation modeling: on the basis of the final measurement model analysis from confirmatory factor analysis, the proposed structural model was tested using latent variables.

The findings of this research clearly demonstrate: employee/internal communication management is linked with employee engagement; employee engagement enhances supportive employee communication behaviors and reduces turnover intention. Also, the mediation results show strong mediation of EORs on the effects of symmetrical internal communication on employee engagement.

Employees’ communication behaviors such as megaphoning and scouting have special strategic values to organizations. With information seeking, selecting, forwarding, and sharing behaviors of employees, organizations may obtain more valuable information than through formal procedures and channels. Professional literature has long been supporting the importance of fostering positive employee communication behaviors (ECBs), suggesting that WOM and information from the employees deemed as most trustworthy by the external publics. ECBs about their organizations may be viewed as a testament of the quality of EOR. This study results show that employee engagement plays a key role in creating positive ECBs.

Pragmatically, as noted in the findings, symmetrical communication is an important factor that leads to positive ECB. To facilitate employees’ favorable communication regarding an organization, therefore, the organization needs to practice a two-way, employee-centered symmetrical communication system in its everyday communication management. Communication managers are advised to nurture internal communication practices that listen to the employees and invite their participation in addition to providing complete and fair information to employees. Second, by showing the significant positive influence of EOR on employee engagement and ECB, the finding of the study suggests that strategic relationship management with internal publics affect overall management effectiveness. Hence, organizational managers need to adopt various relationship cultivation strategies in their communication with employees, which have been previously proposed by several studies.

The findings of the study demonstrated that the effects of employee relationship management and symmetrical internal communication indeed exist beyond ECBs to the actual managerial outcomes. The findings also suggest a three-stage model of employee communication management: employee/internal communication management antecedents; employee engagement; and supportive outcomes of effective employee communication programs, such as supportive/extra ECBs.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the benefits of charitable sport events and examines how consumer involvement in the cause, attitude toward the event, and event-sponsor fit influence corporate image (CI) and corresponding purchase intention (PI).

The conceptual model developed in this research consolidates various constructs related to sponsors and events into a single comprehensive framework, thus offering an integrated view of the factors that determine consumers’ perceptions of a sponsorship and their attitudes toward a sponsor. Data were collected from participants in the Pink Ribbon Love Marathons (PRLM) held in Seoul, South Korea. A total of 650 female subjects (mean age=41.2, SD=12.5) participated in this investigation.

The findings indicate that CI plays a significant role as a partial mediator within a reciprocal relationship between participants’ event perception and patronage intention. Sponsoring a well-targeted event might have a positive impact on CI and PI.

What makes this study unique is the application of previous research examining cause-related sport sponsorship from a sport participant’s perspective. From a practical standpoint, the findings of this study reveal the importance of corporate communication in CSR.

This paper aims to examine how observers evaluate a company that provides service failure (or excellence) to an immoral versus a moral customer. This study introduces the concept of deservingness to the service literature and suggests that observers appreciate when a company delivers “justice” – either bad service to an immoral customer or good service to a moral customer – and thus evaluate the company more favorably.

This paper presents three online studies using scenarios (ns = 205, 199 and 181) and one lab study (n = 89) using a confederate to manipulate customer morality.

Across four studies, this study finds that a service failure has a less negative impact on observers’ company evaluations when observers consider the target customer immoral, and thus deserving of the bad outcome. Conversely, the positive impact of observing service excellence is enhanced when observers consider the target customer to be moral, and thus deserving of a good outcome. This effect occurs because the perception of deservingness leads observers to experience more positive feelings about the service outcome and these positive feelings transfer over to observers’ evaluations of the service provider.

The mechanism shares some similarities with the concept of immanent justice reasoning, whereby individuals draw a causal link between someone’s prior immoral behavior and an unrelated negative outcome. However, the studies go one step further by showing that such causal reasoning, at least on a moral level, can impact the judgments of the other party (in this case, the company involved in the service outcome).

Service providers need to be particularly attentive when serving customers who are viewed in a positive light, as an observed failure that affects a moral customer can be particularly damaging to company evaluations. Conversely, companies should make efforts to publicize when exceptional service is given to nice, admirable customers, as this is particularly effective at improving evaluations.

Researchers have examined how allocations of responsibility affect observers' evaluation of service encounters. This paper adds deservingness as an alternate mechanism and examines service excellence as well.

Audit firm bankruptcy can have significant negative impacts on the stock prices of client firms. The purpose of this paper is to identify determinants of audit firm bankruptcy risk as measured by costs of debt.

Using audit firm data publicly available in Korea, this study empirically examines whether client portfolio, financial, and organizational characteristics are associated with the weighted average interest rates assumed by auditors.

The authors find empirical evidence that audit firms’ client portfolio characteristics, including the incidence (or number) of lawsuits against the auditor, the proportion of audit clients under surveillance, the proportion of initial audit engagements, and the proportion of listed companies of audit clients, are positively associated with the cost of debt. The authors also find several financial and organizational characteristics associated with the cost of debt.

The findings of this study suggest that client portfolio characteristics as well as financial and organizational characteristics are important determinants of the cost of debt in audit firms, and that these characteristics are different from those of firms in other industries. Identifying the determinants of audit firms’ cost of debt provides insight to regulators, client firms, and capital market participants.

This study examines the default risk of audit firms that play an important monitoring role in capital markets. By utilizing unique data about audit firms available in Korea, this study is the first study to empirically examine the effect of detailed audit firm characteristics on audit firm’s default risk.

As intangible cultural heritage, traditional performing arts depend on transmission by individuals and collectives. The purpose of this paper is to explore how traditional performers practice their arts in South Korea. The analysis focuses on the transformations of performance conventions and contexts, as well as on new genres that developed in response to heritage legislation and social change during the last 200 years.

Drawing on a wide array of existing ethnographic research, the paper compares processes of transmission and transformation of three different genres: the solo singing-storytelling genre pansori, the ensemble percussion-dance genre pungmul and the various regional forms of mask dance drama subsumed under the label talnori. The paper argues that the artists, who perform these genres, while not unaffected by the expectations of their audiences, have the power to transcend traditional boundaries.

Due to early professionalization in the nineteenth century, pansori performers could adapt to the changing contexts of market-oriented modernity and survive until governmental intervention in 1962. Pre-modern pungmul and talnori was performed primarily by and for rural communities, resulting in an interruption of transmission when these contexts disappeared and partial re-invention in the wake of official preservation legislation.

The need for repeated performance in historically varying contexts makes the analysis of performing arts particular fruitful for understanding how practitioners of tradition (have to) adapt to change. A historical-comparative perspective provides concise insights into the dynamics of development that informs tradition today. The inclusion of offspring genres (changgeuk, madang-geuk, samulnori) furthermore shows the potential of heritage development beyond the official system of preservation.

Value co-creation is known to increase innovation, but it can backfire under certain conditions. The purpose of this study is to investigate co-creation activities for their effects on consumer perceptions of symbolic designs and to investigate the mediation effect of psychological distance and the moderation effect of peer feedback.

Three studies were designed by using a survey (Study 1) and two controlled laboratory experiments (Study 2 and 3). Study 1 had a sample size of 160 respondents and examined whether innovative ideas and behavior intensity had different impact on symbolic design. Study 2 had a sample size of 204 respondents and verified the interaction effect between innovativeness and intensity and to show that psychological distance is the underlying internal mechanism. Study 3 examined peer feedback as a critical moderator by using a sample of 235 participants.

Results show that idea innovativeness positively influences perceptions of symbolic design, while behavior intensity has a negative influence. The studies verify that innovativeness interacts with intensity to affect perceptions of symbolic design. Psychological distance explains why it is difficult to co-create luxury goods. Peer feedback is revealed to be a new moderator.

This research uniquely develops an extensive theory-based conceptual model and highlights two dimensions of value co-creation that interact with product design. The article emphasizes the theoretical and practical importance of studying both direct and indirect moderating effects.

The purpose of the study is to investigate how mental imagery evoked from sensory in-store experience influences consumer anticipatory emotion, perceived ownership and decision satisfaction which eventually impact positive consumer responses such as behavioural intent. In this study, gender difference is proposed as a moderator to completely understand the role of mental imagery in the in-store decision-making process.

Using a market research agency in South Korea, an online survey was employed to collect data. A total of 455 useable respondents (men = 224 and women = 231) largely living in the two most populous provinces in South Korea (i.e. Seoul and Gyeonggi provinces) completed the survey. A number of path analyses were conducted to test hypotheses.

The results of the study showed that mental imagery evoked from sensory product experience played a critical part in facilitating the consumer decision-making process by influencing anticipatory emotion and perceived ownership. The relationship among anticipatory emotion, perceived ownership, decision satisfaction and behavioural intent was significant except for the relationship between perceived ownership and behavioural intent. This study further indicated that the way mental imagery influences the in-store decision-making process differs between men and women.

The effect of mental imagery in a physical retail context is largely ignored. This study addressed the crucial role of mental imagery in a physical apparel retail setting and examined its impact on consumer decision-making processes. By exploring how to enhance consumers' in-store sensory shopping experiences through mental imagery to influence their positive shopping outcomes, this study offers vital insights into how retailers operating physical stores can successfully utilize their stores.

Academic and popular commentators of Asia find it almost impossible not to reach for metaphors of breathtaking economic and social change, fanned by the winds of globalization. This chapter explores the extent to which young Asian values concerning gender relations in the household, pornography and prostitution are similar to or different from those of young westerners. While some respondents themselves talk of the impact of globalization on attitudes in their countries, clear differences in attitudes as well as vocabularies or justifications for those attitudes are found, the Asian samples, usually but not always, expressing a different set of responses from the Anglophone or Western samples.