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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between female representation on corporate boards and intellectual capital (IC) efficiency – while prior studies focus on the relationship between gender diversity and firms’ financial performance.

Drawing on data from top 500 UK listed firms for 2007–2016 (3,279 firm-years), this study employs an adjusted-value-added intellectual coefficient as a measure of IC efficiency. Further, the two-step system-generalised method of moments has been applied to account for endogeneity issues.

The results reveal a significant positive relationship between female representation on boards and IC efficiency, including human capital, structural/innovation capital and financial capital efficiency. These results are robust to alternative proxies for the independent variable and difference-in-difference estimation.

The results posit that female representation on boards is associated with IC efficiency, which is vital for firms’ value creation and competitive advantage in the knowledge-economy era. The study also endorses current legislation to increase female representation on corporate boards.

This is among the limited studies to explore the role of female representation on boards in IC efficiency – while most prior studies relate IC efficiency to financial performance.

This study aims to evaluate corporate sustainability integration by evaluating corporate practices against the sustainability principles of inclusivity, materiality, responsiveness and impact outlined in AccountAbility’s AA1000 Accountability Principles (AA1000AP) standard.

Data comprise 12 semi-structured interviews with senior managers of listed New Zealand companies. Findings are evaluated against AccountAbility’s principles of inclusivity, materiality, responsiveness and impact, which are based on a normative view of stakeholder theory.

In terms of inclusivity, stakeholder engagement is primarily monologic and is directed more towards traditional stakeholder groups. However, social media, which is gaining popularity, has the potential to facilitate greater dialogic stakeholder engagement. While most companies undertake a materiality assessment (with varying degrees of rigour) to support sustainability reporting, only some use it to drive planning and decision-making. Companies demonstrate responsiveness to stakeholder concerns through corporate governance and sustainability initiatives. Companies are monitoring and measuring their impact on stakeholders using sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs). However, measuring traditional metrics is easier than measuring areas such as the community. In rare instances, the executive’s remuneration is linked to these sustainability KPIs.

The study findings offer useful examples of the integration of sustainability into corporate processes and systems. Practitioners may find the insights useful in understanding how sustainability is currently being integrated into corporate practices by best practice New Zealand companies. Regulators may consider incorporating AA1000AP into their corporate governance guidelines. Finally, academics may find the study useful for teaching business and accounting courses and to guide the next generation of business managers.

First, the study brings together four streams of research on how sustainability reports are prepared (inclusivity, materiality, responsiveness and impact) in a single study. Second, the findings offer novel insights by evaluating corporate sustainability against the requirements of a standard that has received little academic attention.

The purpose of this study endeavour is to delve into the perceptions and sense-making of both spiritually empowered leadership and workplace spirituality at the Akhuwat Foundation, a prominent social sector microfinance organization in the Muslim majority economy of Pakistan.

Using a qualitative research approach and an intrinsic instrumental case study research methodology, a series of 16 in-depth semi-structured interviews and three focus group discussions (each focus group contained five members) were conducted with employees and leaders at the Akhuwat Foundation of Pakistan from June 2020 to June 2021.

The findings from thematic data analysis show that the spiritual leadership at Akhuwat Foundation implemented workplace spirituality by creating a spiritual environment, such as brotherhood, at the workplace. Moreover, the employees exercise workplace spirituality by voluntarily performing their duties at lesser salaries. Alternatively, spiritual leaders care for employees by reducing organizational problems and improving their employees’ well-being.

Although this research explores spiritual leadership and workplace spirituality in the national context of Pakistan, further investigation in other contexts is required to cross-check and validate the research findings.

Regulators and policymakers of organizations operating in Muslim-majority countries should focus on brotherhood, inspire employees through vision, resolve organizational challenges and create a spiritual environment for spiritual leadership and workplace spirituality to improve employee well-being, broader societal welfare and organization’s overall performance.

This study revealed new themes of workplace spirituality and spiritual leadership in the organizational context of a Muslim-majority country, Pakistan, identified context-specific themes and enhanced the theory of spiritual leadership and workplace spirituality.

The present study develops a conceptual model that shows how the manipulation attributes of word choice, sentence fluency, convention of meaning, and organization of sentence structure in online hotel reviews are connected to linguistic errors, such as spelling and grammar and argument errors, how such errors intensify the likelihood that messages will be misunderstood, and how these misunderstandings affect customers' responses.

A structured questionnaire was employed to collect data from 591 inbound tourists in Beijing, China. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS 25.0 and Amos Graphics 23.0. Descriptive analysis was performed to explain the sociodemographic characteristic of respondents. Structural equation modeling was performed to examine hypothesized relationships.

Results demonstrate that manipulation attributes increase linguistic errors, and two linguistic errors have profound positive effects on customers' understanding of meaning, which influence their responses in the form of negative online ratings and low purchase intentions.

The study's findings contribute to the literature on hospitality, linguistics, and consumer behavior, and have managerial implications for online review websites, online travel agents, and hotel management. Research limitations lead to suggestions for future research for hospitality scholars.

This study, based on the conservation of resource theory, aims to investigate the negative impacts of abusive supervision on helping behaviors among employees by examining the mediating role of rumination and the moderating role of psychological flexibility.

A total sample of 282 reliable questionnaires are collected from 282 employees working in education and banking sectors of Pakistan. SPSS and AMOS are used for data analysis of the proposed model.

The findings reveal that rumination mediates the relationship between abusive supervision and employees’ helping behavior. In addition, the results show that higher levels of psychological flexibility negatively moderate the relationship between abusive supervision and employees’ helping behaviors through mediation.

This study elucidates how and when abusive supervision deters helping behavior among employees and provides useful guidelines for banking/university’s administration to understand harmful consequences of abusive supervision and take appropriate policy measures to lessen their harmful effects upon employees.

By proposing a moderated mediation model, this study discovers rumination as a key mediator that links abusive supervision to employees’ helping behaviors and identifies the role of psychological flexibility in diminishing the negative impacts of abusive supervision upon employees’ helping behaviors through rumination.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the importance of intercultural communication competence (ICC) of international students living in Malaysia. This study considered the culture-general factors of integrated model of ICC (IMICC) established from the West with an addition of empathy and further addressed these influencers on the international students from a Malaysian university. It is proposed that empathy, sensation seeking, ethnocentrism, attitude and motivation have a direct influence on ICC.

A quantitative research methodology was considered to address the relationship between the variables of this study. Data were collected through a survey by visiting different parts of the university campus. A total of 388 international students took part in the study voluntarily. Data were analysed using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) and structural equation modeling-analysis of a moment structures (SEM-AMOS).

The findings revealed that empathy, sensation seeking and attitude are the antecedents of ICC. However, ethnocentrism and motivation do not influence ICC significantly.

Through the findings of this study, a series of training sessions can be conducted by Malaysia (host country training) and sender countries (home country training) to educate international students regarding ICC. Furthermore, ministry of higher education (MoHE) Malaysia and higher education institutes (HEIs) can improve their infrastructure and services in terms of hosting and accommodating more international students by considering the findings of this study. These approaches could help international students to adjust in a new cultural setting of Malaysia.

The aim of the paper is to determine the asymmetric impact of tourism on the deficit in the balance of payments (BOPs).

The research uses the non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to investigate the asymmetric impact of tourism on Pakistan's BOPs deficit using quarterly data from 1995 to 2019.

The finding reveals that due to the positive change in tourism, the BOPs deficit decreases by 27%, although due to the negative change in tourism, the BOPs deficit rises by 2.3%. In addition, the significance of F-statistics (10.609) confirms the existence of co-integration between tourism and the deficit in the BOPs. The Wald test confirms the asymmetric association between tourism and the deficit in the BOPs over the long term.

In order to improve tourism in Pakistan, policymakers must consider the following implications. First, there is a need for an adequate infrastructure that can help the tourist. Second, the Government must maintain a stable law and order situation as a whole and particularly at tourist destinations. Finally, the Government should develop tourism-friendly policies in order to boost tourism in Pakistan.

The research provides new evidence of the impact of tourism on the BOPs using the novel non-linear ARDL (NARDL) technique. The evidence will help policymakers to develop policies to improve tourism in order to reduce the BOPs deficit.

This paper aims to provide exploratory evidence on corporate governance (CG) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) interfaces. Although there remains a voluminous literature on CG and CSR, very little effort has been put forward to explore the nature of this relationship.

Using interviews with Senior Executives of New Zealand Stock Exchange listed firms, this research assesses CG and CSR practices, identifies barriers for CG and CSR adoption and investigates the nature of the relationship between CG and CSR.

The results indicate a moderate level of CG and CSR practices, with a lack of resources and cost-time balance as common barriers for CG and CSR adoption. However, despite these barriers, we note that the majority of executives appreciate the increasing convergence between CG and CSR, and believe that a more robust CG framework will lead to more sustainable CSR practices.

These findings have important implications for managers and policymakers interested in understanding the CG-CSR nexus and promoting responsible business practices.

The purpose of this study is to present and test a conceptual framework that describes the Islamic religiosity parameters of riba, zakat and mafsadah and their influence on the adoption of firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices.

The study applied structural equation modelling to empirically test the proposed model on a sample of 109 Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) listed firms.

The study finds that the Islamic religiosity parameters of riba and mafsadah have a positive influence on the adoption of CSR practices, thus confirming the two study hypotheses. However, the authors did not find any significant influence of the zakat parameter on the adoption of firms’ CSR practices.

This study is limited to the Islamic religious concept and only surveyed one stakeholder group, i.e. firms’ managers in the Pakistani context. The authors recommend that future studies should look beyond a single religion with the inclusion of multiple stakeholders in a cross-country setting.

The findings possess important policy implication for regulators, stakeholders and practitioners, as the authors demonstrate that different parameters of religiosity are related to CSR practices and these parameters can be used as a substitute for and complement legal institutions in promoting and developing CSR practices.

The stakeholders’ particular investors and other market participants should be aware of the degree of religiousness and the CSR nexus, as surveyed manger responses in PSX listed firms indicate that better religious firms seem to place more emphasis on social responsibility obligations.

This study is among few studies that propose a comprehensive conceptual Islamic religiosity framework to evaluate the influence of a firm’s Islamic religiosity on CSR best practices. It differs from the past studies that were either on Islamic financial institutes or examined the religious influence on a firm’s economic behaviours.

The purpose of this study is to develop a sustainability reporter classification matrix (hereafter referred to as the “matrix”) to explain why some reporters publish better-quality sustainability reports than others and why some reporters experience improvements in the quality of their sustainability reports while others experience no improvement or a decline in sustainability report quality.

The study draws on the existing literature, which is analysed using a combination of legitimacy theory (i.e. commitment to sustainability reporting) and resource-based view (RBV, i.e. competencies in sustainability reporting).

A two-dimensional matrix is developed representing organisations’ competencies in (explained using the RBV) and commitment to (explained using legitimacy theory) sustainability reporting. Based on these two dimensions the matrix identifies four reporter classifications: incompetent uncommitted reporters (who publish low-quality reports); competent uncommitted reporters (who publish average-quality reports); incompetent committed reporters (who publish average-quality reports); and competent committed reporters (who publish high-quality reports). The matrix explains how reporters can transition from one quadrant/classification to another and how this transition can be either forward (moving from a lower quadrant to a higher quadrant), resulting in improvements in report quality, or backward (moving from a higher quadrant to a lower quadrant), leading to a deterioration in disclosure quality.

The study builds on the extant literature, combining legitimacy theory with the RBV, to provide a more complete explanation for why organisations publish sustainability reports of varying quality and why this quality varies over time. These insights can also be used to explain variations in the quality of integrated reports. The matrix may prove useful to practitioners as a tool for classifying reporters, identifying issues, assessing risk and tracking progress made.