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The purpose of this paper is to test a mediated moderation model of the joint influence of abusive supervision, high-performance work systems (HPWSs) and organizational commitment and intention to leave on employee silence.

Data were collected from 456 employees and 78 human resource managers in 78 Chinese organizations.

The results revealed that abusive supervision led to subordinate silence, and HPWSs intensified this effect. In addition, such moderating effect of HPWSs was accounted for by employees’ organizational commitment and intention to leave.

To reduce the occurrence of employee silence, organizations should not only monitor and restrain abusive supervisory actions, but also be aware of subordinates’ work attitudes driven by organizational HPWSs.

This is the first study which demonstrates that HPWSs can foster employees’ organizational commitment and hinder their intention to leave and consequently strengthen the relation between abusive supervision and employee silence.

This study empirically explores how firms configure the strength and the temporal and spatial features of corporate volunteering (CV) events to promote corporate reputation (CR).

Using event system theory as a framework and applying fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to 385 firms and 2,783 public respondents, this study explores the configurational effects of five elements of CV events—employee engagement, customer engagement, meagre incentive, duration and scope of influence—on two types of CR: capability reputation (CAR) and character reputation (CHR).

The results indicate that (1) the impact of volunteering on CR is not only configurational in nature, but also characterised by equifinality (i.e. the presence of multiple paths to success); (2) with meagre incentive and in the absence of scope-of-influence support, long-term employee and customer engagement in CV is sufficient to achieve high CAR; (3) adequate and diverse incentives, high employee engagement and a sufficiently broad scope of influence work well with either high customer engagement or long duration to achieve high CAR and CHR, respectively; (4) there are identical configurations that can achieve high CAR and CHR.

This study contributes to the CV and CR literature by extending the application of event system theory to proactive events.

Prior studies have consistently treated participative leadership as a given leadership style. Conversely, this study aims to prove that participative leadership can be predicted by leaders and teams collectively, depending on leaders' work characteristics (i.e. workload).

A two-source survey was designed to collect data from a sample of 89 leader-team dyads in a trading company in a southeastern Chinese city. Polynomial regression and response surface analysis were used to test the hypotheses.

The leader showed more participative leadership when leader-team future orientation was congruent rather than incongruent; in the congruent situation, there was an inverted U-shaped relationship between leader-team future orientation congruence and participative leadership; in the incongruent situation, when the team's future orientation gradually exceeded the leader's, participative leadership first increased and then decreased; and leader workload positively moderated the relationship between leader-team future orientation congruence and participative leadership.

These findings theoretically respond to the call for investigating the influence of leader-team future orientation congruence on leaders’ behaviors, and in practice enlighten managers on how to encourage supervisors to involve employees in decision-making processes.

Matching with the timeline of major events in China, as well as major shifts in China’s human research management, the purpose of this paper is to present the comparisons of achieving styles among Chinese millennial employees, millennial university students and Generation X employees.

Drawing from the achieving styles literature as well as the life course theory, this study first proposes hypotheses on specific differences in nine achieving styles. The authors tested by using data from 889 millennial employees and 364 millennial students from five cities in China.

The results showed that the power direct achieving style stood out for the Chinese millennials, and the competitive direct achieving style ranked higher for Generation X. Moreover, millennial employees had higher scores for all nine achieving styles than millennial students.

This study advises that when motivating Chinese millennial employees, human resource managers can create a competitive environment and provide career planning guidance, and that to better assist millennial university students to socialize, human resource managers can develop matched internship programs.

The paper contributes to the life course literature and the achieving styles literature by comparing the differences among Chinese millennial employees, university students and Generation X.

The topic of employees’ taking charge behaviors has garnered increasing interest in both practical and academic fields. Leaders play a critical role in influencing followers’ taking charge behaviors, yet few studies have explored the predicting role of benevolent leadership. Drawing from proactive motivation literature, this paper aims to investigate a moderated mediation model that examines work engagement as the mediator and role-breadth self-efficacy as the moderator in the relationship between benevolent leadership and taking charge.

Matched data were collected from 297 followers and their group leaders in three subsidiaries of a large telecommunication company in China. The authors used hierarchical linear modeling to test the hypotheses.

The results revealed that benevolent leadership was positively related to followers’ work engagement and consequently their taking charge behaviors. Moreover, such moderated mediation relationship was stronger among followers who had low rather than high levels of role-breadth self-efficacy.

The primary contribution of this study is building a contingent model for the effect of benevolent leadership on follower taking charge and thereby extending the nomological networks of both benevolent leadership and taking charge literatures. Another contribution is that this research provides a new perspective to understand how leadership leads to followers’ taking charge behaviors.

This is the first study to investigate how and when benevolent leadership predicts follower taking charge.

The purpose of this study is to empirically explore how firms configure centrifugal and centripetal forces in promoting breakthrough innovation (BI), thus improving their strategic performance (SP) in the artificial intelligence (AI) context.

This study applies the centrifugal and centripetal forces model to a survey sample of 285 Chinese AI firms. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and propensity score matching (PSM) are integrated to explore the configurational effects of three centrifugal forces—the autonomy of technical experts, knowledge search and alliance network—and two centripetal forces—strictness of organisational institutions (SOI) and human–human–AI collaboration (HHAC)—on BI, examining whether the configurations that enhance BI can further improve SP.

The results indicate that the strictness of innovation institutions (SII) and strictness of ethical institutions (SEI) are equally important for determining SOI. Three configurations can improve BI when SOI and HHAC are the core conditions; only one of three configurations can further improve SP significantly.

By introducing SOI composed of equally important levels of SII and SEI and HHAC, this research is one of the few empirical studies to explore the mechanisms behind the impact of centrifugal and centripetal forces on BI and SP, which may help researchers and managers address innovation challenges in the AI context.

The overall goal of this chapter is twofold. First, the authors aim to identify indigenous phenomena that influence employee turnover and retention in the Chinese context. Second, the authors link these phenomena to the contextualization of job embeddedness theory. To achieve the goal, the authors begin by introducing three macro-level forces (i.e., political, economic, and cultural forces) in China that help scholars analyze contextual issues in turnover studies. The authors then provide findings in the literature research on employee retention studies published in Chinese academic journals. Next, the authors discuss six indigenous phenomena (i.e., hukou, community in China, migrant workers, state-owned companies, family benefit prioritization, and guanxi) under the three macro-level forces and offer exploratory propositions illustrating how these phenomena contribute to understanding employee retention in China. Finally, the authors offer suggestions on how contextualized turnover studies shall be conducted in China.

A flexible and realistic linguistic assessment approach is developed to provide a mathematical tool for synthesis and evaluation analysis of nuclear safeguards indicator information. This symbolic approach, which acts by the direct computation on linguistic terms, is established based on fuzzy set theory. More specifically, a lattice‐valued linguistic algebra model, which is based on a logical algebraic structure of the lattice implication algebra, is applied to represent imprecise information and to deal with both comparable and incomparable linguistic terms (i.e. non‐ordered linguistic values). Within this framework, some weighted aggregation functions introduced by Yager are analyzed and extended to treat these kinds of lattice‐value linguistic information. The application of these linguistic aggregation operators for managing nuclear safeguards indicator information is successfully demonstrated.

Political factors play a crucial role in China's initial public offering (IPO) market due to its distinctive institutional context (i.e. “economic decentralization” and “political centralization”). Given the significant level of IPO underpricing in China, we examine the impact of local political uncertainty (measured by prefecture-level city official turnover rate) on IPO underpricing.

Using 2,259 IPOs of A-share listed companies from 2001 to 2019, we employ a structural equation model (SEM) to examine the channel (voluntarily lower the issuance price vs aftermarket trading) through which political uncertainty affects IPO underpricing. We check the robustness of the results using bootstrap tests, adopting alternative proxies for political uncertainty and IPO underpricing and employing subsample analysis.

Local official turnover-induced political uncertainty increases IPO underpricing by IPO firms voluntarily reducing the issuance price rather than by affecting investor sentiment in aftermarket trading. These relations are stronger in firms with pre-IPO political connections. The effect of political uncertainty on IPO underpricing is also contingent upon the industry and the growth phase of an IPO firm, more pronounced in politically sensitive industries and firms listed on the growth enterprise market board.

Local government officials in China usually have a short tenure and Chinese firms witness significantly severe IPO underpricing. By introducing the SEM model in studying China IPO underpricing, this study identifies the channel through which local government official turnover to political uncertainty on IPO underpricing.

There is little doubt that the explosive growth of the cyberspace has provided a wealth of opportunities for a broad range of legal and illegal enterprises. One of the characteristics of the cyberspace is that it removes many barriers (e.g. geographical, accessing potential customers, cost of entry) from the path of savvy entrepreneurs. As such, a new particular brand of entrepreneurs has been born – these are entrepreneurs working at the limits of legality or plainly outside any legal frameworks. The purpose of this work is to explore the area of illegal cyber-entrepreneurship and to illustrate some of the factors that have contributed to its explosive growth over the last two decades.

The work is utilising case studies drawn from literature and news sources to illustrate the theoretical concepts that are being explored. The literature consulted in this work supports the discussion around the areas of entrepreneurship, cyberspace and various aspects related to illegal exploitation of the cyberspace.

The positioning of illegal enterprises within existing theoretical frameworks is explored and a modelling of the characteristics of such enterprises is being proposed. The duality of the opportunities available within the cyberspace is illustrated, with an emphasis on the fact that there will always be a ‘gap’ between the opportunities offered by the cyberspace and the possible illegal nature of some of the entrepreneurial activities that are taking place in this space.

This work explores and positions the illegal entrepreneurial activities taking place in the cyberspace. This contributes to the advancement of knowledge in this area. Given the fast moving nature of this area, there are opportunities for updating this work on a regular basis.