Although the alignment between mission statement and leadership practices leads to higher employee performance, it is unclear how the alignment is linked with employee work…
Abstract
Purpose
Although the alignment between mission statement and leadership practices leads to higher employee performance, it is unclear how the alignment is linked with employee work engagement (EWE), and this vague linkage is a significant research gap in internal branding. Therefore, the current study aims to focus on management mission alignment as perceived by employees as an antecedent of EWE, and clarifies its related mechanism for EWE.
Design/methodology/approach
The current study uses survey data (n = 150) from the airline industry and analyzes the data by adopting structural equation modeling.
Findings
Employee perception of management mission alignment affects EWE directly and indirectly through emotional exhaustion and organizational identification. Also, employee mission engagement can enhance the effect of management mission alignment on EWE.
Originality/value
The current study makes three contributions to internal branding and employee engagement literature. First, as a response to the need to investigate a driver of EWE, it identifies management mission alignment as an initiator of EWE. Second, as an effort to elucidate the unclear mechanism for EWE, it demonstrates three different processes for EWE, represented by the three theories, including job demand-resource theory, conservation of resource theory and social identity theory. This sheds light on the process where management mission alignment has influences on EWE. Third, it proposes employee mission engagement as an employee mission-related factor that can moderate the effect of management mission alignment on EWE.
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Reflecting on the importance of negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) executed by internal audience of brand management, this study aims to explore the mechanism of employees’ NWOM in the…
Abstract
Purpose
Reflecting on the importance of negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) executed by internal audience of brand management, this study aims to explore the mechanism of employees’ NWOM in the emotional exhaustion context.
Design/methodology/approach
Focusing on employees’ active brand-oriented deviances, this study used a surveyed data set (n = 150) collected from negatively aroused employees experiencing a negative event within their organization. Structural equation modeling was adopted to test the hypotheses.
Findings
The current study revealed that employees’ NWOM is associated with emotional exhaustion. Also, it discovered that emotional exhaustion is more strongly associated with employees’ NWOM than turnover intention.
Research limitations/implications
Relying on self-regulation theory, the current study identified emotional exhaustion as a critical antecedent of employees’ NWOM. Future researchers can use the longitudinal research design or temporal separation as an effort to prevent common method variance.
Practical implications
Internal audiences engage in negative brand-oriented performance by spreading NWOM. Further, the advance in social media may instigate NWOM spread by internal audiences to external audiences.
Originality/value
This paper tests the explanatory power of conservation of resources theory and self-regulatory theory in terms of the impact of employees’ emotional exhaustion on NWOM and turnover intention.
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Taewon Suh, Jae C. Jung, Gail M. Zank and Richard J. Arend
Assuming that supplier knowledge can either strengthen the partnership by nurturing the commitment and trust between partners or allow the buyer to be more calculative, this study…
Abstract
Purpose
Assuming that supplier knowledge can either strengthen the partnership by nurturing the commitment and trust between partners or allow the buyer to be more calculative, this study aims to propose two types of knowledge sharing in supplier relationship – a type benefiting the partnership and another privately benefiting only one partner.
Design/methodology/approach
Using structural equation modeling and a surveyed dataset from 352 buyer–supplier partnerships, this study tested the research model of dual mechanism, where two types of knowledge sharing co-exist and have opposite effects on partnership longevity.
Findings
This study found that the two types of knowledge sharing create divergent effects on partnership continuation. For a buyer firm developing supplier knowledge, its supplier firm reciprocates by sharing knowledge with the buyer. While relation-specific knowledge promotes partnership longevity through developing trust, institutionalized knowledge hampers partnership longevity.
Research limitations/implications
Findings overall indicate that knowledge plays a more instrumental role in sharing knowledge in a buyer–supplier relationship, and alternative forces simultaneously work in the partnership. Although this study explicates two mediating mechanisms for the effect of supplier knowledge, there remain many unknown aspects of the effect.
Practical implications
From the buyer’s perspective, it is possible its institutionalized knowledge can facilitate its relationship with a current supply chain partner so that it can gain more benefits from the relationship. From the supplier’s perspective, caution should be exercised in selecting the type of knowledge to share.
Social implications
This study may have a broad impact on public policy by theorizing and testing why some partnerships last longer/shorter than others in association with the dynamics of the relationship initiated by one’s relational knowledge and the other’s knowledge sharing.
Originality/value
What this study contributes to involves the theorizing and testing the effects of the dual mechanism of knowledge sharing on partnership longevity. This study provides an example of a private investment in knowledge that is reciprocated with each type of knowledge – benefiting the partner and also benefiting the focal buyer firm.
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Taewon Suh and Jaehun Lee
Workforce diversity is becoming a crucial matter in the area of internal communication. Realizing that there are multiple brackets within the body of a workforce (i.e. internal…
Abstract
Purpose
Workforce diversity is becoming a crucial matter in the area of internal communication. Realizing that there are multiple brackets within the body of a workforce (i.e. internal audience), the purpose of this paper is to develop an intermediate approach to manage diversity by segmenting the internal audience.
Design/methodology/approach
Developing a segmentation approach for managing diversity, the authors recommended the use of a few mathematical methodologies, including the expectation-maximization algorithm, partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) methodology, and Chow test, on a surveyed data set collected from 1,236 nurses of the US healthcare system. A PLS-SEM model, including employees’ mission awareness, management’s mission fulfillment, employees’ mission fulfillment, and turnover intention, was examined with respect to two internal segments.
Findings
Using a simple set of demographic variables, the authors demonstrated a practical approach to segmenting an internal audience and showed that causal relationships in a nomological network of variables regarding mission integration are significantly different between internal segments. Based on the segmentation approach, the authors proved that managers, in an effort to gain maximum diversity, can mix and match both the centrifugal force of diversity and the centripetal force of diversity to value individuals and for mission integration in their practices, respectively.
Research limitations/implications
The authors highlighted a practical matter of internal communication by connecting the concepts of diversity and internal audience segmentation. However, the generalizability of the results must be assessed in other settings.
Practical implications
While managing diversity involves valuing employees as individuals, the segmentation concept can function as a practical and useful intermediate tool for managing diversity. Practitioners can utilize varied sets of segmented variables according to their contexts.
Social implications
The authors emphasized valuing employees as individuals and developed a managerial way to make personal differences an asset to the productivity of an organization and society.
Originality/value
Introducing a segmentation approach to internal communication and adopting a set of useful statistical techniques, the authors attempted to develop a unique managing model of diversity. The authors suggested a dynamic and substantial segmentation of an internal audience with a smaller set of appropriate variables in each context.
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Taewon Suh, John Ford, Young S. Ryu and John H.S. Kim
This study aims to enhance the simultaneous utilization of measure in product design by mapping out the possible and potential uses of a measure for both academicians and…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to enhance the simultaneous utilization of measure in product design by mapping out the possible and potential uses of a measure for both academicians and practitioners.
Design/methodology/approach
To map out a way for the simultaneous utilization of measure, the authors assessed and portrayed the diverse facets of a four-factor measure for the development of mobile devices by adopting pluralistic techniques through a series of studies and three different study samples.
Findings
This study provided a solution for enhancing the usability of measure in product management, showing that a measure can be developed using a pluralistic methodology so that the results can be incorporated into the practitioners’ design activities that occur and when the gap between theory and practice is a knowledge production problem.
Research limitations/implications
The main positioning of this study involves the science-design interface (Simon, 1992) to bridge the important gap between theory and practice by showcasing a measure development for product design as a strategy of intellectual arbitrage (Van De Ven and Johnson, 2006). Relying on the design scientific approach, the authors focused this study on a prescriptive procedure rather than a more rigorous methodological procedure.
Practical implications
The authors provided product managers with a systematic and synergistic approach to developing a measure and recommended several usages of the developed measure to enhance its simultaneous utilization between academics and practitioners.
Originality/value
Emphasizing pluralistic methodology in the measure development, the authors recommended the concept of intra-examination. The first-order intra-examination, utilizing Bayesian Networks, makes available the thick descriptions of the measure and supports reasoning under uncertainty. The second-order intra-examination examined nomological networks regarding the pragmatic relationships between the four factors that comprise the measure and other important constructs.
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This study seeks to suggest and test an important moderator, organizational encouragement, which plays between working hard, and two outcome variables, creativity and performance…
Abstract
Purpose
This study seeks to suggest and test an important moderator, organizational encouragement, which plays between working hard, and two outcome variables, creativity and performance. This study also aims to test the traditional inferences and conclusions in the creativity literature in order to generalize them into the corporate communications/public relations (PR) setting.
Design/methodology/approach
The dataset includes 148 survey returns from Korean practitioners in corporate communications and/or PR. Path analysis and multi‐group analysis are utilized for analyses.
Findings
The findings provide evidence that the effect of working hard on performance can significantly be intensified when the practitioner is encouraged to work creatively in the organization. Some of the findings also confirm the general view of the traditional notion from the creativity literature.
Research limitations/implications
The results indicate that when an employee is working hard is better related to the performance goal when the employee is encouraged to take risks and to work in a creative manner. Limitations are concerned with the fact that, in the Korean public relations setting, little knowledge was known about the variables.
Practical implications
Without any effort, simply being creative cannot guarantee successful outcomes. Organizational encouragement is very important in the workplace to encourage creative outcomes and better performance.
Originality/value
This study investigates and determines the role of the organizational determinant of creativity as a moderator in the combination of a mediating variable and working hard. The study area of corporate communications lacks discussion of creativity.
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Taewon Suh and Vishag Badrinarayanan
The purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents of project creativity in international marketing teams. The proposed framework includes both proximal (characteristics that…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents of project creativity in international marketing teams. The proposed framework includes both proximal (characteristics that impact the everyday functioning of the team) and distal (characteristics associated with the team's organizations that are relatively remote to the everyday functioning of the team) factors as antecedents of project creativity. Specifically, the authors investigate the influence of three proximal factors, namely, collaboration with foreign counterparts, autonomy, and international experience as well as two distal factors, namely, organizational encouragement and innovative organizational culture.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 156 executives from publicly traded firms in the manufacturing sector in South Korea and tested using hierarchical regression.
Findings
Collaboration with foreign counterparts and autonomy exert direct positive influence on project creativity. International experience exerts a curvilinear relationship such that low and high levels of international experience positively influence project creativity, whereas moderate international experience negatively influences project creativity. In addition, whereas the relationship between organizational encouragement and project creativity was supported, the relationship between innovative culture and project creativity was not.
Originality/value
Despite the importance afforded to international marketing teams and creativity in marketing research and practice, little attention has focussed on project creativity in international marketing teams. This study represents an initial effort toward filling the void and identifying certain proximal and distal factors as relevant antecedents of project creativity in international marketing teams. In addition, deviating from extant studies on creativity, this study highlights a curvilinear relationship between international experience and creativity.
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Taewon Suh, Jae C. Jung and Bruce L. Smith
This study aims to investigate creativity‐related determinants of learning in the context of business‐to‐business services and client‐agency relationships.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate creativity‐related determinants of learning in the context of business‐to‐business services and client‐agency relationships.
Design/methodology/approach
The research model includes client encouragement, agency creativity, campaign creativity, and perceived performance. The study involved conducting a questionnaire survey in 150 publicly‐traded companies in South Korea.
Findings
The results show that client learning from agency services is the result of the creative process of the agency and the creativity of the service outcome itself. Client learning from marketing services also varied depending on different performance ratings.
Originality/value
The study elucidates client learning as the central process of value co‐creation in the brand value chain. It produces several unique findings and managerial takeaways for building up better co‐creation environments in the context of business‐to‐business services.
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Jeremy J. Sierra, Michael R. Hyman, Byung-Kwan Lee and Taewon Suh
– The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of antecedents and consequences of superstitious beliefs.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of antecedents and consequences of superstitious beliefs.
Design/methodology/approach
From survey data drawn from 206 South Korean and 218 US respondents, structural equation modeling is used to test the posited hypotheses.
Findings
To extrinsic superstitious beliefs, both the South Korean and US models support the subjective happiness through self-esteem path and the anthropomorphism path; from these beliefs, both models support the horoscope importance path and the behavioral superstitious beliefs path. Only the US model supports the path from self-esteem to extrinsic superstitious beliefs, and only the South Korean model supports the path from intrinsic religiosity to extrinsic superstitious beliefs.
Research limitations/implications
South Korean and US student data may limit generalizability. As effect sizes in this context are established, researchers have a benchmark for future quantitative superstition research.
Practical implications
By further understanding antecedents and consequences of superstitious beliefs, marketers are in a better position to appeal to targeted customers. Anthropomorphism and intrinsic religiosity, not fully studied by marketing scholars, show promise as segmentation variables related to consumers’ attitudes and behaviors.
Social implications
To avoid unethical practice, marketers must limit themselves to innocuous superstition cues.
Originality/value
Leaning on experiential consumption theory and the “magical thinking” literature, this study augments the superstition literature by exploring carefully selected yet under-researched determinants and consequences of superstitious beliefs across eastern and western consumer groups.
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This paper explores the impact of both the increase in foreign direct investment inflows and the increase in information and communication technology infrastructure investments on…
Abstract
This paper explores the impact of both the increase in foreign direct investment inflows and the increase in information and communication technology infrastructure investments on exporting in ASEAN nations (the trade bloc of which is known as AFTA) compared with two other major trade blocs: CEFTA and LAIA. The analyses are based on data from a cross section of countries (26 emerging markets from three trade blocs) over time (from 1995 to 2000). The results show that the increase of investments in ICT infrastructure yields positive and significant returns in the national exporting level only for the ASEAN/AFTA and CEFTA sample. Interestingly, the impact of the increase of FDI inflows on export is significant only in the CEFTA and LAIA samples. These results are discussed in the light of the different economic experiences of these trade blocs, noting that variations are typically present between individual countries. Overall, reflecting the results from this study, research concerned with the determinants of national exporting level should be conducted independently, along with regional and national characteristics.