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Prior work underscores the important role of customer advocacy for brands. The purpose of this study is to explore the critical role customers can play as brand heroes. The authors developed and validated a measurement scale composed of properties that are derived from distinct brand hero motivational mechanisms.

The authors conducted one exploratory pilot, using semi-structured interviews, with industry and academic experts, and employed three main studies across varying brands and market settings.

This study explores and empirically demonstrates how the brand hero scale (BHS) is related to, yet distinct from, existing scales of opinion leaders, market mavens, attachment and customer advocacy. The six-item BHS demonstrates convergent, discriminant, nomological and predictive validity across several different brand contexts.

This research extends the extant body of work by identifying and defining brand heroes, developing and validating a parsimonious BHS, and demonstrating how its predictive validity extends both to a range of key advocacy and loyalty customer behaviors.

The study provides provocative insights for marketing researchers and brand managers and ascertains the important role heroes may play for brands in terms of strong customer advocacy and loyalty behaviors.

Building on the theory of meaning, this study shows that identifying and working with brand heroes is of great managerial importance and offers critical avenues for future research.

This study is aimed to develop a novel intuitionistic fuzzy P-graph with Gaussian membership function to help decision-makers deal with complex process network systems.

Two fuzzy P-graph case studies of the cogeneration system were selected, and relevant data were collected, including the structure and flow sequence of the system, and the rate of material and product transitions between the operating units. Gaussian function membership was set according to the restriction of fuzzy upper and lower bounds. Then the α-cut was used to obtain different upper and lower bound restrictions of each membership degree. After finding the optimal and suboptimal solutions for different membership degrees, the results of non-membership and hesitation were calculated.

The proposed method will help the decision maker consider the risk and provide more feasible solutions to choose the optimal and suboptimal solutions based on their own or through experience. The proposed model in this study has more flexibility in operation and decision making.

This study is the first to propose a novel intuitive fuzzy P-graph and demonstrates the effectiveness and flexibility of the method by two case studies of the cogeneration system. However, the addition of hesitation can increase the error tolerance of the system. Even for the solutions with a high degree of membership, optimal and suboptimal solutions still exist for the decision maker to select. Since decision makers expect the higher achievement of the target requirements; thus, it is important to have more feasible solutions with a high degree of membership.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of career plateau (hierarchical and job-content plateau) on internal employability, and to investigate psychological contract breach as a moderator on the relationship between career plateau (hierarchical and job-content plateau) and internal employability.

Data were collected by distributing paper-based questionnaires to 521 workers in private banking sectors in Taiwan. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine the results of the relationships.

The results supported the idea that career plateau (hierarchical and job-content plateaus) could be a significant antecedent of internal employability. Psychological contract breach significantly moderated the negative relationship between career plateau (hierarchical and job-content plateau) and internal employability. Specifically, the negative relationship between career plateau and internal employability will be stronger for employees who perceive a higher level of psychological contract breach.

These findings can help human resource practitioners gain a better understanding of the value of applicable approaches as an influence on a plateaued employee’s perception of internal employability, and to facilitate a positive employer–employee relationship, which could foster both a successful career for an individual and a prosperous performance for the organization that employs them.

Career plateau have been aroused variety issues in HR practice, but employability and psychological contract breach have barely been discussed with career plateau. This study empirically establishes the correlation between career plateau and internal employability as well as shown that psychological contract breach would decrease the plateaued individual’s willingness to stay in the current organization. Thus, the career plateau may provide organizations with a helpful perspective on one’s career development. Building substantial relationships between employees and employers lead to better human capital for organizations as it deals with rapidly changes in the real world.

The paper focuses on social capital as the characteristic of social groups that promote coordination; moreover, social identity plays a key role in the construction of group relationships. However, few research studies have looked at how the social capital of social networking sites (SNSs) is related to the social identity of its members. Drawing on social capital and social identity theory, this study investigated the effects of SNS social capital (shared language, social trust and network density) on social identity and continuous participation. The mediating role of social identity was also investigated.

In total, 444 SNS members volunteered to participate in this study. Structural equation modeling was applied to analyze a conceptual model.

The results revealed that SNS social trust and network density directly and significantly affected the social identity and continuous participation behavior of members. SNSs using a shared language positively affected social identity, but this was not directly associated with continuous participation behavior.

Because the network externalities of SNSs exert critical effects on user benefits, attracting continuous user participation remains one of the critical challenges for SNS administrators. Both the theoretical and practical implications of this study can aid SNS administrators in developing effective continuous participation strategies.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2021-0369

Social media fatigue (SMF) has been widely recognized; however, previous studies have included various concepts into a single fatigue construct. Fatigue has typically been explored from the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) or stimulus-organism-response (SOR) perspectives. To further investigate SMF, the authors split it into the two constructs of exhaustion and disinterest. Furthermore, the authors introduced the concept of emotional labor and identified rules that may affect surface and deep acting strategies.

The authors designed and conducted a survey to collect data from social networking platform users.

Results from 364 users of social networking platforms supported most of the authors' hypotheses. First, most of the display rules affect the choice of deep or surface acting. Second, both types of acting lead to exhaustion, but only surface acting leads to disinterest. Third, discontinuance intention is affected by both types of fatigue.

This study contributes to SMF research by adding more antecedents (deep and surface acting) based on the emotional labor perspective and showing the impacts of communication rules on emotional labor. In addition, this study also distinguishes disinterest-style fatigue from exhaustion.

Facilitating members' continual participation in a community is crucial for ensuring the community's long-term survival. However, knowledge regarding whether member similarity is related to member participation and the mechanism underlying this relationship is limited. Drawing on similarity–attraction, social exchange and social identity theories, this study explored the influences of different facets of similarity (i.e. value, personality and goal similarity) on group norm conformity, group identity and social participation.

Data were collected from 444 Taiwanese members of social networking sites (SNSs), and structural equation modeling was employed to examine the hypothesized relationships.

The results revealed that value similarity directly affected group norm conformity but did not directly affect group identity; personality similarity influenced group identity but not group norm conformity. Goal similarity had positive influences on group norm conformity and group identity. Moreover, group norm conformity had direct and positive influences on group identity and social participation; group identity also had a positive influence on social participation.

On the basis of the aforementioned findings, this study contributes to the understanding of factors facilitating SNS members' participation from the perspective of similarity. These findings can serve as a reference for SNS administrators to facilitate social participation by emphasizing member similarity.

For decades, consumer identification and motivation, either alone or jointly, have been essential constructs for behavioral researchers. The resultant output is significant in terms of both quality and quantity. However, at a deeper level, a lack of conceptual clarity in the relationship between these constructs has led to theoretical and practical irregularities, which this study aims to address.

An online questionnaire was distributed to sport consumers aged over 18 participating in an online panel, prompted 293 completed responses. Structural equations modeling was used to examine the data.

Findings show that identification mediates the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on sport supporters’ loyalty and explain 90% of the variance in that construct. In addition, identification mediates the adverse effects of extrinsic motivation on loyalty and strengthens loyalty when levels of satisfaction decline.

This study extends previous work by providing a theoretical perspective that clarifies the relationship between motivation and consumer identification; deepens theory by empirically observing the relationship at different levels of consumer satisfaction; and presents a parsimonious, valid and reliable method that managers can leverage to strengthen sport supporters’ loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a benchmarking framework to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the hotel industry, in a multi‐period context, with consideration of perishable traits and carry‐over activities. The sustained high performers in the case study are identified and their business strategies are discussed.

The dynamic DEA (data envelopment analysis) approach is used to identify the multi‐period sustained high performers. The super‐efficiency DEA approach is employed to conduct a thorough ranking under an input‐output‐consumption structure. The supplementary analysis is further implemented to help elucidate the benchmarking results.

In total, nine out of 80 international tourist hotels in Taiwan during 2006‐2010 are identified as the sustained high performers. These hotels have diverged business strategies in terms of employees (intensive versus economical labor forces), products (room versus F&B (food and beverage) services), prices (extremely expensive versus very inexpensive room rates), guests (business versus tourism guests), and others (e.g. location advantages).

This study contributes to benchmarking literature and to hotel industry in several aspects. Compared with conventional single‐period benchmarking in efficiency aspect only, the proposed multi‐period benchmarking framework under input‐production‐consumption structure can take into account the carry‐over activities, account for perishable traits, provide more robust results, and add more useful information to facilitate the hotel managers to ameliorate the efficiency and effectiveness. The proposed framework should be readily applied to other service industries (e.g. transport).

This study aims to evaluate the current situation of education for sustainable development, climate change education and environmental education in a nationwide context. Methodologically, this study calls for more research to go beyond case studies and take a similar approach to examine university curricula and facilitate cross-country comparisons.

This paper examines the status of climate and sustainability curricula in Taiwan’s higher education system. Using the course catalog for the 2020–2021 academic year, the authors constructed a unique data set that includes 1,827 courses at 29 major universities in Taiwan. In each institution, the authors search for course titles that include “climate,” “sustainable/sustainability” and “environment/environmental” as keywords and code the courses according to their disciplines.

The finding highlights the variations across institutional types and subject matters. Public universities have an average of 4.94 related courses per 1,000 students, whereas private universities have only 3.13. In general, the relevant courses are more concentrated in the STEM and bioscience fields. The curricula, however, are seriously constrained by the disciplinary structure and foster few transdisciplinary perspectives.

The authors seek to go beyond case studies and offer one of the most comprehensive curricula samples at the national level. Taiwan adds an important data point, as the current literature focuses heavily on the USA and Europe.