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Engaging suppliers in joint innovation can be an effective means for buyer firms to overcome internal resource/capability limitations. The purpose of this research is to investigate the impacts of cultural and trust congruences between the supplier and buyer firms on joint innovation. In addition, we examine the relationship commitment as an antecedent of cultural and trust congruences.

The study constructs a theoretical model based on social exchange theory (SET) and examines it using data from Chinese manufacturing firms.

The results suggest that cultural and trust congruences between suppliers and buyers positively influence joint processes and product innovations. Furthermore, we find that while normative relationship commitments of supplier firms promote cultural and trust congruences with buyers, instrumental relationship commitments only positively affect trust congruence.

This study enhances our understanding of social exchanges by adopting a dyadic view to examine the interconnectedness between relationship commitment, cultural and trust congruences, and joint innovation. These findings also offer practical managerial implications for managing collaborative innovation projects.

Despite the growing and widespread importance of exploring the primary factors facilitating global value chain (GVC) and supply chain management, this topic has received surprisingly little attention to date. Drawing upon the technology–organization–environment framework and the resource-based view, this study aims to fill these important gaps in the literature by theorizing and developing a comprehensive model to explain how a foreign subsidiary of multinational enterprises can improve the upgrading of the GVC and supply chain performance in a host market.

Using survey data collected from 266 foreign subsidiaries of multinational enterprises operating in the Chinese manufacturing sector, this study empirically examines the theoretical framework using a structural equation modeling approach.

The results demonstrated that the relative advantages of digital technology, supplier diversification and environmental uncertainty all contribute positively to the development of foreign subsidiaries’ supply chain management capabilities. Meanwhile, supply chain management capability plays a positive role in foreign subsidiaries facilitating GVC upgrading and enhancing supply chain performance.

The findings of this study provide many important implications and useful insights to foreign subsidiaries operating in an emerging host market by concentrating on how to develop and maintain their competitive advantages in the process of GVC reshaping and supply chain restructuring.

This study provides a useful guide to help firms better understand how they may develop and enhance their competitive advantages in upgrading their GVCs and implementing supply chain restructuring. In addition, this research generates important policy implications considering the recent trend toward creating more effective and sustainable global supply value chains.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically disrupted everyday life, leading to a cascade of negative emotional responses such as death anxiety. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the buffering effect of brand attachment on death anxiety by exploring the roles of brand concepts and brand positioning on psychological compensation for security.

This multi-method paper features four studies and shows how brands can offer emotional support under high-risk circumstances.

Study 1 includes two surveys which offer preliminary evidence that death anxiety can enhance consumers’ brand attachment. Study 2 reveals a causal effect wherein consumers experiencing death anxiety are more likely to attach to brands with a self-transcendence (vs self-enhancement) concept. Study 3 examines the mediating role of need for security in the relationship between death anxiety and attachment to brands with a self-transcendence concept. Further, Study 4 indicates the moderating role of brand positioning: self-transcendence brands adopting local (vs global) positioning strategies are more likely to satisfy consumers’ need for security, thereby leading to strong brand attachment.

The findings of this paper contribute to the brand attachment literature and to the global branding literature regarding consumers’ emotional responses in the context of COVID-19. This paper innovatively frames brand concepts and brand positioning and provides actionable guidelines to help brands satisfy consumers’ needs amid a worldwide crisis.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings and leverage manipulation and the moderating effects of internal and external supervision.

The authors draw on a sample of Chinese non-financial A-share-listed firms from 2013 to 2020 to explore the effect of ESG ratings on leverage manipulation. Robustness and endogeneity tests confirm the validity of the regression results.

ESG ratings inhibit leverage manipulation by improving social reputation, information transparency and financing constraints. This effect is weakened by internal supervision, captured by the ratio of institutional investor ownership, and strengthened by external supervision, captured by the level of marketization. The effect is stronger in non-state-owned firms and firms in non-polluting industries. The governance dimension of ESG exhibits the strongest effect, with comprehensive environmental governance ratings and social governance ratings also suppressing leverage manipulation.

Firms should strive to cultivate environmental awareness, fulfil their social responsibilities and enhance internal governance, which may help to strengthen the firm’s sustainability orientation, mitigate opportunistic behaviours and ultimately contribute to high-quality firm development. The top managers of firms should exercise self-restraint and take the initiative to reduce leverage manipulation by establishing an appropriate governance structure and sustainable business operation system that incorporate environmental and social governance in addition to general governance.

Policymakers and regulators should formulate unified guidelines with comprehensive criteria to improve the scope and quality of ESG information disclosure and provide specific guidance on ESG practice for firms. Investors should incorporate ESG ratings into their investment decision framework to lower their portfolio risk.

This study contributes to the literature in four ways. Firstly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is among the first to show that high ESG ratings may mitigate firms’ opportunistic behaviours. Secondly, it identifies the governance factor of leverage manipulation from the perspective of firms’ subjective sustainability orientation. Thirdly, it demonstrates that the relationship between ESG ratings and leverage manipulation varies with the level of internal and external supervision. Finally, it highlights the importance of governance in guaranteeing the other two dimensions’ roles by decomposing overall ESG.

This study develops a cross-level moderated mediating model based on expectation-value theory to extend the knowledge on how and when organizational culture motivates employee radical creativity.

Based on longitudinal, multisource data for 584 R&D employees in 73 organizations, the research hypotheses were tested by a multilevel analysis using hierarchical linear model.

The results showed that error management culture had a positive effect on employees' psychological safety and radical creativity; psychological safety mediated the effect of error management culture on employee radical creativity. Further, moderated path analysis revealed that employees' promotion focus moderated the positive effect of psychological safety on employee radical creativity and thus strengthened the indirect effect of error management culture on employee radical creativity via psychological safety.

Literature on how organizational culture motivates workplace creativity pays little attention to employees' radical creativity. This study fills this gap by empirically examining the role of error management culture as a critical organizational culture that secures employee radical creativity. It also provides a novel mechanism, i.e., an expectancy-value mechanism to explain the link between organizational context and radical creativity by elucidating the underlying psychological process whereby error management culture drives employee radical creativity and identifying the pivotal moderating role of employees' regulatory focus in the function of error management culture.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the initial corrosion behavior of pure Mg, AZ31 and AZ91 alloys in phosphate buffer solution (PBS) and to characterize the features in corrosion type and resistance of the corrosion product layer.

The scanning electron microscopy, equipped with energy-dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy have been used to characterize the as-corroded samples. Besides, the Mg²⁺ concentration in PBSs has been determined by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrum.

It has been found that pure Mg suffers pit corrosion, and AZ31 initially undergoes pit corrosion and then uniform corrosion dominates with an extended immersion duration. However, AZ91 exhibits the uniform corrosion with the highest corrosion rate among the three materials. Besides, the corrosion product layer on AZ31 has the best compactness and corrosion resistance.

The findings add depth in understanding the corrosion of pure Mg and its alloys in PBS and also have guiding significance in exploring the effects by alloyed elements to develop new biomaterials with better performance.

With the improvement of consumers' health consciousness, healthy food has attracted great attention in daily consumption. Previous research into the sense of power often distinguishes it into high and low level, ignoring the impact of different construal of power on consumption behaviors. This article divides power into dual construal (responsibility vs opportunity) and aims to examine the differential impacts of the construal of power on healthy food preference.

Two pretests and three formal experiments were conducted to examine the effect of the construal of power on the consumer's healthy food preference, the mediation of self-discipline perception and the moderation of the relative strength of prevention over promotion focus (i.e. RSPPF).

Results indicate that individuals who construe power as responsibility (vs opportunity) exhibit higher self-discipline perception, which in turn leads to greater healthy food preference. However, the main effect above can be weakened among the low-power group. Moreover, the above mediating effect of self-discipline perception is stronger for individuals with higher RSPPF.

First, based on the binary-construal perspective, this study refines the classification of high power and introduces it into the antecedent research of healthy food preference. Second, this paper reveals the self-discipline perception as the inner mechanism underlying the effect of the construal of power on healthy food preference, while RSPPF as the boundary condition for this mediating mechanism. Moreover, this research also provides practical implications for healthy food enterprises that the construal of power, self-discipline perception and regulatory focus should be taken into consideration in advertising design and healthy product promotion.

This paper aims to conduct a comparative study between the historical development of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in both the USA and China. It is motivated by the phenomenon that CSR is developing in two different directions (global vs local).

A comparative study on sustainability-linked compensation illustrates how CSR in the USA is driven by firm-level economic decisions, in which the manifestations of CSR are usually those which prove to be the most profitable financially. Moreover, a case analysis on the green bond market in China contrarily illustrates how CSR in China is usually based more on alignment with top-down, state-led initiatives in which the state directs the ways in which CSR is manifested.

This paper reveals that despite globalizing trends are attempting to unify definitions of CSR, they inevitably become localized to fit the societal needs in which they are located.

By understanding how CSR development in these two countries has changed over time, this paper shows that future developments in CSR will likely be influenced more by local practices than by converging global forces.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how CEO humility influences inter-firm collaboration (IFC) and the moderating roles of firm status (a firm's relative position in a social order) and environmental uncertainty on such an effect.

As the firms were nested in township clusters, the theoretical model was tested using hierarchical linear modeling to analyze a multisource and multilevel onsite survey from 254 firms in Chinese township clusters. CEO humility was measured using an 18-item scale reported by both the human resource managers and the financial managers. Besides using CEO self-reported ratings as the measurement of IFC, this study employed additional measurements to further validate the findings, including the IFC reported by the administrative managers and two alternative measures for IFC reported by both CEO and the administrative managers of each firm.

This study found that CEO humility is positively related to IFC (H1), and that this association is marginally more salient when firms have high status (H2) but less salient when firms face a high level of environmental uncertainty (H3).

Findings suggest that firms with humble CEOs may benefit from better inter-firm collaborative relationships, especially when firms have high status (i.e. possess many well-known trademarks), but not when they are in an uncertain environment.

Previous humility studies focused on the influence of leader humility on individual and team outcomes, but little attention has been paid to organizational outcomes. This research extends the implications of leader humility to inter-firm relationships. Moreover, this paper explores the boundary conditions of the influence of CEO humility, thus advancing the contextual understanding of leader humility.

Mixed products, while presenting new business opportunities, raise considerable concerns among managers and researchers. However, whether mixed products (functionally vs culturally) trigger positive or negative consumer reactions is controversial. Hereby, the present research seeks to resolve the conflicting effects by examining the moderating role of service provider type (humanoid service robot vs human employee) in the impact of mixed products on consumer reactions.

Two studies were conducted to explore the effect of mixed products on consumer reactions. Specifically, study 1 was developed to examine the interplay of mixed products and service provider type in shaping consumers' product attitudes and purchase intentions under an offline shopping scenario; study 2 further provided evidence for the mediating roles of perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment in the above processes under an online-shopping context.

The convergent findings of two studies conclude that, when served by a humanoid service robot (vs human employee), consumers exhibit more positive attitudes and higher purchase intentions toward functionally (vs culturally) mixed products. Furthermore, such effect is driven by the perceived usefulness (vs perceived enjoyment) when served by humanoid robot (vs human employee).

First, this is one of the first studies to conceptualize mixed products as the two-dimensional construct (i.e. functionally mixed and culturally mixed), and the findings sheds light on the mixed products literature. Second, this paper introduces service provider type as the boundary condition for the impact of mixed products on consumers' product attitudes and purchase intentions, which expands the match-up hypothesis and schema theory in service marketing. Third, the current research explores the mediating roles of perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment in the above effects, which could make significant contribution to the motivation theory.