Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine how microblog communication enabled a new form of hybrid net-roots third-sector organization that rely heavily on the internet to achieve multiple organizational successes in civil society, social movement and service providing in China, where the government holds predominating power over the third sector.

A qualitative inductive analysis was conducted to analyze two successful organizations’ Sina tweets sent from their Weibo debuts to the dates when they achieved their first milestone successes. In the analysis, the author iteratively alternated between emic data coding and etic reference to literature on social movement rhetoric and nonprofits’ microblog communication.

This study developed an indigenous communication framework featuring three key communication strategies: changing perceptions, mobilizing action, and building and maintaining relationships, each associated with specific tactics. These strategies and tactics allowed both organizations to tap into social media’s interactive features to engage publics and construct legitimacy.

This paper enriches social media-based communication research and classic social movement rhetoric, and further illustrates strategic communication’s active role in reacting to and reforming institutional contexts. Findings from study might be extended to address similar problems experienced by nonprofits across countries, especially within those that operate in a context where institutional separation from a predominant government is unavailable.

This original communication framework developed in this study crystalizes strategic microblog use by a nascent type of nonprofit when fulfilling functions reflects civil society, social movements and traditional nonprofit organizations in an understudied political and social context.

This paper seeks to advance paracrisis research by clarifying paracrises’ distinct features and developing typologies of paracrises and response strategies with strong external validity.

A case series study of 143 paracrises systematically selected from various news and trade sources was conducted to build an organizational paracrisis communication framework that connects paracrisis clusters with paracrisis response strategies.

Results of the study attest to the validity of the paracrisis concept by demonstrating refined paracrisis clusters’ connections with refined paracrisis response strategies.

This study enriches paracrisis research by refining the paracrisis definition, paracrisis clusters and response strategies. Its rigorous descriptions of how organizations address paracrises distinguish paracrisis response strategies from traditional crisis response strategies and generate rich possibilities for future analytic investigations.

As perhaps the first empirical attempt to build a comprehensive framework of organizational paracrisis communication, this descriptive study lays the groundwork for the burgeoning paracrisis communication research.

This study explored how organizational leaders at different hierarchical levels may communicatively enhance employees' health and well-being. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, it proposed a model that connects health-oriented leadership communication at supervisory and executive levels with remote workers' self-care and stress levels during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data collected through a survey of 363 full-time United States (US) employees were analyzed to test the model.

Results showed health-oriented communication at the two leadership levels directly influenced employees' self-care, which in turn reduced their stress levels. Further, executive leaders' health-oriented leadership communication indirectly impacted remote workers' self-care through its positive association with supervisors' health-oriented leadership communication.

This study offers much-needed guidelines for executive leaders, supervisors and communication practitioners seeking to meet employees' growing expectations for a healthy work environment in today's post-pandemic era.

Although the literature has established organizational leadership as a vital determinant for a healthy workforce, few studies have explored leaders' health-specific communication to enhance employee health. This study is the first to conceptualize health-oriented leadership communication at dual hierarchical levels and uncover its influence on employees. The results suggested the importance of health-oriented leadership communication across hierarchical levels in building a healthy workplace.

Opaque selling has become popular among service providers in recent years. Although many researchers have investigated the optimality of opaque selling for service providers focusing on heterogeneous consumers, one question remaining unexplored is how the service providers’ optimal decisions are impacted by competitive intensity in a heterogeneous market. This paper aims to determine the conditions under which opaque selling is optimal for competing service providers.

The paper takes a Hotelling model to characterize the competition between two service providers. The authors also consider the interaction between the service providers and intermediary. Service providers act as game leaders and determine whether they should cooperate with the intermediary to introduce the opaque service.

The authors find that two competing service providers do not always benefit from opaque selling in a heterogeneous market consisting of leisure and business consumers, and the competitive intensity plays a significant role in the service providers’ decision optimization. Opaque selling allows service providers to acquire more profit in a highly competitive market or when the market contains a large proportion of leisure consumers. Otherwise, it is optimal for service providers without introducing the opaque selling.

The paper examines the optimality of opaque selling for competing service providers, and provides the suggestions to optimize the service providers’ decisions.

The paper investigates how the service providers’ optimal decisions are impacted by competitive intensity, considering the interaction between the service providers and intermediary.

This study aims to reveal the room-temperature effect of a superconducting gravimeter prototype, which will guide its subsequent optimization to improve its gravimetric measurement accuracy.

Without leveling, the prototype output signal, tilt data and room temperature were measured under steady operating conditions. After analyzing the correlations of the three data sets, the residuals of the prototype’s output signal were compensated using the tilt data and the geodynamic effects (ocean tide loading, atmospheric loading and the gravitational effect of polar motion) were then corrected.

The remaining residuals after correction may be caused by small tilt variations that are due to the sensor chamber temperature and radiation shield temperature changes. These small tilt variations were submerged in the tilt signal noise. Although the peak-to-peak noise of the tiltmeter does not exceed 15 µrad, it can still produce gravimetric deviations above 60 µGal when the prototype is significantly tilted.

This study analyzes in detail the room-temperature effect of a superconducting gravimeter prototype, introduces the tilt effect of the relative gravimeters to compensate for the gravimetric deviations and emphasizes that the improvement of fine leveling and the accuracy of the tiltmeter are key requirements for the prototype to perform high-accuracy gravity measurement tasks.

Corporate entrepreneurship is an important way for organizations to gain competitive advantages and achieve sustainable development. However, few studies pay attention to the influence of CEO strategic leadership on corporate entrepreneurship. Drawing on social identity theory and uncertainty-identity theory, this study aims to investigate whether CEO relationship-focused leadership impacts corporate entrepreneurship through middle managers’ (MMs’) organizational identification and whether the indirect effect is moderated by environmental uncertainty.

Using 192 Chinese samples with 192 firm-level and 716 department-level observations, this study uses multilevel structural equations modeling by Mplus 8.0 to test the theoretical model.

This study finds that CEO relationship-focused leadership positively predicts MMs’ organizational identification and corporate entrepreneurship, and MMs’ organizational identification mediates the relationship between CEO relationship-focused leadership and corporate entrepreneurship. In addition, environmental uncertainty moderates not only the relationship between CEO relationship-focused leadership and MMs’ organizational identification but also the indirect effect of CEO relationship-focused leadership on corporate entrepreneurship through MMs’ organizational identification.

This study enriches the understanding of process and contextualization of CEO strategic leadership influencing on corporate entrepreneurship.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to explore the influence of CEO relationship-focused leadership on corporate entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze theoretically the influence of normal stress on the formability of aluminum alloy sheets in non-linear strain paths.

Four loading modes of non-linear strain paths are investigated in detail to consider the effect of normal stress on formability of aluminum alloy sheets.

Results show that the influence of normal stress in the first stage can be ignored. However, the normal stress in the second stage enhances the formability of aluminum alloy sheets obviously. Besides, the normal stress in the second stage is found to have larger effect on forming limit stress than that in the first stage.

Maybe more experiment data should be obtained to support the theoretical findings.

This current study provides a better understanding of normal stress effect on the formability of aluminum alloy sheets in non-linear strain paths. Since the reacting stage of normal stress play important roles in normal stress effect on the formability of aluminum alloy sheets, the insight obtained in this paper will help to judge the instability of aluminum alloy sheets in complex forming processes with normal stress reacting on the sheet or tube.