Search

The impact of leader characteristics on international activities has been identified in the literature, but leader narcissism, as a psychological feature, has long been neglected, especially in the field of international business. Based on an empirical study of Chinese construction firms over the period between 2006 and 2016, this paper discusses the positive relationships between leaders’ narcissism and firms’ pace of internationalization, as well as the tendency to choose developing countries as destinations. The data also raise strong support for the argument that firm internal factor-foreign listing and external factor-institutional environment (anticorruption) weaken the effects of leader narcissism on international patterns. These research results indicate the effects of leaders’ personality on international management under different internal and external environments and contribute to upper echelons theory. Meanwhile, it is emphasized that leaders’ personal decision-making plays an important role in the strategy and performance of construction firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information systems (IS) investments fail largely because a newly implemented system is not fully infused into its users’ everyday life at work. IS infusion beyond an organization's mandated usage requires that users are actively motivated to use it and that they hold authority over usage of the system. Psychological empowerment represents one's motivational orientation, as well as one's authority to tap into a system's maximum potential. This empowerment is likely an important mechanism underlying successful IS infusion. The main objectives of this study are to: 1) understand the antecedents of empowerment; and 2) examine the effect of empowerment on IS infusion. We developed a theoretical model that was empirically tested through a field study, which focused upon individuals’ use of a customer relationship management system. The results strongly support our theoretical model and reveal that the design of a work environment (i.e., IS, job, and social structure) affects the development of user empowerment. User empowerment in-turn plays a prominent role in regulating various aspects of IS infusion (i.e., extended use, integrative use, and emergent use). Overall, this paper contributes to postadoption research by introducing the concept of user empowerment and demonstrating its critical role in regulating IS infusion. It also helps managers promote user empowerment and eventually achieve IS infusion in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with the evaluation of Japanese traditional crafts, in which product items are assessed according to the so-called “Kansei” features by means of the semantic differential method. For traditional crafts, decisions on which items to buy or use are usually influenced by personal feelings/characteristics; therefore, we shall propose a consumer-oriented evaluation model targeting these specific requests by consumers. Particularly, given a consumer's request, the proposed model aims to define an evaluation function that quantifies how well a product item meets the consumer's feeling preferences. An application to evaluating patterns of Kutani porcelain is conducted to illustrate how the proposed evaluation model works, in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]