Jen-Shou Yang

Purpose: This study investigates how leader character strengths – specifically, the consistency and ambivalence of integrity and justice – and cultural values, namely power distance and collectivism, jointly shape the relationship between responsible leadership (RL) and employees’ organizational citizenship behavior for the environment (OCBE). Design/methodology/approach: The study combines an experimental vignette methodology with Information Integration Theory. Data were collected from 300 employees across various sectors. Findings: When supervisor integrity and justice are ambivalent (i.e. one is high and the other is low), the effect of RL on OCBE intention is weaker than when both are consistent (i.e. both are high or both are low). Furthermore, power distance attenuates the effect of RL on OCBE intention. The moderating role of collectivism is contingent on power distance: collectivism strengthens RL’s impact under low power distance but has little or even a negative influence when power distance is high. Practical implications: Organizations should prioritize the development of managers’ justice-related character strengths while minimizing character ambivalence. They should also adopt culturally contingent strategies to promote employees’ OCBE. For organizations seeking to institutionalize RL, low-power-distance societies provide particularly favorable contexts. Originality/value: This research introduces the concept of leader character ambivalence into the RL–OCBE literature and suggests its detrimental effect. It also helps clarify inconsistent findings regarding the roles of power distance and collectivism, offering a nuanced understanding of how RL effectiveness depends on both leader character consistency and cultural context.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effects of power distance and collectivistic orientations on the effectiveness of intrinsic, extrinsic and reciprocal motivators in promoting employees’ willingness to cooperate for organizational interest. An integrated theoretical framework which incorporated cultural influence on need priority and on legitimacy of social exchange was established to develop the hypotheses.Design/methodology/approach: This study used the methodology of information-integration theory to test the research hypotheses.Findings: This study found that power distance orientation enhanced the effectiveness of extrinsic motivator but mitigated that of intrinsic motivator, and was irrelevant to that of reciprocal motivator. In contrast, collectivistic orientation mitigated the effectiveness of extrinsic motivator but enhanced that of reciprocal motivator, and was irrelevant to that of intrinsic motivator.Practical implications: Managers may use reciprocal motivators for employees with high collectivism in order to increase their willingness to cooperate for the interest of the organization. Meanwhile, extrinsic motivators may be utilized for employees with high power distance but may not be as effective for those with low power distance. However, managers should not expect intrinsic motivators to be as attractive to those with high power distance as to those with low power distance.Originality/value: By integrating multiple cultural orientations and multiple work motivators in one study, this research clarified the differential moderating effects of power distance and collectivistic orientations on the effectiveness of intrinsic, extrinsic and reciprocal motivators in promoting employees’ willingness to cooperate. Potential confounding problems in prior studies derived from the correlation between cultural values and coexistence of multiple motivators were discussed.

Why do various workers exhibit dissimilar motivational levels and performance results within the same incentive systems? According to expectancy theory, this might result from distinct evaluations of whether those rewards deserve corresponding effort. We proposed and verified that affective states influence the valuation of effort and reward. We concluded that happy people are likely to exert efforts for future rewards and sad people tend to seek rewards without extra effort. Our finding can explain divergent employee reactions to the same incentive programme. Our results provide an explanation for the finding that happy workers are more productive than sad workers. These results have crucial implications for human resource management theory and practice.

Generally the literature has favoured the notion that positive affect facilitates creative performance. However, a recent critical review has demonstrated that negative affect can enhance cognitive performance and improve motivation. Moreover, with a few exceptions, previous research comparing positive and negative affect as either a facilitator of or a constraint on creativity factors has rested primarily on the valence approach. Unfortunately, the results were mixed. This paper explores the effects of two common specific emotions elicited in work team processes, anger and companionate love, on individual creativity, with the cognitive‐activation and the functions‐of‐emotions perspectives. The results from our experiment demonstrate that positive emotions can constrain and negative emotions can foster creative performance. More specifically, we found that companionate love constrains creativity, whereas anger facilitates it. Furthermore, our qualitative analyses of interviews with employees justify the implications of the experimental results in an organizational context. Our findings suggest that nurturing a moderate degree of hostility towards opposing ideas from others in an idea‐generation process while concurrently encouraging thoughtfulness in an idea‐implementation process can facilitate managing organizational innovation processes.

In most developed countries, service industry production values exceed those of the manufacturing industry, showing the significance of the former. Although both industries emphasise quality, different characteristics in their services and products make the emphasis on quality, and ways adopted to improve it, differ. From the perspective of the organisation, improvement in service quality (SQ) can be carried out through the service system (including service process and physical environment) and human resource (HR) practices (including job attitude and service ability). Through an indepth analysis of a benchmark company in Taiwan's hair salon industry, findings show: the design of a service process influences the service personnel's job attitude. Similarly, the service process influences the contents of training. Total quality management (TQM) in the service industry requires not just a sound system design, but also a parallel emphasis on training and relevant policies when it comes to HR practices. Only in this way can TQM become efficient, and lead to improvements in job attitude and service ability, and in turn, upgrade SQ, customer satisfaction and organisation performance.

More and more quality management activities involve team-based work. When teams are low on learning ability, difficulties will be encountered in their quality improvement process. Knowledge of how to improve learning ability at team level, therefore, becomes critical in continuous quality improvement. This article reports a case study of a learning organization project implemented in a manufacturing company, focusing on designing a systemic training programme to promote a team learning climate and learning ability. We found four components important in the training programme, including participant selection, course content design, course process design, and vision projects as practice fields. These components as a whole stimulate self-reinforcing mechanisms that motivate participants to acquire knowledge and to apply learned skills, and help teams to promote learning climate, learning capabilities, as well as product quality, production volume and profit margin.