Yang Yang

Background: Smart care robots are increasingly viewed as a potential way to address care burden and support care quality in long-term care facilities. However, their integration into routine care practice remains limited, and the conditions required for their effective implementation are not yet well understood from the perspective of frontline nursing assistants. Objective: This study aimed to clarify nursing assistants’ core functional expectations of smart care robots in long-term care facilities and to explore the key conditions for their integration into practice. Methods: A qualitative descriptive study was conducted. Using purposive sampling, 31 frontline nursing assistants were recruited from 5 long-term care facilities in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, with recruitment assistance from facility administrators and eligibility screening by the research team. Semistructured face-to-face interviews were conducted between September and November 2025. Data were analyzed using framework analysis. Results: Framework analysis produced 4 analytical domains: real-world care needs, limited facilitating conditions, major anticipated barriers, and preparatory pathways for implementation. Participants expected robots to support safety monitoring and risk warning, standardized checking and management, repetitive physical tasks, and basic interaction. Although some openness to technology and organizational support existed, these facilitating conditions were insufficient for routine implementation. Key barriers included unclear human-robot collaboration models, inadequate organizational capacity, potential new care risks, and weak external support. Participants emphasized organizational assessment, contextual adaptation, pilot testing, and structured training as essential preparatory steps. Emotional support functions were also valued for alleviating caregivers’ emotional burden in high-intensity care work. Conclusions: Openness to technology, supportive organizational climates, and positive policy and social signals provided an initial foundation for considering robot integration. However, uncertainties remained around human-robot collaboration, risk management, organizational capacity, and concrete external support. Organizational assessment, contextual adaptation, real-world pilot testing, and practical training warrant further evaluation before wider implementation.

Sadness and anger are among the most commonly experienced and expressed negative customer emotions in service failure encounters, yet their differential interpersonal effects on frontline employees remain underexplored. To address this gap, this study examines employees’ emotional and behavioral responses to customer sadness versus anger expressions, drawing on appraisal theory. Through two scenario-based experiments, we find that in the primary appraisal stage, employees experience other-concern emotions (such as empathy, sympathy, and compassion) in response to sad customers, and reciprocal anger in response to angry customers. In the secondary appraisal stage, employees strategically translate these emotions into recovery behaviors. Specifically, employees exert more spontaneous extra-role recovery effort for sad customers, whereas they provide comparable levels of mandatory in-role recovery for sad and angry customers. These findings contribute to the emotion literature on customer-employee interactions in service contexts, and offer valuable insights for service recovery management in the hospitality industry.

The advancement of anthropomorphic generative artificial intelligence, especially in large language models and multimodal capabilities, has developed its two dimensions: functional anthropomorphism and interactional anthropomorphism. Despite this progress, prior research has predominantly emphasized interactional anthropomorphism, neglecting a holistic understanding of the dual dimensions and their combined effects. This research utilizes a sequential mixed-methods approach, starting with qualitative interviews ( n = 15) to explore the joint effects of dual anthropomorphism. The qualitative results were incorporated into a subsequent series of experiments aimed at testing the joint effects, their underlying mechanisms, and boundary conditions. By extending the Expectation Confirmation Model (ECM), this research integrates the dual anthropomorphic features of GAI into a dynamic process that links users’ initial expectations—both cognitive and emotional—to their subsequent experiences, evaluations, and continuance intentions. This user-centered approach addresses the growing demand in IS research to focus on not only technological features but also on how these features influence user experiences. The findings provide practical recommendations to GAI service designers and deployers, offering strategies to enhance user experiences and improve the effectiveness of GAI applications.

Once a mass health crisis breaks out, it causes concern among whole societies. Thus, understanding the individual’s behavior in response to such events is key in government crisis management. From the perspective of social influence theory, this study adopts the empirical research method to collect data information in February 2020 through online survey, with a view to comprehensively describe the individuals’conformity behavior during the COVID-19 outbreak in China. The individual’s conformity behavior and new influencing factors were identified. The results revealed that affective risk perception, cognitive risk perception, and individual risk knowledge had a positive significant impact on normative influence. Affective risk perception and individual risk knowledge had a positive significant on informative influence. Cognitive risk perception did not significantly impact informative influence. Informative influence and normative influence had a positive effect on conformity behavior. These results have significant implications for the management behavior of the government.

Innovation plays a critical role in shaping market advantages and leading technology competition. Meanwhile, innovations have spillover effects that are beneficial to others, even though they are not involved in the practice of innovation. Innovation is full of uncertainty, which means investment is not guaranteed to pay off for innovators. Therefore, it is essential to choose the appropriate innovation strategy, especially for those leading firms with both innovative ability and bargaining power. In this paper, both uncertainty (including technical uncertainty and market uncertainty) and spillover effect are taken into consideration to explore the innovation strategies adopted by leading firms: non‐innovation, independent innovation, and collaborative innovation (i.e., co‐innovation hereafter). Furthermore, numerical analysis is conducted to explore the integration strategy that a leading firm adopts to control one of the manufacturers. The results are obtained as follows. First, the innovation of a leading supplier is always beneficial to the whole supply chain. Second, the spillover effect of co‐innovation is more significant, compared to other innovation strategies. Last, from the perspectives of profit and innovation efficiency across the supply chain, co‐innovation is the best option for a leading firm.

China’s ski tourism industry has grown tremendously in the past few years, leading to an increasing amount of tourism-related carbon emissions with negative environmental impacts. Although the government and other market participants are trying to solve the problem from both legislative and technological perspectives, encouraging tourists to engage in low-carbon behavior may play a more important role. This study aims to explore how tourism involvement influences ski tourists’ low-carbon behavior. A sampling survey was conducted to collect 422 valid responses from two ski resorts (indoor and outdoor). Findings from structural equation modeling revealed a significant positive impact of tourism involvement on both low-carbon tourism behavior and low-carbon daily behavior, and this impact can be serially mediated by place attachment and environmental responsibility. In addition, we confirmed that the impact of ski tourism involvement on place attachment is more significant for outdoor ski resorts compared with indoor ones. This study expands the categories of destinations for research on ski tourism and low-carbon behavior. It provides implications for encouraging visitor pro-environmental behavior while corroborating the social value of ski tourism in addressing environmental issues. It also offers insights for government low-carbon campaigns, business management practices, and individuals with actionable attitudes. However, it is worth noting that this study was conducted in a single latitude region and did not conduct a comparative analysis with different locations across latitudes. Future research could investigate skiers in cities of different latitudes to gain a more comprehensive understanding.

Supply chain finance (SCF), which has gained prominent attention from academicians, is a complex process involving various participants. However, previous studies have not provided a comprehensive framework integrating these participants or a consensus on how participants’ strategies influence SCF. Here, a comprehensive framework is proposed to investigate SCF through an agent-based approach. We chose the Chinese market to proxy key model parameters. We find that although banks prefer large businesses, trade credit, and partial credit guarantee still play a pair of main complementary financing channels for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The cautious strategies of agents indeed significantly decrease the risk contagions in the supply chain. However, marketisation negatively moderates this effect for SMEs. From the banks’ perspective, although longer-term credit policies bring lower risk contagions, they increase the uncertainty of the banks’ risk. In addition, our extended framework also shows that the market-oriented financial system benefits either large business or SMEs as well as smooths the risk fluctuation for banks. This study not only verifies some economic phenomena but also provides a new systematic angle for understanding SCF. We also discuss in detail this study’ important practical insights and theoretical contribution.

This study proposes a framework to analyze the strategic value of integration, when separation of ownership and control is considered. According to this framework, we investigate the optimal integration strategy in different control distribution and discuss how external market influences the best strategic choice. Beside theoretical analysis, we also provide evidence from Chinese listed firms to validate our research. The key results of our study show that first, unintegrated strategy works best, if the level of control-ownership disparity is extremely high. Second, in general, vertical strategy is more appropriate for substitute markets, while horizontal strategy may bring more benefits in a highly complementary market. Third, the impact of integration strategy on a firm’s performance is negatively moderated by control-ownership disparity. However, this moderate effect may be weakened by market structure. Our results provide a new and comprehensive perspective for understanding the inconsistent results from previous studies. Moreover, the analysis in this study also highlights a firm’s strategic decision and market regulation policy.

Overwork is prevalent in labour-intensive industries, such as the hospitality sector, especially in Asia. This paper explores the dual-squeeze effect of professional life on personal life, which constitutes critical antecedents of overwork. Additionally, it investigates the organizational and individual consequences of overwork. A multi-wave, multi-source field study was conducted to verify a two-stage structural equation model. Results show that all three types of job demands (time demand, work intensity, and emotional labour demand) are positively associated with task performance. Not only do job demands directly affect overwork, but they also promote work–family conflict, which indirectly cause overwork. Further, overwork inhibits helping behaviour and aggravates interpersonal conflicts, which are covert organizational outcomes. The impacts of overwork on family satisfaction vary with marital status and gender. Our findings contribute to the literature of overwork by taking a ternary approach to work–family–leisure and elucidate the concealed consequences for organizations and individuals’ well-being.