Kedge Business School

As smart products gain autonomy, they increasingly perform tasks that consumers used to carry out themselves. This challenges foundational assumptions in consumer psychology that link psychological value to consumers’ active participation in product use. This article introduces the concept of operative displacement, a consumption arrangement in which smart products perform the core tasks of product use while consumers move from operative agency (directly executing tasks) to meta-agency (configuring, supervising, evaluating, and selectively intervening). We outline three dimensions of operative displacement: process-outcome decoupling, effort conversion into supervisory load, and attentional recession and relational intensification, along with their psychological consequences and implications for future research.

Spatial spillover effects between neighbouring ports can provide evidence of the degree of competition or complementarity within a port range and inform strategic or policy decisions on port investment. However, these effects have received limited attention in dry bulk ports, which account for around 25% of global port traffic by volume. We apply four spatial models - the Spatial Autoregressive Model, Spatial Error Model, Spatial Autocorrelation Combined Model, and Spatial Durbin Model - to 206 European bulk ports from 2005 to 2022 to examine the degree of spatial spillover effects across different dry bulk commodities. Our findings reveal negative spatial spillover effects associated with vessel size and number, which remain statistically significant after accounting for endogeneity in the aggregate model. However, these effects vary across commodity segments. For coal, the baseline SDM indicates negative indirect effects associated with vessel size and a positive total effect of vessel calls. In contrast, the IV estimates reveal significant negative indirect effects for both vessel size and number, while neither variable has a significant total effect. For ore, the negative indirect effects are consistent with a degree of substitution between neighbouring ports, whereas for agricultural ports, the findings are consistent with a more complementary spatial relationship. Our findings are consistent with different dynamics of competition across segments in European bulk ports, particularly when traffic is declining, as for coal, or relatively stable, as for ore.

This paper investigates how microaggressions experienced by female employees can trigger antagonistic work behaviors (AWBs). By drawing on social exchange and reciprocity perspectives, we test a moderated-mediated model of microaggressions toward women. Findings from our vignette experiments (Study 1) conducted with 236 female employees confirmed that individuals exhibit more AWBs in a high-microaggressions condition and vice versa. Additionally, vignette-based Study 2, which used a 2 × 2 factorial design and included 272 female employees, validated the significant interactive effect of psychological ownership (PO) and co-rumination on AWBs. Furthermore, results from a two-wave time-lagged survey (Study 3) conducted with 267 female employees confirmed that microaggressions toward women are significantly related to AWBs. Additionally, we found the significant partial mediating role of PO in the relationship between microaggressions toward women and AWBs. Results regarding the boundary condition showed that high co-rumination at work intensifies the negative relationship between PO and AWBs. We also find evidence of a moderated mediation relationship in our study. These empirical findings add to the existing knowledge on microaggressions toward women and their effects on employee outcomes. Furthermore, these results guide organizations in creating a more diverse workplace where covert forms of discrimination toward women should also be addressed.

Enacting fairness remains a persistent challenge for managers, prompting the need to understand how they can better treat their subordinates. Addressing this challenge, we investigate whether, how, and when mindfulness facilitates managers’ adherence to fairness. Through the lens of Social Cognitive Theory, we frame mindfulness as a metacognitive skill and propose that it enhances managers’ enactment of justice by fostering their moral potency, while this effect is diminished under high-workload conditions. We tested these ideas across two studies. Study 1 (N = 201), an experiment conducted with graduate business students from cooperative education programs, showed that a brief 15-min mindfulness intervention significantly increased moral potency relative to an active control condition, providing causal evidence for the proposed mechanism. Study 2 (N = 419), a three-wave study of managers in the United States and the United Kingdom, offered full support for the overall moderated mediation model. Together, these studies advance the mindfulness and justice literature by clarifying moral implications and contextual boundaries of mindfulness.

We examine how home-country cultural institutions shape firms’ responses to political risk when choosing equity-based entry modes for international expansion. Prior research typically treats host-country political risk as a uniform deterrent, yet we contend that risk is cognitively filtered through national cultural frameworks that guide managerial perceptions and choices. We test this perspective with a meta-analysis of 154 studies (1976–2022), combining Hedges–Olkin models and meta-analytic regressions with Hofstede and GLOBE cultural dimensions and Lasso-based residualization of macro-institutional covariates. On average, we find that host-country political risk is associated with only a modest reduction in equity-based entry, and this relationship is highly heterogeneous. We show that cultural-cognitive institutions systematically account for this heterogeneity: power distance, individualism, and masculinity strengthen firms’ propensity to maintain or increase equity under political risk, whereas uncertainty avoidance weakens it, and long-term orientation shows no robust effect. These findings show that political risk is not simply an external constraint but a culturally interpreted phenomenon. By integrating internalization theory, neo-institutional perspectives, and insights from Institutional Anomie Theory, our study offers a more nuanced account of internationalization strategies and practical guidance for firms navigating political uncertainty across diverse cultural contexts.