This study examines the historical development process of the 3 Pillar activity in Toyota, thereby providing a contextualized explanation on how participative gemba kaizen, that is closely linked to Japanese values, can be transferred to multinational companies' (MNCs') overseas subsidiaries as a globally standardized system. This case is extreme, as Japanese MNCs (JMNCs) have largely given up trying to incorporate Japanese values globally, and instead have introduced market-based Western values. In contrast to such JMNCs experiencing difficulty in sustaining their global competitiveness, Toyota has embraced participative gemba kaizen to strengthen its global competitiveness.
This study examines how dynamic capabilities influence firm performance in Japan. Using integrated reports (N = 62), we identify a U-shaped relationship between transforming capability and operating profit margin, suggesting 'transformation pain' - an initial performance decline during reconfiguration. Crucially, female board representation significantly moderates this link, acting as a strategic buffer. Corporate values also positively impact performance. These findings suggest that this diversity enhances organizational resilience during structural renewal in the Japanese context.
Hallyu marketing (i.e. the strategic deployment of Korean popular culture to promote goods and services globally) has emerged as one of the most consequential non-Western marketing phenomena of the postcolonial era. Yet despite its extraordinary commercial footprint, it remains theoretically underspecified in the academic marketing literature. This special issue advances Hallyu marketing from a descriptive practitioner concept to a theoretically grounded, empirically validated, and multi-level research programme. Drawing on seven original empirical studies spanning social network analysis, grounded theory, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, experimental design, longitudinal survey, topic modelling, event study, and archival case research across Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, the United States, and South Korea, the issue establishes that Hallyu marketing is distinguished by four structural elements: female universalism as its performing myth, community clusters as its organizational infrastructure, creative content and digital platforms as its commercial mechanism, and celebrity brand ambassadorship as its instrument for converting cultural capital into firm-level financial returns. Theoretical and practical implications for Hallyu marketing and pop culture marketing more broadly are discussed.
This conclusion paper to the special issue on Hallyu marketing subjects the seven contributing papers to critical scholarly scrutiny, identifying the theoretical and methodological limitations that the field must address to mature as a research programme. Organized in the same thematic sequence as the special issue introduction, the paper evaluates each contribution's advances and shortcomings across four dimensions: key findings, theoretical limitations, methodological constraints, and future research directions. Collectively, the papers establish Hallyu marketing's definitional architecture, document its commercial mechanisms, identify its behavioural boundaries, and demonstrate its financial market legibility. Yet significant gaps remain: the female gaze as a cultural mechanism linking Hallyu fandom to financial market reactions is undertheorized; fan-generated creativity is conflated with firm-produced content creativity; geographic coverage excludes Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia; and the intersection of Hallyu marketing with artificial intelligence, sustainability, and emerging K-industries remains unaddressed. A five-question future research agenda is proposed to guide the next generation of Hallyu marketing scholarship.
How resource-based enterprises (RBEs) orchestrate innovation ecosystems to generate green value remains a critical issue. We conducted a longitudinal single-case study of China Baowu Steel Group to construct a process model that reveals how incumbent firms achieve this transformation through the development of vertical and horizontal ties. We identify three evolutionary stages, emergence, expansion, and optimization, shaped by a recursive mechanism between identification of complementor relationships and green strategic actions. Through this process, green value develops across process, product, and service dimensions, while the ecosystem evolves from boundary expansion to integration and leadership.
As digital transformation accelerates across China, organizations increasingly depend on digital platforms not only to enhance operational efficiency but also to cultivate employee-driven innovation. However, the mechanisms through which platform capabilities translate into intrapreneurial behaviour remain underexplored. This study investigates how digital platform capability influences employee intrapreneurship using two-wave matched data from 278 senior managers and employees in China. Results show that digital integration and reconfiguration capabilities significantly promote intrapreneurship. Employee value co-creation partially mediates these effects, while employee flexibility strengthens the indirect relationships. These findings enrich understanding of how digital platforms facilitate bottom-up innovation in China's evolving digital economy.
This study examines how ownership structure, franchisee autonomy, and brand governance shape the trade-off between franchise expansion and organizational stability. Drawing on agency theory and 84 interviews across eight leading convenience store and estate agency brands in Taiwan, it finds that governance outcomes depend not on ownership alone, but on the fit among ownership design, autonomy, and brand governance capacity. In convenience stores, plural-form and co-ownership arrangements enhance stability through stronger monitoring and brand discipline. In estate agencies, pure franchising promotes faster expansion but may reduce stability when brand governance is weak.
This study examines whether nationality, as a proxy for national culture within Hofstede's framework, explains workplace outcomes, or whether organizational and psychological mechanisms offer stronger explanatory power in integrated multinational environments. Survey data were collected from 161 professionals working in China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) organizations. Hayes' PROCESS macro (v4.0) was used to test a moderated-mediation model, with demographic variables as predictors, cross-cultural leadership (CCL) and turnover intentions (TI) as outcomes, organizational commitment (OC) as a mediator, and job satisfaction (JS) as a moderator. Results show that demographic variables significantly predict both CCL and TI, with education and job position exerting the strongest effects. OC mediates the relationship between demographics and TI, while JS moderates demographic effects on both outcomes. In contrast, nationality shows no significant effects. These findings suggest that nationality may be less influential in highly integrated environments, highlighting the importance of organizational commitment and job satisfaction. The study provides empirical evidence from the Belt and Road Initiative context and offers implications for managing multinational project teams.
As the fourth industrial revolution rapidly transforms global markets, the integration of advanced digital competencies has become a critical prerequisite for small and medium enterprises. This study explores how Industry 4.0 competencies affect sustainable manufacturing performance among Malaysian SMEs. Using survey data from 156 manufacturers and partial least squares structural equation modelling, results show that artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and corporate social responsibility significantly enhance sustainability outcomes. Organizational learning had no effect. Importantly, rational culture moderates these relationships, amplifying positive impacts. The findings offer actionable insights for SMEs, policymakers, and governments to strengthen sustainability practices in the digital era.
International project-based organizations (PBOs) often struggle to sustain performance when positioned at the periphery of global value chains, where difficulties in delivering superior customer value exacerbate their liability of outsidership (LOO). This study investigates how PBOs address LOO by constructing and evolving value innovation (VI) logic that fuses customer orientation and innovation. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of a leading PBO in China with a sensemaking lens, we develop a framework illustrating how VI emerges as an adaptive process shaped by LOO and enacted through social and technical structures. These findings provide process-oriented insights for reframing cognition and sustaining innovation.
This study examine how generative AI empowers tourist value co-creation in smart tourism scenescapes and its implications for destination governance. Integrating S - O - R and cognition - affect - conation, we propose an SCAR model linking five AI scenescape factors (guidance, storytelling, sensing, collaboration, operation) to perceived value, cultural identity, participation, and co-creation. Survey data from 426 visitors in three AI-enabled towns in Zhejiang, China were analysed using PLS-SEM, ANN, and NCA, complemented by interviews. Storytelling and collaboration are strongest; operation is least salient. Perceived value boosts identity and participation, with identity the stronger mediator.
This study introduces Overseas Professional Readiness (OPR) as a composite construct and examines how it influences expatriates' individual work performance (IWP). Using data from 313 Chinese construction expatriates in Thailand and PLS-SEM analysis, the results show that Cultural Intelligence (CQ) and Construction Technical Intelligence (CTI) fully mediate the OPR - IWP relationship, with CTI playing a stronger role. Educational level exerts a comparatively stronger moderating effect on the CTI - IWP relationship. The findings reveal the dual-capability mediation mechanism of CQ and CTI and thereby emphasize the theoretical extension beyond traditional culture-centred expatriation models.
Leader secure-base support (LSBS) is generally expected to be associated with wide-ranging benefits due to its dual emphasis on care and developmental challenge. By adopting a within-person approach to capture daily fluctuations in LSBS, we caution its double-edged effects in eliciting employee voice. Drawing on cognitive evaluation theory, the current research develops an integrative theoretical model to uncover whether, how, and when daily LSBS influences employees' daily promotive and prohibitive voice. A multilevel, multiphase, and multisource experience sampling method spanning 10 consecutive workdays was conducted to test our model. Results indicate that daily LSBS simultaneously enhances employees' challenging appraisal and legitimate power perception. Challenging appraisal facilitates both daily promotive and prohibitive voice, whereas legitimate power perception stimulates daily promotive voice yet constrains daily prohibitive voice. Besides, power distance orientation functions as a crucial between-person contingency to attenuate the positive within-person relationship between daily LSBS and challenging appraisal, as well as the mediating effects of challenging appraisal. By contrast, power distance orientation magnifies the positive relationship between daily LSBS and legitimate power perception, along with the mediating effects of legitimate power perception. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and suggest directions for future research.
The study investigates employee resilience as a mediator between workplace ostracism and employee vitality. It also examines servant leadership as a moderator of the relationship between workplace ostracism and resilience. Two-wave data (N = 407) were collected from the Malaysian hotel industry through questionnaire survey and tested using PLS-SEM. Employee resilience was found to mediate the relationship between workplace ostracism and vitality, and servant leadership played a crucial, positive role in mitigating the negative impact of workplace ostracism on employee resilience. This research applied COR theory and servant leadership theory to test a model, contributing significantly to the hospitality literature.
This study explores the mechanism through which CEO entrepreneurial leadership promotes new venture growth. By analysing data from 216 core leaders in Chinese new ventures, this study finds that employees' followership and meaning in life mediate the relationship between CEO entrepreneurial leadership and new venture growth. Additionally, organizational slack moderates the relationship between employees' followership and new venture growth. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), this study offers the first empirical evidence for the dual-path (behavioural and cognitive) internalization mechanisms of CEO entrepreneurial leadership and illuminates the boundary condition of organizational slack. Finally, limitations and implications for future research are discussed.
Electronic performance monitoring (EPM) provides organizations with the technological means to detect and reduce employees' deviant behaviours, but its 'digital panopticon' scenario seems to increase such deviant behaviours. Drawing on gaze theory, we investigate the dual-edged sword effect of EPM on employee counterproductive work behaviour (CWB). The empirical results of 404 two-wave survey responses from China revealed that EPM simultaneously reduces both CWB-O and CWB-I by enhancing employee perceptions of moral scrutiny while increasing such behaviours by triggering their psychological reactance. Furthermore, employees' organizational identification moderates both effects. Our study offers important implications for the ethical management of EPM.
This paper examines the strategic competition between China and Japan in the Mekong Subregion, focusing on how their approaches to non-traditional security and regional connectivity shape foreign policy and foreign direct investment (FDI) patterns. Using structural realism and the OLI paradigm, the study shows three projected scenarios, which are Framework-Led Multilateralism, Fragmented Bilateralism, and Competitive Coexistence. The scenarios capture the future of the political and economic implications of this rivalry. The findings suggest that policymakers and businesses must adopt integrated geopolitical and economic analysis, recognizing that great-power competition directly influences investment patterns and long-term strategic opportunities.
This study theorizes how entrepreneurs become 'Super Individuals' in AI-mediated China. Using grounded theory and multi-source qualitative evidence, we show that marginal-cost collapse, platform governance, and social atomization shape this transformation. Individuals respond through two mechanisms: identity reconstruction (from task executor to algorithmic orchestrator via digital doppelg & auml;ngers) and responsibility reconstruction (from ambiguity to radical liability). By internalizing an 'I choose, I bear' ethos, they achieve organization-like scale through workflow automation while remaining dependent on platform infrastructures. The study redefines entrepreneurial agency and introduces the Super Individual as a new analytical unit.
AI distrust drives employee creativity along two distinct pathways: knowledge manipulation, which constrains idea generation, and knowledge searching, which enhances it. Grounded in Uncertainty Management Theory and the Knowledge-Based View, we unpack how these contrasting routes emerge. AI self-efficacy shapes the outcome: high self-efficacy directs distrust towards productive knowledge searching, while low self-efficacy triggers defensive knowledge manipulation. Evidence from a scenario-based experiment (N = 256) and a three-wave, multi-industry survey in China (N = 384) reframes AI distrust as a conditional catalyst for innovation, offering practical guidance for converting scepticism into a driver of organizational creativity.
