Search results

This study examines a way to enhance the effectiveness of commercials embedded in the telecasts of mega sporting events. We hypothesise that embedded commercials are more likeable when the cues of the commercials match the motivations induced by the telecasts of sports games. Specifically, we posit that the telecasts of mega-sporting events induce motives of relatedness (rather than motives of competence) and that the advertisements embedded in these telecasts will be more effective when they appeal to the relatedness motive. The results support this hypothesis. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed and future research directions are provided.

The purpose of this research is to trace the evolution of the claims used for advertising food products in Italian magazines, by analysing the content and structure of the claims, the target audiences and the elements that have the greatest influence on the presence of the claims in food advertising.

On the basis of the research conducted by Pratt and Pratt (1995), revised and adapted to the Italian food context, the authors designed a matrix of 1,316 advertisements, which were selected based on the analysis of 67,340 advertisements and using the reference to the food sector as a discriminator. The advertisements were extrapolated from a sample of six Italian magazines, so as to determine the extent to which the various demographic groups in Italy are exposed to print advertising for food, beverages and food supplements. The authors examined the frequency of the relevant advertising forms over a period of four years, from January 2014 to December 2017.

The results revealed the main types of claims used in the four-year period, as well as the statistically significant differences between the different magazine panels, as concerns the frequency and the types of messages. Moreover, a strong relationship between the number of advertisements in the magazines and the time of the year was also ascertained, as well as significant gender variations.

This study introduces the trends and dynamics of the Italian printed advertising for food to the relevant scientific literature. The results yielded by this research have added further implications and contributions to the existing studies, as concerns claim diffusion based on type, gender and seasonality, and the authors also provide important insights to various socio-economical stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships among athlete star power, enjoyment and revisit intention of sport event tourists in a sport mega-event (SME).

This study was conducted in the context of 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. A total of 419 respondents completed a survey. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

This study proved the final structure model fit well by having the values and scores higher than the minimum cutoff in all categories. Path coefficients indicate that H1a, H1c and H2 were supported while H1b was not supported by the analysis. In addition, enjoyment partially mediated the relationship between athlete star power and revisit intentions. In particular, two mediating effects were found: enjoyment mediated trustworthiness and revisit intention and expertise and revisit intention. However, enjoyment did not mediate the relationship between attractiveness and revisit intentions.

The limitation of this study lies within two perspectives. Since the data have been collected in one country, the results may be viewed and interpreted for a specific location and time. Thus, it is strongly recommended to conduct the similar studies in the future Olympic Games. In the other perspective, the results could be different from one to another sport game because of the popularity by star power and game itself.

This study adds the literature on sport event research. Although there were a few studies on the effect of athlete star power, a dearth of research examined the relationships among athlete star power (trustworthiness, attractiveness and expertise), enjoyment and revisit intention. These results are valuable to SME managers to increase the propensity of tourists’ revisit intention at sport mega-event by understanding the factors that lead to increased tourist enjoyment.

Social television (Social TV) viewing of live sports events is an emerging trend. The realm of transformative service research (TSR) envisions that every service consumption experience must lead to consumer well-being. Currently, a full appreciation of the well-being factors obtained through Social TV viewing is lacking. This study aims to gain a holistic understanding of the concept of digital sports well-being obtained through live Social TV viewing of sports events.

Focus group interviews were used to collect data from the 40 regular sports viewers, and the qualitative data obtained is analyzed thematically using NVivo 12. A post hoc verification of the identified themes is done to narrow down the most critical themes.

The exploration helped understand the concept of digital sports well-being (DSW) obtained through live Social TV sports spectating and identified five critical themes that constitute its formation. The themes that emerged were virtual connectedness, vividness, uncertainty reduction, online disinhibition and perceived autonomy. This study defines the concept and develops a conceptual model for DSW.

This study adds to the body of knowledge in TSR, transformative sport service research, digital customer engagement, value co-creation in digital platforms, self-determination theory and flow theory. The qualitative study is exploratory, with participants’ views based on a single match in one particular sport, and as such, its findings are restrained by the small sample size and the specific sport. To extend this study’s implications, empirical research involving a larger and more diversified sample involving multiple sports Social TV viewing experiences would help better understand the DSW concept.

The research provides insights to Social TV live streamers of sporting events and digital media marketers about the DSW construct and identifies the valued DSW dimensions that could provide a competitive advantage.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the exploration is the first attempt to describe the concept of DSW and identify associated themes.

The meddling of foreign players into the Indian hotel industry has triggered fervent competitiveness, and therefore, consumers' attitude, intention and behavior have been the epicenter of all activities. This study endeavors to explicate enablers of online hotel booking intention (OHBI) in the Indian hospitality industry.

The study examined OHBI of 560 travelers during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic in India using structural equation modeling and an extended technology acceptance model. Direct and indirect associations were explored using mediation and moderation.

The results manifest that hotel website credibility, perceived website interactivity and perceived ease of use (PEU) aggrandize perceived usefulness (PU), which, in turn, considerably magnifies travelers' OHBI. PEU and PU partially mediate the relationship in the model. Into the bargain, service affordability reinforces the relationship, while perceived pandemic risk enfeebles the relationship between PU and OHBI.

The study unfurls pressing determinants of PEU, PU and OHBI that may facilitate hoteliers to lure travelers and enhance profitability.

There is a paucity of literature on “hotel website credibility” and “perceived pandemic risk” in the hospitality industry. Hence, the study enriches literature by assimilating underlying constructs through an epigrammatic conceptual model. The study is distinctive because it unearths the possibilities of mediation and moderation amongst the aforementioned constructs and posits the calamitous effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the tourism and hospitality sector.

Empowering leadership is often considered unequivocally positive for employees, but recent studies have shown that this ostensibly straightforward effect is more complex. The dual facets of the effect of empowering leadership – especially on employees’ innovative behaviour – have received insufficient attention. Based on job demand-resource (JD-R) theory, this study aims to propose a theoretical framework for the relationship between empowering leadership and employees’ innovative behaviours with a dual process model of gain and loss.

This study is survey based, with 261 paired leader–employee data points collected in the People’s Republic of China.

The results show that empowering leadership has a “double-edged” effect on employees’ innovative behaviours: it affects innovative behaviours positively through employee job engagement and negatively through emotional exhaustion. Moreover, trust in leaders moderates the mediating roles of job engagement and emotional exhaustion.

This study contends that empowering leadership has a dual impact on employees and proposes a promising model of this double-edged effect to contrast with other complex models in the empowering leadership literature. Furthermore, this study uses JD-R theory to deeply explore the dual process whereby empowering leadership influences employees’ innovative behaviour and provides practical guidance for business management.

With the usage of social media and Web 2. 0, YouTube channels currently play a pivotal role in supporting a traveler’s destination visit. Travelers create their YouTube channels and share their past experiences in the form of videos, which helps other potential travelers to support their destination visit. The purpose of this paper is to understand how travelers adopt information through YouTube channels and how it influences the traveler’s intention to visit a destination.

A research model was constructed and empirically tested by using a sample of 486 respondents who watch YouTube channels before visiting a destination. Further, the hypotheses of this study were validated with the help of structural equation modeling using partial least squares. The respondents in this study were from Delhi.

This paper found comprehensiveness, relevance, timeliness, source expertise and attitude as the most significant predictors of a traveler’s destination visit intention through YouTube channel adoption. Further, source trustworthiness and accuracy were not found to be statistically significant.

The findings of this paper were based on data taken from the local respondents in Delhi. Further, it analyzed the influence of only seven dimensions on destination visit intention, which could have excluded some important factors that influence tourists’ destination visit intention.

This paper has provided implications for YouTube vloggers and tourists. The result proves that while making decisions regarding destination visit, tourists thinks critically and scrutinize the content of YouTube channels prior to deciding a destination. So, vloggers should provide relevant, comprehensive and accurate destination information through their videos to tourists.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first in the Indian context to examine the adoption of YouTube channels before visiting destinations through information adoption models with additional constructs.

The purpose of this paper is to show how different combinations of the subdimensions of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) information quality (consisting of its accuracy, completeness, relevance, timeliness, and sidedness) may affect consumers' eWOM use behavior from a configurational approach.

Based on a synthesis of past literature, five precursors of eWOM use were considered. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was employed to understand the configurations that lead to travel-related eWOM use. The study was conducted with 311 consumers from an online travel service company.

Findings identified six solutions that explain eWOM use. EWOM accuracy, completeness, and sidedness are found to be core conditions reinforcing consumers' use of eWOM in combination with different peripheral conditions, including the subdimensions of eWOM information quality and the traits of the consumers (such as social media use time and gender).

Factors related to eWOM information quality and traits of the consumers, when considered in combination, predict eWOM use behavior in particular sets of conditions.

This work enriches the eWOM literature by providing an in-depth understanding of eWOM use from a configuration perspective. Configuration analysis serves as a better tool for explaining the complex relationships among variables than a regression analysis approach does. Additionally, in response to the need to move beyond multiple regression analysis to algorithmic approaches, this study shifts the emphasis from a symmetric paradigm to an asymmetric perspective for data analysis focused on eWOM use.

Prior research indicates that empowering leadership has simultaneous contradictory effects on work performance. This study aimed to explore contradictory mechanisms through which empowering leadership is related to work role performance behaviors.

The sample was composed of 274 professionals from five IT companies located in the Baltic area. OLS regression analyses were performed using MEDCURVE for SPSS 23.0.

Empowering leadership is positively related to work role performance behaviors; additionally, perceived uncertainty mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and work role performance behaviors, with the relationship between empowering leadership and uncertainty having a curvilinear U-shape (concave upward). That is, although empowering leadership is positively related to work role performance, the relationship between empowering leadership and work role performance though uncertainty becomes non-significant at high levels of empowering leadership.

This is one of the first studies to demonstrate that empowering leadership is related to work performance through simultaneous compensatory mechanisms. Moreover, this study provides evidence about the curvilinear relationship between empowering leadership and performance through uncertainty (previously unknown).

This study aims to explore mediational mechanisms and conditions by which empowering leadership leads to positive outcomes at the employee level. Using social identity theory (SIT) as a foundation, the authors present an integrated moderated mediation model to explain the interactive effects of empowering leadership and leaders' prototypicality on employees' work engagement through the mediation of organizational identification (OI).

The research model was tested using multilevel nested data obtained from 634 employees working in 133 departments (teams) in the service sector of Pakistan.

The results reveal that empowering leadership influences work engagement through the mediation of OI. However, leader prototypicality has emerged as an important moderating condition for these relationships because, at a lower level of leader prototypicality, the positive effect of empowering leadership may diminish.

The results of this study suggest that organizations should promote empowering leadership to increase their employees' OI and work engagement. Furthermore, it is suggested that leader prototypicality is important along with empowering leadership to inculcate positive behavior among employees.

This is the first study of its nature, which used SIT to explain the indirect effect of empowering leadership on employees' work engagement via OI. Furthermore, the bounding condition of leader prototypicality is also studied for the first time in the context of the indirect relationship between empowering leadership and employees' work engagement via OI. The authors note that the novel unique findings of this study have the potential to open additional further avenues of research in the field of empowering leadership.