Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present how ethical leadership has a double-edged effect to influence emotional exhaustion and long-term customer relationship developments of employees in a sales management context through a latent growth model (LGM). Design/methodology/approach To test the LGM, data were collected by surveying 407 salespeople of a retail travel agency with 814 customers in Greater China at multiple points over an eight-month period. Findings This study found that, as salespeople perceived more ethical leadership at Time 1, they were more likely to show increases in the work engagement development that increased the service performance development and increased the work–family conflict development over time. In addition, increases in service performance development influenced increases in customer relationship development and increases in work–family conflict development also influenced the emotional exhaustion development. Originality/value These findings help managers understand that enabling salespeople to use their full capabilities to their work by ethical leadership may bring not only high service performance but also negative factors that erode salespeople’s well-being.

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Purpose The purpose of this study is to borrow from a limited resource view of job embeddedness to argue that ethical leadership can hurt salespeople’s growth of sales performance by a latent growth model. Design/methodology/approach This work surveyed 825 salespeople in Greater China at three points over six months to test the latent growth model. Findings The findings reveal that as salespeople perceive more ethical leadership at the initial point, they may show more increases in job embeddedness behavior development that lead to decreases in social capital and human capital behavior development, which consequently decreases sales performance over time. Originality/value These findings unearth a novel idea that ethical leadership may erode growth of sales performance over time.

With the popularity of financial technology (fintech) chatbots equipped with artificial intelligence, understanding the user’s response mechanism can help bankers formulate precise marketing strategies, which is a crucial issue in the social science field. Nevertheless, the user’s response mechanism towards financial technology chatbots has been relatively under-investigated. To fill these literature gaps, latent growth curve modeling was adopted by the present research to survey Taiwanese users of fintech chatbots. The present study proposed a customer continuance model to predict continuance intention for fintech chatbots and that cognitive and emotional dimensions positively influence the growth in a user’s attitude toward fintech chatbots, which in turn, positively influences continuance intention over time. In total, 401 customers of fintech chatbots were surveyed through three time points to examine the relationship between these variables over six months. The results support the theoretical model of this research and can advance the literature of fintech chatbots and the information technology adoption model.

Purpose This study aims to propose a multilevel moderated mediation model of transformational leadership, corporate social responsible, organization-based self-esteem and job engagement to detect Kahn’s theory and predict new product development performance. Design/methodology/approach This study used a longitudinal study over a six-month period to test the multilevel moderated mediation model. Empirical testing used a survey of 1,655 employees from 165 different R&D work group in Great China. Findings Transformational leadership, corporate social responsible and organization-based self-esteem well predict employees’ job engagement and new product development performance and are moderated by open discussion of conflict. Originality/value This study is the first to propose a multilevel moderated mediation model to detect Kahn’s job engagement theory and predict new product development performance.