Perceptions of psychological empowerment play a vital role in the way an individual perceives things at the workplace. In spite of this, there is scant research on the antecedents and consequences of psychological empowerment. This study is an attempt to fill this gap by analyzing the mediating role of psychological empowerment on the relationship between its antecedents (leader-member exchange) and its consequences (work engagement and psychological withdrawal behavior). Data were collected from 454 employees working in the Research and Development (R&D) departments of the information technology (IT) and pharmaceutical sectors operating in India. Results suggest that employees who have a high-quality relationship with their leader have high psychological empowerment, they are highly engaged at work, and their psychological withdrawal behavior is also low. In addition to this, high levels of psychological empowerment have a positive impact on their engagement toward work, which further leads to a low psychological withdrawal behavior. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

PurposeThe manufacturing industry is presently experiencing technological disruption on a global scale. Consequently, to tackle such disruption, firms are identifying a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) scenario and seeking ways to counter it. Accordingly, this paper aims to investigate the employee performance through assessing organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) among the shop floor employees of the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry where a high-performance work system (HPWS) has been implemented.Design/methodology/approachA descriptive research design was used in the study, and 395 shop floor employees working in leading multinational firms, with a minimum global turnover of US$1bn, were interviewed. These manufacturing firms were located in three industrial clusters in the northern part of India.FindingsThe results indicate that HPWS influences OCB. Most of the dimensions of HPWS and OCB were found to be positively associated. The findings also disprove the labour process theory in the context of the study.Practical implicationsThe findings report a broad view of the relationship between HPWS and OCB in the Indian manufacturing context. The study offers the practical insights that HPWS is a universally accepted framework and that organizations should focus on the effective implementation of HPWS in a VUCA scenario, which is in line with past studies. The study also provides future directions for research.Originality/valueThis paper has established the relationship between HPWS and OCB in the manufacturing sector, especially for shop floor employees.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine how the anticipated positive evaluation of a tourist’s social media posts by significant others, known as social return (SR), impacts the memorable tourism experience (MTE) and how this evaluation influences the revisit intention and recommend intention (operationalized dimensions of behavioral intention-BI). Design/methodology/approach The relationship among SR, MTE and BI was measured using established scales that were assessed for reliability and validity. Structural equation modeling was applied to the data collected from 316 respondents who had visited a heritage site. Findings The findings indicate that SR significantly impacts MTE and BI and MTE partially mediates the relationship between SR and BI. However, the impact of SR on revisit intention is weak despite being statistically significant. Research limitations/implications This paper seeks to extend the SR concept introduced in tourism and hospitality literature in 2018. This study validated the scale in a new context while retaining the inviolability of the scale by including a world heritage site. This study used an extended version of the MTE scale and an adapted version of the BI scale. The use of these three scales together is an attempt to examine the symbolic nature of social media posts that can generate perceptions regarding the memorability of the tourist’s visit. Originality/value SR is a relatively new construct and has been very sparsely studied with no known study linking SR, MTE and BI.

The study of consumer buying behaviour is essential for marketers to understand the key elements such as what is purchased, from where it is purchased, the quantity of purchase, how much money is spent and other related variables affecting buying behaviour. The purpose of this article is to assess the consumer buying behaviour for apparels. The study makes substantial effort to recognize the variables which affect decision of apparel purchase among youth. Theoretical foundation of the study is based on secondary sources such as research papers, articles, magazines and articles on consumer buying behaviour. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is performed to extract factors which affect consumer buying behaviour and subsequently purchase decision. Total 6 factors were extracted with 20 prominent indicators. CFA confirms that all the obtained values of the indicators are model fit and comply with the standardized criteria. The findings show that consumer buying behaviour in apparel such as purchase frequency, average spending, preferred store type and preferred brand mostly depends on various demographic variables. Hence, the study validates the significance of segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP) for marketers of apparel. The present article reveals that all types of domestic and worldwide brands are available in Indian market and are purchased by consumers as long as those are perceived to deliver value to consumers. The study recommends that marketers must segment the market and target those segments which can be served expeditiously. Marketers must target a particular segment of consumers for which they can offer better value. The findings and recommendations of the study might be useful for academicians, policymakers, entrepreneurs and managers of apparel industry to understand industry trends and formulate appropriate strategies.

The purpose of this research paper is to understand the role of employability skills and emotional intelligence toward employer satisfaction in recruiting fresh information technology engineering graduates from institutions of higher learning in India. Using a structured questionnaire, the study surveyed 507 employers from the information technology sector companies in India, who as recruiters conduct campus placement drives across various engineering schools in the country. An application of structured equation modeling to the data revealed emotional Intelligence partially mediates in the relationship between employability skills and employer satisfaction while recruiting these fresh engineering IT graduates. The finding of the study will be supportive for the students, academicians and practitioners in recognizing the need of soft skills for making young engineering graduates employable.