Although almost all employees have heard of or witnessed their colleagues being mistreated, we have an incomplete understanding of how employees perceive and respond to such events. Whereas past research has established that observer emotions can be congruent with victim emotions, we examine observer schadenfreude, an incongruent emotion that is also prevalent in organizations. Based on appraisal theories of emotion, we propose a process model of schadenfreude emergence and development: initial schadenfreude occurs when observers appraise mistreatment incidents as relevant and conducive to their goals; this initial feeling evolves into either righteous or ambivalent schadenfreude, depending on observers' secondary appraisals of victim deservingness. We also address the implications of schadenfreude for observer behavior and the moderating effects of observers' moral foundations and organizational civility climates. Our model extends current knowledge about observer reactions and helps us understand the persistence and pervasiveness of workplace mistreatment.
Authenticity is considered to be one of the major challenges for the luxury segment of our time. Crises and scandals in the economic world change behaviors of luxury consumption: Today, luxury clients are looking for authenticity, purpose and sustainability. Furthermore, the progressive democratization of luxury and the increasing imitation of a luxury-specific strategy by mass product manufacturers lead to an erosion of the notion of “luxury” and its mysticism. Luxury becomes commonplace.
The increasing interdependence of firms and individuals throughout the world facilitates the development of the crowdlending market. Crowdlending is an emerging source of financing involving open calls to the public, generally via internet, to finance with loans individuals or companies (Meyer, 2007). The major role of crowdlending activities has been to bring new energy to a global economy that is unable to catch its breath following the recent financial crises (Berger, 2009). North America leads the world in crowdlending volumes, representing 58% of the world's market. But the global strong growth is due, in part, to the rise of Asia as a major crowdlending player with 21% of the world's market, putting the region slightly ahead of Europe (Pignon. 2015). As of today, Switzerland has not adopted specific regulation governing the practice of crowdlending, but the regulator has issued a fact sheet on this topic, informing the stakeholders of the crowdlending industry that some of their activities may be subject to banking regulation (Dietrich, 2015). In this context, this article get a general overview of the regulations adopted abroad, in particular in the USA and in the European Union, where countries such as the UK or France chose to adopt a more detailed regulation, some with financial limits applicable to crowdlending campaigns or with specific requirements regarding who would be authorized to invest in crowdlending campaigns or soft regulation in the form of Best Practices.
Research question: A social network programme called J’arrête de fumer was set up in 2016 in the six French-speaking cantons of Switzerland. It consists of Facebook groups where people agree on a date to quit smoking. A peak of relapse appears during the first three weeks of the programme. This research aims to explore the feasibility of building a Chatbot to help people to get over this peak in future iterations of the programme. Methods: It has been shown that the urge to smoke may be one of the reasons for relapses. Being able to distract users from the idea of smoking during these phases would help them to get through these three first weeks. Due to the large number of participants, a human intervention within the craving time frame is difficult to achieve, but such a constraint would be easier to overcome with ChatBots. Results: A ChatBot for the Telegram platform has been developed. It offers five different modules to overtake the time frame where the urge to smoke is greatest. Some of these modules, such as motivating comments and factual information, are already well used, but some others are less widely explored, like helping scientific research by classifying images or putting people in touch with each other as another form of distraction. Conclusion: ChatBots offer interesting opportunities for helping smoking cessation communities, as they would help participants during craving time frames and would be able to handle the large number of participants.
