Leadership Soft Skills, Perceived Trustworthiness and Structural Empowerment: A Correlation

To generate trust inside organizations, administrators with soft skills must build relationships and alliances with their staff, as well as create work conditions that empower employees to carry out their responsibilities. Administrators must essentially boost perceptions of trustworthiness. To solve this shortcoming, educational administrators must be informed and cautious about the notions of soft skills, dependability, and structural empowerment. This article investigates the relationship between each component of leadership soft skills, structural empowerment, and perceived trustworthiness. The mediating function of structural empowerment in the link between leadership soft skills and the perceived trustworthiness of the Head of Faculty was also investigated. This study collects its quantitative data using a survey questionnaire. The survey included 225 respondents who worked as administrative professionals in clerical and office assistant positions at three major campuses of Malaysian public higher education institutions in Malaysia's northern state. The study found that perceived trustworthiness and structural empowerment were substantially connected to all eight components of leadership soft skills. However, structural empowerment did not act as a bridge between leadership soft skills and perceived trustworthiness

Customer Delight Measurement in Halal Cosmetics Industry in Malaysia: The Relationship between Functional Values, Epistemic Values and Customer Emotions towards Customer Delight

Providing and maintaining customer emotion experience and satisfaction are the biggest contemporary challenges of management in Halal cosmetics industry. While customer satisfaction measures the perception of the customers, customer delight is the measure to success. Delighted customers are loyal and more valuable as they will help the organisation to compete with the competitors. The objective of this article is to present a conceptual framework to examine the role of functional values (Halal product attributes and reference price), epistemic values (Halal visual packaging design) in establishing positive customer emotion experience in the customers mind for Halal cosmetics products and ultimately achieving customer delight. The well-established Holbrook consumer value model was applied to test its validity and robustness in the Halal cosmetics products context. A self-administered, 5-points Likert scale questionnaire was distributed to selected retail outlets throughout the states in Malaysia. The findings indicated that functional values and epistemic values are insignificant in creating positive customer emotion experience, but customer emotion experience shows significant relationship with customer delight for Halal cosmetics products. In view of the relationship between these variables can assist the providers to improve their product offerings and competitive strategies

Modelling the Predictors and Outcomes of Supply Chained of Brand Experience: Evidence from the Chained Fast Food Brand

Brand Experience can be the most privileged tool for differentiation in today’s highly competitive marketplace. Customer’s feeling, emotion and interactions will contribute to the overall perception of the brand experience. Undoubtedly, it is critical to gain insights into the key drivers of brand experience and subsequently ascertain its outcomes in order to design effective marketing strategies for market growth and perhaps business sustainability. The principal aim was to develop an integrative novelty model of brand experience and examine the predictors and outcomes of brand experiences of fast food brand share in Malaysia.  The study applies SOR Model (Mehrabian-Russell, 1974), and other related branding models to a sample of 450 adult respondents who reside in chosen urban areas in Malaysia. The study has used a survey approach with self-administered questionnaire distributed in restaurants, offices and homes. Structural equation modelling was utilized to test the hypothesized relationships among the constructs, as postulated in the model. The measure employed in this study were rigorously assessed and purified initially via item analysis and exploratory factor analysis and subsequently refined by confirmatory factor analysis. It is reasonable to claim that they have adequately met the unidimensionality, validity and reliability criteria applied. Nine of the hypothesized links were supported and three rejected. Result of hypothesis model acceptable fit was CMIN/DF=3.45, RMSEA=0.074, GFI=0.931, CFI=0.958 and IFI=0.959. Ultimately, the study’s primary goal of developing an integrative model that has statistical and explanatory power, which could permit interpretation of results confidently, was achieved. Hence, the current investigation unequivocally illuminates several key contributions to the marketing theory, chained fast food industry practitioners and government bodies. Firstly, it exemplifies that ‘Product Quality’ is the key driver of the predictors of brand experience. Secondly, service quality and store image are not significant predictors of customers’ brand experience with the chained fast food brand. Thirdly, the findings suggest that brand experience is not significant predictor of customer’s commitment towards chained fast food brand. Finally, the current investigation confirms that trust was the most influential predictor on resonance and commitment is also revealed to be a significant predictor of resonance, but of a smaller magnitude compared to trust.  Discussions of the results are provided along with contributions for the fast food industry and government and suggestions for future research