In January of this year, we initiated a call for papers for a special issue, Impact and Value Creation from Sustainability, with Professor Wei-Chieh Su from National Chengchi University and Associate Professor Min-Fen Tu from Tamkang University serving as the chief editors. Sustainability studies have advanced from focusing solely on net-zero emissions to encompassing transitional mechanisms that are more equitable and inclusive. These advances provide avenues for exploring various sustainability topics from diverse perspectives, including the development of sustainability concepts in the cultural domain, the effects of temporality, and the impact of pursuing sustainability goals, all of which represent emerging topics in sustainability studies. We welcome scholars and researchers from relevant fields to share their research findings. Submissions for this special issue are open until January 24, 2025, and a symposium for the special issue is scheduled for May 2, 2025. For more details, please visit our official website. We look forward to the enthusiastic participation of interested academics.

Sponsored by United Microelectronics Corporation, the UMC Management and Administration Paper Award has entered its fourteenth year. After a rigorous review process, remarkable success has been achieved for Journal of Management and Business Research this year. The paper titled Moving up or Pulling down? The Relationship between Benign and Malicious Envy, Task Performance and Interpersonal Counterproductive Work Behaviors: The Moderating Roles of Personal and Situational Factors was awarded the Excellence Award. Furthermore, The Effects of Supplier R&D Capitalization on the Trade Credit and the Duration of Customer-Supplier Relationships, Curating Social Experience: Fusing New and Incumbent Media Business Models, and Family Firms and CSR Specialization: Evidence from Taiwanese Listed Firms each received an honorable mention. We hereby extend our congratulations to the award-winning authors for their distinguished honors.

This issue features five articles. The first article, Female Breadwinner and Male Housekeeper: Atypical Gender Role Mechanism in Advertising, centers on advertisements with atypical gender roles. This study explored the impact of cognitive dissonance on consumers when they encounter various types of advertisements, and it validated the moderating effects of cognitive needs and the use of humor in advertisements. The study conducted three between-group experiments and found that advertisements featuring low degrees of atypical gender roles triggered the highest cognitive dissonance, further affecting the effectiveness of the advertisements. Additionally, cognitive needs and humor were found to play significant moderating roles, giving advertisements with moderate atypical gender roles a certain advantage in terms of advertisement effectiveness.

The second article, Language that Matters: The Organizational Boundary of the MOST, adopts the perspective of “communication constructing organization” and further invokes the perspective of naming to understand how organizational leaders use naming to define and construct the boundaries and scope of operations of an organization. This study focused on the Ministry of Science and Technology, examining how its leaders have utilized communicative naming to define and legitimize the ministry's organizational boundaries following its restructuring from the National Science Council. The study findings indicate that industry–academic ties, technological innovation, cross-ministerial integration, and humanities and social sciences serve as the four crucial pillars shaping the ministry's jurisdiction and operations. Additionally, the naming of organizational boundaries is a dynamic process featuring gradual progress and continual efforts. Organizational leaders tend to adopt an approach that extends and expands the existing framework, establishing a familiar framework that is easily understandable and acceptable to the outside world, thereby acquiring legitimacy, and constructing new organizational responsibilities and scopes.

The third article, The Effects of Giving Styles on the Communication Effectiveness in Cause‐Related Marketing (CRM): The Underlying Mechanism of Imagery of the Beneficiaries, describes a study that explored the interactive effects between the form of charitable donations (goods vs. money) and the duration of cause-related cooperation (first time vs. long-term) on the effectiveness of cause-related communication, with the recipients' imagination serving as the primary psychological mechanism. This study conducted three experiments: the first focused on cause-related activities with large donation scales; the second experiment was conducted under controlled conditions of small donation scales; and the third experiment aimed to resolve contradictions between the results of the first two experiments and revealed that through posttests, the manipulation of cause-related activities in advertisements led to different consumer perceptions of the donation scale. Accordingly, the moderating effect of donation scale was observed. The findings offer guidance for brands or charitable organizations in planning cause-related marketing strategies, contributing both theoretical insights and practical implications for marketing.

The fourth article, How do Female Managers or Board Members Affect Corporate Credit Ratings? focuses on all listed companies in Taiwan from 2011 to 2018, covering 813 companies and 6,681 annual corporate credit ratings. This study examined the impact of female managers or board members on credit ratings and the factors contributing to this impact. The empirical results indicate that companies led by female managers tend to achieve better credit ratings; that a U-shaped relationship exists between the proportion of female board members and credit ratings; that female managers can reduce the overconfidence behavior associated with excessive borrowing, thereby leading to better credit ratings for the company; and that once the proportion of female board members exceeds a certain threshold, the overconfidence behavior of managers can be reduced in terms of overinvestment, or higher quality of earnings can be maintained.

The fifth article, Trust in and Demand for Financial Advice, features a study that analyzed data from the 2011 National Financial Literacy Survey conducted by the Financial Supervisory Commission of Taiwan. The findings indicate a complementary relationship between financial knowledge levels and the consultation of financial advisors, and a substitutable relationship between financial knowledge levels and the adherence to financial advisors' advices. Trust in financial advisors significantly affects the tendency to follow financial advice, making trust a key factor in deciding whether an individual adheres to financial recommendations. Furthermore, individuals with lower financial knowledge levels increase their retirement planning by following financial advice. By contrast, those with higher financial knowledge are more likely to actively engage in retirement planning or purchase investment-type insurance policiesdue to, in part, their higher level of financial knowledge and proactive consultation with financial advisors.