Purpose Following promising growth of the international medical tourism industry, competitions within the global market have escalated tremendously with increased involvement by numerous healthcare providers to acquire a share of its disposable income. The brand reputation would hereby play a determining role as a competitive strategy. Specifically, this paper aims to investigate the impact of social and marketing aspects on the brand image of medical tourism-based hospitals, alongside its relationship toward service quality. In turn, the influence of perceived service quality on satisfaction and the perceived value was examined, in view of further potential behavioral intention among medical tourists on healthcare providers in Malaysia. Design/methodology/approach The data were collected through a survey questionnaire among medical tourists, with 596 successful cases collected via 6 major private hospitals at 3 popular Malaysian medical tourism locations. Data analysis was then performed using both SPSS and Smart PLS software. Findings The findings from the present study acknowledged the importance of both social (e.g. social media and word-of-mouth communications) and marketing (e.g. hospital advertisement and price perception) aspects toward establishing brand image among medical tourism-based hospitals. Consequently, the brand image would influence perceived service quality among medical tourists; further entail positive impact on behavioral intention, with satisfaction and perceived value as mediators between both factors. Following PLS predict analysis confirming this model’s high predictive capability, it demonstrated close representation to actual medical tourism scenario in Malaysia. Originality/value This study is one of the very few studies that explored the minimally investigated territory on the consequential importance of hospital branding within the medical tourism industry; specifically through extending the literature on the influence of social and marketing efforts toward the formation of brand image.

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This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching the original reports together with 55% of tests in different spans of years and 40% of tests in novel geographies. Some original findings were associated with multiple new tests. Reproducibility was the best predictor of generalizability—for the findings that proved directly reproducible, 84% emerged in other available time periods and 57% emerged in other geographies. Overall, only limited empirical evidence emerged for context sensitivity. In a forecasting survey, independent scientists were able to anticipate which effects would find support in tests in new samples.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has gained increasing attention and popularity since the last decade. There are many CSR debates arise since then. These debates were shaped by trends and fundamental changes of the political, social, and economic spheres of life. Tracing back, the precursor to CSR was topic of charitable giving, which had been in existence since 1980s. Todate, CSR has evolved to a business concept that had been accepted widely. Business corporations are focusing on CSR due to tremendous pressures from the society. Presently, CSR approach has emerged from focusing on the shareholders to stakeholders due to the acknowledgement of the crucial roles of stakeholders in every organisation. Stakeholder management and CSR is a relational affair. Stakeholder theory involves list of critical stakeholders namely employees, 260 NGOs, that could be source of new competitive advantage. This present a research agenda to look into internal CSR practices as to how it manifest among the crucial stakeholders of every organisation, i.e. the employees, on their attitudes and behaviours. As Small Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) are gaining its foothold in Malaysia, they also encountered many challenges, one of these is the issue of high employee turnover that lead to substantial costs to the organisations. The findings reveal that internal CSR practices enhanced employee's job satisfaction and also resulted in the reduction of employee's turnover intention. It was interesting to discover that internal CSR practices enhance employee's organisational commitment like job satisfaction, but it failed to reduce employee's turnover intention through enhanced organisation commitment as a result of internal CSR practices. The results also show that perceived ease of movement has an impact on employee's turnover intention.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of ethics and social responsibility on employees’ affective commitment in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach This is a quantitative research. The authors employ multistage sampling technique, non-probability and judgmental sampling method. Data were collected through questionnaire survey to measure the respondents’ perceptions of the ethics and social responsibility, as well as internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. The data obtained were analyzed through variance-based structural equation modeling (SEM), i.e., partial least square SEM. Findings The findings reveal that perceived role of ethics and social responsibility (PRESOR) and internal CSR are positively related to employees’ affective commitment. Job satisfaction is found to be mediating the relationship between PRESOR and affective commitment. The result also showed that internal CSR practices mediate the relationship between PRESOR and affective commitment. Research limitations/implications There are few limitations in the present research. First, present research merely investigates the practices of ethics and social responsibility by SMEs and did not perform a comparison with larger organizations. Second, the use of non-probability sampling method is unable to generalize results for the entire population. Future research could address the shortcoming of present research in order to further contribute to the academic and business world. Practical implications The findings provide insights to entrepreneurs and SMEs on the manifestation of ethics and social responsibility in enhancing employees’ affective commitment. In turn, it reduces employees’ turnover intention and enhances SMEs sustainability to strive in the competitive environment. Social implications These findings highlight the positive chain effects of enterprises in discharging their moral obligation as well as their social responsibility. The enterprises are benefited from the good reputation which may act as a magnet to attract talent-employees and also sustaining their enterprises through employees’ retention. Originality/value This research paper contributes to current knowledge by painting a better picture on the importance of ethics and social responsibility and internal CSR from the employees’ perception. As to date, employees’ perception of ethics and social responsibility and internal CSR practices are still under-investigated. Moreover, past research often focuses the impact of ethics and social responsibility in the larger corporation but scant research is conducted in the smaller organization such as SMEs.