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A company’s cyber defenses are based on a secure infrastructure and risk-aware behavior by employees. With rising cyber threats and normative training efforts showing limited impact, raising cyber risk awareness is emerging as a challenging effort. The review of the extant literature on awareness diagnosis shows interdisciplinary but mainly theoretical approaches to understanding attitudes and influencing risk behavior. We propose and test a novel methodology to combine and operationalize two tools, deep metaphor interviews and the IDEA risk communication model, to apply them for the first time in the context of behavioral cyber vulnerabilities. The results show a link between diagnosed attitudes and effective risk behavior in a real-life organizational setting, indicating the potential for an expanded diagnostic effort. We propose to develop a broader diagnostic and intervention set to improve cyber awareness and a toolkit to support the business practice of cyber risk management.

Social media usage has grown rapidly in recent years, and with it companies’ interest in interacting with their customers on these platforms. It is, however, not yet clear whether customers welcome more intense relationships on social media and what drives this acceptance in more detail. Our research aims at understanding how age, gender, geography, usage, type of platform, personality, and current insurance provider impact customers’ attitudes towards interacting with insurance companies in the Swiss market. We find that age and frequency of use, in particular, impact acceptance, with younger customers much more open to interactions and insurance presence more welcome on more frequently used tools. This is an encouraging result for insurers, as customers tend to welcome them where customers are already frequently present. In addition, insurers can look forward to increasing interaction as younger individuals, who are more open to social media, age into core customers. Social context, on the other hand, plays only a minor role in customer preferences. The current insurance provider plays no significant role, in spite of insurance companies in the sample following widely different approaches to digital offerings and communication. This may be due to the early stage of development of the industry.

This study investigates the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) investment and diffusion on Pakistan’s economic growth by proposing the threshold level of ICT investment. At our proposed level, the ICT imports significantly enhance the intermediate inputs to capital goods, ultimately enhancing economic growth. For this empirical investigation, we use the maximum available data on technological innovation and investment, ranging from 2003 to 2018. Incorporating the structural breaks, the results of regression analysis reveal that Pakistan’s economic growth is unaffected by ICT development. However, we observe the mixed shreds of evidence on the ICT investment. Following existing literature, we use ICT goods exports and imports as a proxy for ICT investment. Interestingly, the economic growth of Pakistan is again unaffected by the ICT goods exports. However, we observe that a one percent increase in ICT goods imports enhances economic growth by 1.73 percent. Then, we extend this analysis to the threshold approach, which reveals that ICT imports affect the overall economic growth when the ICT goods imports reach the level of 4.13 percent of the total imports. At this threshold, the ICT goods import significantly enhances the intermediate input to the capital goods, leading to higher economic growth. Therefore, the policymakers should ensure that the ICT goods import must be greater than the 4.13 percent of Pakistani imports.

Leading across national borders is a challenge, partly due to the cultural differences among employees in different locations. We investigate this dynamic for employees of a Swiss financial services company located in Switzerland and in Poland by surveying employees about their leadership expectations and experiences, as well as about their cultural values. We find that the leadership expectations of employees in these two locations do not differ significantly. However, their experience does, indicating the opportunity for further development of local Polish management practices and leadership behavior, and underlying the importance of local leadership development. In addition, we find that a few cultural dimensions have a significant impact on leadership expectations in both countries, indicating the opportunity to further refine situational leadership behavior throughout the organization independently of location. While organizations spanning across Western and Central European locations need to deal with significant differences in cultural and leadership expectation, our results suggest that they can effectively align leadership practices and thus mitigate the practical challenges arising from these differences.

Background: The management of people affected by age-related neurological disorders requires the adoption of targeted and cost-effective interventions to cope with chronicity. Therapy adaptation and rehabilitation represent major targets requiring long-term follow-up of neurodegeneration or, conversely, the promotion of neuroplasticity mechanisms. However, affordable and reliable neurophysiological correlates of cerebral activity to be used throughout treatment stages are often lacking. The aim of this systematic review is to highlight actual applications of functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) as a versatile optical neuroimaging technology for investigating cortical hemodynamic activity in the most common chronic neurological conditions. Methods: We reviewed studies investigating fNIRS applications in Parkinson’s Disease (PD), Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) as those focusing on motor and cognitive impairment in ageing and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) as the most common chronic neurological disease in young adults. The literature search was conducted on NCBI PubMed and Web of Science databases by PRISMA guidelines. Results: We identified a total of 63 peer-reviewed articles. The AD spectrum is the most investigated pathology with 40 articles ranging from the traditional monitoring of tissue oxygenation to the analysis of functional resting-state conditions or cognitive functions by means of memory and verbal fluency tasks. Conversely, applications in PD (12 articles) and MS (11 articles) are mainly focused on the characterization of motor functions and their association with dual-task conditions. The most investigated cortical area is the prefrontal cortex, since reported to play an important role in age-related compensatory mechanism and neurofunctional changes associated to these chronic neurological conditions. Interestingly, only 9 articles applied a longitudinal approach. Conclusion: The results indicate that fNIRS is mainly employed for the cross-sectional characterization of the clinical phenotypes of these pathologies, whereas data on its utility for longitudinal monitoring as surrogate biomarkers of disease progression and rehabilitation effects are promising but still lacking.