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With the emergence of technological innovations, digital finance with a blend of new models and the development of inclusive financial innovation shows great significance for business firms to emphasize innovative and competitive product market competition. Thus, financial digitalization and business environment directives help improve the financial performance of business enterprises. This study assesses the role of product market competitiveness on firm performance through the mediating role of digital financial innovation. The annual data of 90 companies from 2014 to 2020 is taken from the Pakistan stock exchange market. The empirical results are estimated using three paths by the Structural Equation Model (SEM) regression approach. The study identifies that product market competitiveness positively contributed to determining the firm performance. Besides, digital financial innovation serves as the mediator in the study, which partially positively determines firm performance. It shows that firm financial innovation fails to account fully for firm performance. This study does not include several other factors determining firm performance. The research results deliver a useful empirical and theoretical contribution to digitalization and product innovation. The findings help to uncover the antecedents of financial innovation and firm performance. This research model can assist researchers in designing robust strategies to appraise the impact on firm performance. Investigators may advance valuable insights by integrating this methodology. Concerning originality, these results indicate that digitalized innovation positively influences firm performance by offering innovative products and digitalization. The outcomes contribute to the literature on digital innovation, and the study recommends that business organizations should pay particular attention to improving financial innovation and digitization in business firms.

AbstractThis study intended to examine the relationships between empowerment leadership, psychological empowerment, and affective commitment on work engagement. Importantly, this study aimed to examine the moderating role of self-efficacy on the relationship between psychological empowerment and affective commitment on work engagement. The data were collected in a two-waves week time lag, data was gained from 375 full-time front-line employees working in five-star hotels in Erbil. The structural equation modelling (SEM) using partial least squares (PLS) was used to analyze the research model. Thus, our results indicated that empowerment leadership is positively related to psychological empowerment, and affective commitment as well as psychological empowerment, and affective commitment were found to be significantly related to work engagement. Self-efficacy was a vital moderator in the relation of psychological empowerment, and affective commitment toward work engagement such as the relationship is stronger when self-efficacy is high than low. This study provides theoretical and managerial implications such as having to empower leadership in the workplace because it provides a sustainable competitive advantage to organizations as well as limitations and future research directions. This study, like every study, has limitations. To begin with, the responses were confined to front-line employees working in five-star hotels, thus the findings cannot be applied to employees working in other types of hotels in the hotel industry. The managerial implication is this study has shown the importance of having empowering leadership in the workplace because it provides a sustainable competitive advantage to organizations. In suggestions to initiate empowerment leadership, hotels should hire and train leaders who are willing to empower their subordinates how to empower their subordinates.

Food security in a just energy transition is a growing debate about designing sustainable food secure networks worldwide. Energy transition, land-use change, and food security are crucial factors for food security and provision. The increased demand for food products and customer preferences regarding food safety provide various issues for the current agriculture food supply chain (AFSC). Along with rising sustainability concerns, strict government regulation, food security, and traceability concerns compel managers, business houses, and practitioners working in AFSC to adopt new tools, techniques, and methodologies to model current food supply chain problems. Thus, in turn, design the food logistics network for food security. Hence, this study investigates the core determinants of food security and supply in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Lebanon over the period of 2010–2019. In order to estimate the objectives of the study, we employ the fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares estimators (DOLS) to draw the study findings. However, the estimated results show a negative association of land use with food security and supply. Likewise, energy transition, gross domestic product, and agricultural value added (AVA) contribute to the food security supply. In contrast, urbanization's negative but insignificant contribution to the food supply in selected economies exists. Besides, another core objective of the study is to investigate the moderate role of the energy transition on the gross domestic product, agriculture sector, and land use and find the significant contribution to the food supply. However, the current study also tries forecasting for the next 10 years and employs the impulse response function (IRF) and variance decomposition analysis (VDA). Congruently, this study uses the pairwise panel causality test and finds exciting outcomes. The COVID-19 crisis has posed challenges such as energy consumption and food security issues. On behalf of the results, the current study proposes imperative policies to investigate the desired level of food supply. The findings provide valuable insights for experts, policymakers, and officials to take practical measures for energy use and food security challenges.

The COVID-19 pandemic developed new challenges for global consumers. In response to this disaster, digital technology users have faced the necessity to adopt and use specific technology apps for online shopping. This article examines how contingencies disrupt existing theoretical models and their implications for the post-COVID-19 era for online purchases. Customers prefer apps to use on the websites for search and purchase amid the COVID-19 crisis. The websites offer competitive advantages to apps for branding and CRM prospects. This motive keeps customers happy and satisfied with the website offers. This study focuses on consumer electronics and observes the comparative influence of fundamental elements (i.e., hedonic motivation, habits, perceived risk, technological trust, and technological awareness) on purchasing customer satisfaction. The study further examines the impact of customer satisfaction with online purchases with website continuance intention (WCI). Notably, this study explores the moderating effect of word-of-mouth (WOM) on the relationship between customer satisfaction with online purchases and website continuance intention. This study designed a web-based survey and recruited frequent visitors including international and citizens of Qatar for data collection. The study employed a purposive sampling technique and used three standardized psychological tools to obtain the data set needed to measure customer satisfaction with online purchases. The survey used a web link, distributed 600 questionnaires via email and social media, and received only 468 responses. After screening, only 455 were valid responses. The study showed a response rate of 75.83%. The study results showed that hedonic motivation, habits, perceived risk, and technological awareness were positively related to customer satisfaction with online purchasing. Besides, customer satisfaction with subsequent online purchases is also positively associated with website continuance intention (WCI). The results revealed that this relationship remained stronger when word-of-mouth (WOM) was higher. Hence, this shows that online shopping is seen as a vital and interesting activity in the Qatari context. The findings provide useful insights for future studies to explore the effects of COVID-19 on online purchase intentions.

Employees' behavior and corporate social responsibility (CSR) can affect firms’ profitability and increase the corporate economic burden. This current research endeavors to explore how business firms navigate employees' technology-driven behavior and CSR sustainable practices for tax avoidance to affect firms’ performance. This study examines how CSR sustainable practices moderate the relationship between employees' behavior and tax avoidance to achieve sustainable business performance. The study incorporated the Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) for the purpose of data analysis using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique that is suitable for this sample size. The study’s target population is employees of small and medium enterprises located in Pakistan. The study has drawn a sample of employees and applied a convenience sampling technique. The findings show that tax avoidance, employee behavior, and corporate social responsibility positively affect business firms’ performance. The results further indicate that sustainable CSR practices significantly moderate tax avoidance’s effect on business firms’ performance. However, there is no condition to identify the relationship between employee behavior and firm performance. In theory, this research contributes to the corporate strategy literature by answering how corporate social responsibility sustainable practices mediate the relationship between tax avoidance, employees' behavior, and sustainable business performance. It shows that socially responsible organizations will engage less in tax avoidance behaviors. The results exhibit that the study provides a systematic, holistic framework to attain sustainable firms’ performance. The findings' generalizability offers future direction with helpful insights for business managers and policymakers.