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PurposeThis paper aims to investigate how commercial influencers retain their followers and successfully persuade them to consider purchasing newly recommended products and services within the food industry. We explored the impact of followers’ purchase satisfaction upon their repurchase intention for newly promoted food products and services, directly and by the mediating roles of followers’ affective commitment and loyalty toward commercial food influencers.Design/methodology/approachOur conceptual model design was supported by the tricomponent attitude model, which helps explain followers’ emotional attachment to the influencers. We validated the proposed model using a sample of 200 followers of renowned commercial food influencers in Iran. We used partial least squares structural equation modeling for data analysis, with the assistance of Warp PLS (version 8.0) software.FindingsWe found that followers’ purchase satisfaction exerts a positive influence upon their repurchase intention, both directly and through the mediating roles of affective commitment and loyalty toward commercial food influencers.Practical implicationsThis study elucidates the role of followers’ satisfaction with their previous purchases in influencing their intention to buy newly recommended products. There is a multiplicity of important implications for restauranteur’s business models, as this marketing approach rewards a digital equivalent of a strong customer relationship and an honest, high-quality product. Our results also suggest that food influencers can operate effectively in the affiliate marketing sphere by operating and sustaining enduring relationships.Originality/valueThis work addresses how the influencer–follower relationship, followers’ purchase satisfaction and emotional attachment toward influencers, shape both follower retention and future repurchase intentions. This is from the perspective of the tricomponent attitude model within the food industry.

There is increasing evidence that animal groups can maintain coordinated behaviour and make collective decisions based on simple interaction rules. Effective collective action may be further facilitated by individual variation within groups, particularly through leader–follower polymorphisms. Recent studies have suggested that individual-level personality traits influence the degree to which individuals use social information, are attracted to conspecifics, or act as leaders/followers. However, evidence is equivocal and largely limited to laboratory studies. We use an automated data-collection system to conduct an experiment testing the relationship between personality and collective decision-making in the wild. First, we report that foraging flocks of great tits (Parus major) show strikingly synchronous behaviour. A predictive model of collective decision-making replicates patterns well, suggesting simple interaction rules are sufficient to explain the observed social behaviour. Second, within groups, individuals with more reactive personalities behave more collectively, moving to within-flock areas of higher density. By contrast, proactive individuals tend to move to and feed at spatial periphery of flocks. Finally, comparing alternative simulations of flocking with empirical data, we demonstrate that variation in personality promotes within-patch movement while maintaining group cohesion. Our results illustrate the importance of incorporating individual variability in models of social behaviour.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to identify the process of virtual influencer stickiness in the age of influencer marketing, which has received little attention in the literature. This is essential because the research creates a theoretical model of follower loyalty/stickiness to virtual influencer techniques from the standpoint of influencer marketing, which has a substantial effect on the evolution of the global marketing world.Design/methodology/approachIn 2022, 302 people who currently follow an Instafamous virtual influencer took part in an Instagram self-administered online survey.FindingsThe findings show that both expertise and trustworthiness have a positive and significant influence on parasocial interaction, which in turn has a significant influence on virtual engagement and stickiness.Originality/valueThis research will specifically assist international readers in understanding how to harness and increase the efficiency and efficacy of interactive marketing strategies and methods to engage and retain followers of Instafamous virtual influencer. Moreover, the findings will be beneficial to opinion leaders, brand managers, company investors, entrepreneurs and service designers.HighlightsThe study pioneers a holistic virtual follower stickiness mechanism that comprises the role of source credibility, parasocial interaction, informational influence and virtual follower’s engagement and their interrelationship to each other.This study is based on parasocial interaction theory and source credibility theory to understand the relationship between virtual followers and influencers stickiness process at social media platforms.In addition, the study examined the subsequent effects of sources of credibility components on parasocial interaction; as well as, on virtual follower engagement and stickiness.This study also categorized and examined the moderating effects exerted by the genres of informative influence of virtual influencer.

Successful social interactions rely upon the abilities of two or more people to mutually exchange information in real-time, while simultaneously adapting to one another. The neural basis of social cognition has mostly been investigated in isolated individuals, and more recently using two-person paradigms to quantify the neuronal dynamics underlying social interaction. While several studies have shown the relevance of understanding complementary and mutually adaptive processes, the neural mechanisms underlying such coordinative behavioral patterns during joint action remain largely unknown. Here, we employed a synchronized finger-tapping task while measuring dual-EEG from pairs of human participants who either mutually adjusted to each other in an interactive task or followed a computer metronome. Neurophysiologically, the interactive condition was characterized by a stronger suppression of alpha and low-beta oscillations over motor and frontal areas in contrast to the non-interactive computer condition. A multivariate analysis of two-brain activity to classify interactive versus non-interactive trials revealed asymmetric patterns of the frontal alpha-suppression in each pair, during both task anticipation and execution, such that only one member showed the frontal component. Analysis of the behavioral data showed that this distinction coincided with the leader–follower relationship in 8/9 pairs, with the leaders characterized by the stronger frontal alpha-suppression. This suggests that leaders invest more resources in prospective planning and control. Hence our results show that the spontaneous emergence of leader–follower relationships in dyadic interactions can be predicted from EEG recordings of brain activity prior to and during interaction. Furthermore, this emphasizes the importance of investigating complementarity in joint action. •Sensorimotor and frontal alpha oscillations suppressed during dyadic interaction•Spontaneous emergence of leader–follower relations during an interactive task•Multivariate decoding of two brains reveals complementary neural mechanisms.•Leaders and followers can be distinguished based on frontal alpha activity.

Purpose Although leaders play a vital role in motivating the creative performance of followers, a paucity of research has examined specific behaviors of leaders. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of leader knowledge sharing behavior on followers’ creative performance. Design/methodology/approach To decrease the potential of the common method bias, this research conducted a time-lagged study to gather data from 319 employees working at information technology companies in Vietnam. This study used the hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses. Findings The results showed that leader knowledge sharing behavior had a positive impact on follower creativity. Moreover, follower-acquired knowledge partially mediated this relationship. Furthermore, follower prosocial motivation positively moderated the effects of leader knowledge sharing behavior and follower-acquired knowledge on followers’ creative performance. Originality/value The findings contribute to the creativity literature by providing evidence that leader knowledge sharing behavior could stimulate follower creativity directly and indirectly through follower-acquired knowledge. This research also confirmed the moderating role of prosocial motivation in reinforcing the influence of leader behaviors and employee ability on employee creativity.

This paper addresses the difficulties with connected vehicle systems (CVSs), particularly with vehicle platooning, are examined in this paper. For leader and follower-connected vehicles, the control protocol (which includes artificial delays, disturbances and proportional gains) is implemented. With tracking error systems, system dynamics are modelled while taking outside influences into consideration. Using creative thinking, a centralized event-triggered control system is implemented to maximize fleet wide communication updates. System stability is guaranteed by this centralized method in combination with quadratic form Lyapunov stability analysis. The risk of zeno behaviour is reduced by an event-triggered communication condition that is activated when a threshold is exceeded. The effectiveness of the centralized event-triggered system in improving stability and resilience in connected vehicle platooning scenarios is evaluated numerically through simulations.

Social groups such as schools of fish or flocks of birds display collective dynamics that can be modulated by group leaders, which facilitate decision-making toward a consensus state beneficial to the entire group. For instance, leaders could alert the group about attacking predators or the presence of food sources. Motivated by biological insight on social groups, we examine a stochastic leader–follower consensus problem where information sharing among agents is affected by perceptual constraints and each individual has a different tendency to form social connections. Leveraging tools from stochastic stability and eigenvalue perturbation theories, we study the consensus protocol in a mean-square sense, offering necessary-and-sufficient conditions for asymptotic stability and closed-form estimates of the convergence rate. Surprisingly, the prediction of our minimalistic model share similarities with observed traits of animal and human groups. Our analysis anticipates the counterintuitive result that heterogeneity can be beneficial to group decision-making by improving the convergence rate of the consensus protocol. This observation finds support in theoretical and empirical studies on social insects such as spider or honeybee colonies, as well as human teams, where inter-individual variability enhances the group performance.

Purpose The purposes of this paper are first to resolve the inconsistent relationship between leader intellectual stimulation and follower creativity by investigating a promising moderator and then to examine the role of follower creative ability and job autonomy as mediating mechanisms linking leader intellectual stimulation with follower creativity. Design/methodology/approach A time-lagged study was undertaken to gather data from employees working in the information technology sector in Vietnam (N = 415). This study used structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze the gathered data. Findings This study found a positive direct relationship between leader intellectual stimulation and follower creative performance. Moreover, the follower proactive personality moderated this direct relationship. Furthermore, the results illustrated that follower creative ability and job autonomy partially mediated the positive effect of leader intellectual stimulation on follower creativity. Originality/value This is one of the first studies to investigate the moderating role of follower proactive personality in resolving the inconsistent relationship between leader intellectual stimulation and follower creativity. Moreover, with using follower creative ability and job autonomy as mediating mechanisms, this study provides evidence that leader behaviors have a partially indirect association with follower creativity through follower abilities and work characteristics.

This paper proposes a tracking controller for the formation construction of multiple autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances with output constraints. To design a formation control system, the leader-following strategy is adopted for each ASV. A symmetric barrier Lyapunov function (BLF), which advances to infinity when its arguments reach a finite limit, is applied to prevent the state variables from violating constraints. An adaptive-neural technique is employed to compensate uncertain parameters and unmodeled dynamics. To overcome the explosion of differentiation term problem, a first-order filter is proposed to realize the derivative of virtual variables in the dynamic surface control (DSC). To estimate the leader velocity in finite time, a high-gain observer is effectively employed. This approach is adopted to reveal all signals of the closed-loop system which are bounded, and the formation tracking errors are semi-globally finite-time uniformly bounded. The computer simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of this newly proposed formation controller for the autonomous surface vessels.