Lei Zhu

This research uses an experimental approach to investigate the relationship between market orientation of a company and its level of success in international business. The aim of the study was to develop and use a market orientation scale that is appropriate to the sector. It was discovered that there are four hidden traits that drive market orientation. These include customers, rivals, departmental response, and overall customer satisfaction. According to the results, orientation toward one's customers is more essential than any of the other traits, while orientation toward one's competitors has an inverted U-shaped connection with performance. The performance of the firm was not found to correlate in any way with the responsiveness of its departments. With the help of the comprehensive conceptualization, managers are able to develop specific kinds of orientations that are essential for higher levels of performance.

An experiment explored the acquisition of conscious and unconscious knowledge of semantic prosody in a second language under incidental and intentional learning conditions. Semantic prosody is the conotational coloring of the semantics of a word, largely uncaptured by dictionary definitions. Contrary to some claims in the literature, we revealed that both conscious and unconscious knowledge were involved in the acquisition of semantic prosody. Intentional learning resulted in similar unconscious but more conscious knowledge than incidental learning. The results are discussed in terms of second language learning and the nature of unconscious knowledge

Construction schedules play an important role in construction project management. However, during construction activities, risks may arise due to unexpected schedule changes, resulting in the ineffective delivery of projects. This study aims to reveal the law of schedule change risk propagation and to analyze the effects on the risk propagation through numerical simulations. First, construction projects are represented by activity-on-node networks. A model of risk propagation is then built based on a susceptible-infected model considering the effects of the nodal characteristics on the propagation process. Next, the model is tested on a real-world project to examine cascading failures with varying parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the model is effective in identifying the activities most capable of affecting a project schedule and evaluating the impact of schedule change risk propagation. This study will provide a basis for enhancing the robustness of AON networks and controlling the propagation of schedule change risks.

How to improve the development quality of state-owned enterprises is of great significance to the economic and social development in the transition period. And promoting the reform of mixed ownership is an important path for state-owned enterprises to achieve high-quality development. Based on the micro-data of China’s A-share listed state-owned companies, the paper explores the impact of mixed ownership reform on the high-quality development of state-owned enterprises. It clarifies the importance and moderation of equity reform and the heterogeneity of impact effects from the theoretical mechanism analysis and empirical test. It also analyzes the reasons of inverted U-shape from the perspective of the transmission mechanism of the internal competition atmosphere and non-state-owned capital speculation motivation. It is found that the relationship between equity reform and state-owned enterprises’ high-quality development is inverted U-shaped with multi-dimensional heterogeneity. From the analysis of conduction mechanism, on the one hand, the equity reform can enhance the internal competitive atmosphere, stimulate the vitality of enterprises and improve the development quality for state-owned enterprises. On the other hand, it enhances the speculation motivation of enterprises and slows down the high-quality development process.

Previous research has shown that people can implicitly acquire mappings between word forms and literal meanings . We argue, from the metaphor-representation and embodiment perspectives, that people can unconsciously establish mappings between word forms and not only literal but also metaphorical meanings. Using Williams’ paradigm, we found that transfer of form-meaning connections from a concrete domain to an abstract domain was achieved in a metaphor-consistent way without awareness. Our results support the view that unconscious knowledge can be flexibly deployed in an abstract way not previously explored in the implicit learning literature

The study aims to help characterize the sort of structures about which people can acquire unconscious knowledge. It is already well established that people can implicitly learn n-grams and also repetition patterns. We explore the acquisition of unconscious structural knowledge of symmetry. Chinese Tang poetry uses a specific sort of mirror symmetry, an inversion rule with respect to the tones of characters in successive lines of verse. We show, using artificial poetry to control both n-gram structure and repetition patterns, that people can implicitly learn to discriminate inversions from non-inversions, presenting a challenge to existing models of implicit learning

We demonstrated unconscious learning of task-irrelevant perceptual regularities in a Serial Reaction Time task in both visual and auditory domains. Participants were required to respond to different letters or syllables which occurred in random order. Unbeknownst to participants, the color of the two letters or the tone of the syllables varied according to certain rules. Reaction times indicated that people indeed learnt both the color and tonal regularities indicating that task-irrelevant sequence structure can be learned perceptually. In a subsequent prediction test of knowledge of the color or tonal cues using subjective measures, we showed that people could acquire task irrelevant knowledge unconsciously.

The role of moral intuition has been increasingly implicated in business decisions and ethical business behavior. But troublingly, because implicit processes often operate outside of conscious awareness, decision makers are generally unaware of their influence. We tested whether subtle contextual cues for identity can alter implicit beliefs. In two studies, we found that contextual cues which nonconsciously prime moral identity weaken the implicit association between the categories of “business” and “ethical,” an implicit association which has previously been linked to unethical decision making. Further, changes in this implicit association mediated the relationship between contextually primed moral identity and concern for external stakeholder groups, regardless of self-reported moral identity. Thus, our results show that subtle contextual cues can lead individuals to render more ethical judgments, by automatically restructuring moral intuition below the level of consciousness.

We demonstrated unconscious learning of task-irrelevant perceptual regularities in a Serial Reaction Time task in both visual and auditory domains. Participants were required to respond to different letters or syllables which occurred in random order. Unbeknownst to participants, the color of the two letters or the tone of the syllables varied according to certain rules. Reaction times indicated that people indeed learnt both the color and tonal regularities indicating that task-irrelevant sequence structure can be learned perceptually. In a subsequent prediction test of knowledge of the color or tonal cues using subjective measures, we showed that people could acquire task irrelevant knowledge unconsciously

We investigated the implicit learning of a linguistically relevant variable in a natural language context . Trial by trial subjective measures indicated that exposure to a form–animacy regularity led to unconscious knowledge of that regularity. Under the same conditions, people did not learn about another form–meaning regularity when a linguistically arbitrary variable was used instead of animacy . Implicit learning is constrained to acquire unconscious knowledge about features with high prior probabilities of being relevant in that domain