METHODS: The (n = 1614) students enrolled in the science section for the academic year 2019-2020 participated in this descriptive correlational survey, selected from 40 high schools in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan, through a non-proportionate stratified random sampling technique. The Reading Habits Questionnaire (RHQ) and the Study Skills Scale (SSS) were used to collect data about students' reading habits and study skills. At the same time, academic achievement was the students' grades obtained in the ninth class in the subject of English that were determined by the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) Lahore in 2019. Students' responses were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics.
RESULTS: The results indicated that students have competent reading habits and study skills. The correlational findings showed a strong positive relationship among reading habits, study skills, and academic achievement in English, while moderate positive relationships between reading habits and academic achievement in English. However, regression analysis results were significant, while reading habits and study skills moderately predicted academic achievement.
DISCUSSION: It is implicated that teachers should plan such assignments and tasks based on reflective thinking by considering the role of study skills in academic achievement. Moreover, teachers and school administrators could mutually create timetables for library lessons to build reading habits and study skills among learners.
DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The proposed mediated moderation model was tested in two separate studies, study 1 and study 2, with data collected from police officers and employees of Islamic banking respectively, and then analyzed with Mplus for random coefficient models for direct effects, indirect effects, and for mediated moderation.
FINDINGS: It was found that leaders' ambitions may enhance performance pressure on the subordinates, which in turn promotes their cheating behavior. Overall, we found that the traditional view of ambition theory only emphasizes good mechanisms such as motivation. However, to integrate with a social identity perspective, ambition would also cause pressure and pressure rather than motivation. Additionally, leaders' ambitions are more strongly and positively related to the performance pressure and cheating behaviors of employees when subordinates also have high leader identification. The findings of this research suggested that leaders' positive workplace behavior could also spawn subordinates' unethical behaviors.
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: Through this research, we can help policymakers understand that leaders' positive desire in general and ambition, in particular, may not be necessarily associated with subordinates' positive behaviors. Our results revealed that internalized with performance pressure, the leaders' ambition is associated with subordinates' cheating behavior. The findings of this research will help policymakers understand what might be promoting unethical behavior of employees. The cheating behavior of employees is not a singular level phenomenon of subordinates, it could also be triggered by contextual factors. Therefore, in developing policies for reducing the chance of cheating at work, the policymakers should also focus on the contextual factors that might be promoting cheating.
ORIGINALITY/VALUE: Ambitious leaders tend to demonstrate high performance, also, performance pressure literature focuses efforts of the employees toward high performance. The dark side of these lines of researches is still underexplored. We shifted the conventional focus of understanding to the positive side of ambition and performance pressure by explaining the potential cost in the form of employees' enhanced cheating behavior. The interplay between the relationship between leaders' ambition and subordinates' perception of leader identification also enhanced our understating about the boundary condition of the relationship between leaders' ambition, performance pressure, and cheating behavior of subordinates.
METHODOLOGY: We rely on the person-organization fit theory for our conceptual framework and we collected primary data from 124 respondents designated as chairman and managing directors in small family businesses.
RESULTS: Our results show that a descendant entrepreneur's openness, extroversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness traits are likely to lead to successful family business succession, but a descendant entrepreneur with neuroticism trait is unlikely to do so. In addition, our results reveal that the DE-FBVC mediates the relationship between openness and extroversion traits with succession success positively, but between neuroticism trait and succession success negatively. By contrast, we find that DE-FBVC does not mediate the relationship between conscientiousness and agreeableness traits with succession success.
ORIGINALITY: The findings of our study suggest that while four of the Big-5 personality traits matter for the success of small family business succession, specific personality traits of descendant entrepreneurs which are found to be congruent with the values of their family business, will also lead to succession success.