Central European Business Review

11-22

Authors: Marek Vich, Marina Y. Kim

Negative feedback has been repeatedly identified as beneficial for organizational learning, adaptability, and performance. Despite having these advantages, most organizations still do not use negative feedback to its full potential, as they fail to spread it correctly among their members. The application of negative feedback, therefore, faces several issues like misuse or process avoidance that are mostly driven by psychological factors. The purpose of this paper is to discuss potential benefits of a newly emerged organizational approach called radical candor for contemporary state of the art in feedback-related behavior and to propose how it might be successfully applied in organizational settings. We define radical candor as a proactive and compassionate engagement in an unpleasant and direct feedback process. Radical candor may help reduce the influence of psychological factors like extreme levels of attachment, harsh emotions or low self-esteem in order to make organizational members more engaged and satisfied with the negative feedback process. Organizations willing to apply radical candor might consider either official implementation from top to bottom (through managers and leadership) or unofficial intervention through the agents (employees of all levels) depending on company characteristics.

34-46

Authors: Petr Kral, Martin Machek, Tomas Karel

Comparative advertising had been traditionally banned in most EU countries and was allowed by the European law just relatively recently. That is why in the EU this form of advertising is relatively new, as opposed to the situation in the US, where comparative advertising has been widely used and well accepted by consumers for decades. The literature has been silent on the topic of the effectiveness of comparative advertising in the Czech Republic, as well as in other Central and Eastern European countries. The goal of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of comparative advertising campaigns in the Czech Republic. Using an online survey with 160 Czech respondents, we found that the attitude towards comparative advertising is rather positive in the Czech Republic. We also identified that the gender of the recipient influences the general perception of comparative advertising. On the other hand, the age of the recipient does not seem to be a moderator of the attitude towards comparative advertising, in general. The results also do not signal any impact of the gender and the age of the recipient on the change of the perception of any of the brands involved in the campaign. Managerial implications target mainly marketing and advertising managers responsible for Central European markets.

61-70

Authors: Jaroslava Kubatova

The goal of this article is to present work-related attitudes of a sample of Czech Generation Z and their comparison to the results of an international research study. Currently, there are three important trends influencing the labor market: (1) the origin and development of a ubiquitous working environment, (2) the thriving of coworking centers, and (3) Generation Z's entering the labor market. Instead of traditional jobs, the bearers of human capital tend to choose independent work in an online environment, and often work in coworking centers. Using self-determination theory, we substantiate why they thrive better this way. Based on the results of an international research project focused on work attitudes among Generation Z and the results of a replication study we carried out in the Czech Republic, we attest that members of Generation Z may prefer independent virtual work in coworking centers, too. The total amount of available human capital, the lack of which is pointed out by companies, may grow thanks to new ways of working. Companies, which can use human capital of independent workers, gain a competitive advantage.