RESUMEN
The five-item Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (CAS) was found to be a useful and valid mental health screener. Participants in the respective surveys were mostly from single countries such as the US, Turkey, Mexico, or Brazil. However, a cross-cultural re-examination is lacking. This study fills this gap. In several multigroup confirmatory factor analyses with 25 countries from five continents as groups, sex and age as groups, and different stages of concern with COVID-19 infection, CAS was found to be invariant across all groups; this indicates that CAS is appropriate for meaningfully comparing the results across different groups. On a global basis, Coronavirus anxiety did not differ between female and male participants. Regarding age, however, younger individuals suffered more from anxiety of the pandemic. Individualistic cultures and those with low power distance such as in the Western hemisphere had higher COVID-19 anxiety. CAS values were also higher for those individuals who had been infected by COVID-19, those whose relatives had been infected, and those who experienced COVID-19-related death in the family. Overall, CAS is a parsimonious, valid, and reliable mental health screener on a global basis.
RESUMEN
Maintaining and increasing brand equity is the top priority for most brand managers. This includes not only the areas of public relations and advertising, but also the way in which sales staff communicates regarding the brand. According to behavioral branding, the brand should be strengthened by the brand fit of the employees. To date, research and practice have developed more intuitive and heuristic methods for evaluating employee behavior and its impact on the brand. In this article, behavior will be operationalized and measured by personality and sales encounter experience. The method is based on Heider's balance theory explaining the occurrence of cognitive dissonance in case of unbalanced states in triads, here the brand, the customer, and the salesperson. Findings show how discrepancies in personal behavior led to discrepancies in brand equities before and after the sales encounter.