From the beginning of the new semester, news of academic achievements kept pouring in for the teachers and students of our college. Recently, the paper “Creating a high-performance exhibitor team: A temporary-organization perspective”, co-authored by Professor He Huiwen as the first author and Dr. Li Chunxiao as the correspondence author, with Dr. Liang Sai and Associate Professor Lin Zhibin of Durham University, UK, was accepted and published by International Journal of Hospitality Management, the top journal of the tourism discipline.

Always for a rush of a few days, the temporary characteristics of the exhibition activities determine that the exhibitor teams are also mostly temporary organizations. Based on the perspective of temporary organizations, the paper focuses on the exhibitor team, and through theoretical reasoning and expert interviews, it is found that servant leadership and swift trust are the two main factors affecting the performance of the exhibitor team. Servant leadership can not only contribute directly to the improvement of exhibitor performance, but also indirectly improve the performance of exhibitors by accelerating the formation of swift trust. Swift trust not only has a positive direct influence on team performance but is also a partial mediator between servant leadership and team performance. In addition, considering the multi-dimensional characteristics of servant leadership, the paper further explores the degree of influence of each dimension on the team performance, and finds out that the conceptual thinking ability of team leaders and the concern for subordinates' growth consciousness are the two dimensions that have the most significant impact on the performance of exhibitors. The above research results have all passed the test of empirical data and will play an important role in guiding the practice of exhibitors.

International Journal of Hospitality Management is an important SSCI journal in the field of tourism management (Impact Factor: 4.664). In the past decade, the journal has only accepted and published 10 papers or so on exhibition which were mostly written by scholars from outside mainland China. This paper has contributed Nankai wisdom to the theoretical research of exhibitions.