An empirical investigation of service recovery in e-retailing: An operations management perspective

Abstract

Purpose

E-retailing grows rapidly in recent years. The majority of previous research on e-retailing service recovery has been mainly focussed on the customers’ perspective. The purpose of this paper is to examine service recovery from the operations management perspective of the e-retailing industry in order to investigate the impact of an integrated service recovery system on e-retailers’ capability improvement and market performance.

Design/methodology/approach

Empirical data consists of a sample of 256 employees from a leading e-retailer in China. Structural Equation Model was used to verify the relationship between the integrated recovery system and employees’ job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) as well as e-retailers’ capability improvement and market performance.

Findings

The empirical results reveal that e-retailers need to pay attention to establishing an integrated recovery system. The system can facilitate employee job satisfaction and OCB, ultimately the e-retailer’s market performance. However, the relationships between job satisfaction and OCB as well as market performance are found to be low in the context of e-retailing in China.

Originality/value

This research contributes to the effectiveness of an integrated service recovery system in the context of e-retailing and the important role played by employees during recovery process.

Citation

Zhang, M., Dai, X. and He, Z. (2015), "An empirical investigation of service recovery in e-retailing: An operations management perspective", Journal of Service Theory and Practice, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 348-367. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSTP-03-2014-0046