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Large numbers of older workers are remaining in the global workforce, raising questions concerning age-related differences in perception and behavior. The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay between employee age, gender and ethnicity on benevolence perceptions of new co-workers.

Data were obtained through scenario methods from a sample of 215 full-time, team-based employees across nine North American business organizations. Participants evaluated three provocative scenarios depicting initial meetings with new colleagues.

Workers of greater age perceived significantly less benevolence in all three scenarios. In evaluating a new boss, women perceived lower benevolence than men, and gender moderated the relationship between age and perceived benevolence, where aging was associated with significantly lower levels of perceived benevolence only among men.

Deeper understandings are needed concerning the behavioral and cognitive mechanisms related to age and workplace perceptions.

Older employees, guided by experience, are skeptical of the intentions of a wide variety of newly acquainted colleagues, signaling organizational leaders to customize behaviors and develop programs to encourage awareness and positive relationships across age- and gender-diverse employee groups.

This research uniquely explores age influences, and interactions with gender and ethnicity, on benevolence perceptions of diverse new coworkers. The results are robust, considering that age was related to lower benevolence perception across three disparate scenario interpretations.

With more than half of customer-experienced disruptions attributed to first-tier suppliers, supplier resilience (SRES) is fundamental to the resilience of the supply chain. However, little is known about the relational aspects that engender SRES, from the purview of the supplier. The purpose of this paper is to examine the explanatory role of suppliers’ relationship commitment dimensions (i.e. affective and continuance), which may foster SRES through customer benevolence. Moreover, the impact of customer benevolence on SRES is examined considering varying levels of industry dynamism.

Survey data from 207 manufacturing firms are utilized to test the hypotheses taking potential endogeneity issues into consideration.

Affective and continuance commitment induce customer benevolence, which furthers SRES. Specifically, affective commitment is the most potent approach to induce customer benevolence, while the dampening effect of industry dynamism is more palpable at the higher levels of industry dynamism.

This study did not account for specific disruption types and the contingent effects of power asymmetry.

This study empirically demonstrates that suppliers can leverage customer benevolence via relationship commitment to achieve SRES. However, the efficacy of customer benevolence to engender SRES is limited to environments not characterized by high levels of industry dynamism.

This paper highlights the role of relational mechanisms in achieving resilience from the purview of a supplier using survey data.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the contribution of benevolence as a moderator variable that enhances the effect of service employees' competence on the customer's perception of a service firm's image.

A hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed on data collected from 445 customers in a financial service setting to assess the influence of competence and benevolence, as well as their interactive effects on corporate image.

The results show a significant interaction between competence and benevolence in their influence on corporate image. The results reinforce the idea that benevolence intervenes as a moderator variable that enhances the impact of competence on corporate image.

The study has limited generalisation given the convenient sample and the great variety of service industries. The efficacy of the direct measures and the hierarchical multiple regression must be considered. It would be helpful to realise similar studies in other service settings by using multidimensional scales of competence, benevolence and corporate image.

Service firms should not only highlight the role of the service employees' expertise but also their attitude and behaviour during the service encounter in a manner so as to increase the customer's trust in the firm's capability, to satisfy his/her needs and to enhance the firm's image.

The present study contributes specifically to understanding how major characteristics of service employees can influence the assessment of corporate image by consumers.

This study examines how the different dimensions of a privacy policy separately influence perceived effectiveness of privacy policy, as well as the mediating mechanisms behind these effects (i.e. vulnerability, benevolence). In addition, this study considers privacy concern as a significant moderator in the research model, to examine if the relative influences of privacy policy content are contingent upon levels of users' privacy concern.

The survey experiment was conducted to empirically validate the model. Specifically, three survey experiments and six scenarios were designed to manipulate high and low levels of the three privacy policy dimensions (i.e. transparency, control and protection). The authors totally distributed 450 copies of the questionnaire, of which 407 were valid.

This paper found that (1) all the three privacy policy dimensions directly influence perceived effectiveness of privacy policy; (2) all the three privacy policy dimensions indirectly influence perceived effectiveness of privacy policy by enhancing perceived corporate benevolence, whereas control also affects perceived effectiveness of privacy policy by reducing perceived vulnerability; and (3) individuals with high-privacy concern are much more impacted by privacy policy contents than individuals with low-privacy concern.

The findings could provide website managers with guidelines on how to design privacy policy contents by reducing user perceptions of vulnerability and enhancing user perceptions of corporate benevolence. The managers need to focus on customers' perceived vulnerability and corporate benevolence when launching or updating privacy policies. Furthermore, the managers also need to attend to users' privacy concerns, especially for multinational companies or companies with specific consumer groups.

This study extends the current privacy policy literature by articulating the separate influences of the three privacy policy dimensions and their impact mechanisms on perceived effectiveness of privacy policy. It also uncovers privacy concerns as a boundary condition that influence the effects of privacy policy contents on users' privacy perceptions.

This research aims to test a model that proposes potential antecedents and consequences of an importer's benevolence towards its foreign export supplier. The model posits that an importer's satisfaction with and commitment to its relationship with a foreign export supplier have a positive impact on its benevolence towards the exporter, which in turn positively influences the performance of the dyadic relationship. The model also suggests that the effect of the importer's relationship satisfaction on benevolence is moderated by value similarity and cultural familiarity.

The model was tested through a mail survey of US importers who bought from foreign exporters.

The results largely support the model. The findings of this study also indicate that the importer's relationship satisfaction has a significant influence on benevolence only when cultural familiarity is high.

Strategic implications for international marketers are discussed.

The model proposed has value for marketing professionals.

This study aimed to examine the predictive effects of trustworthiness attributes (i.e. benevolence, integrity, and ability) on trust‐in‐supervisor.

A field survey using a structured questionnaire was used to gather data from 107 white‐collar employees from diverse organizations in Malaysia. The data were analysed using hierarchical multiple regression analysis.

The results showed that perceptions of supervisor benevolence, integrity, and ability predicted trust‐in‐supervisor both directly and interactively. Further analysis revealed that integrity and ability interacted in a compensatory manner to predict trust‐in‐supervisor when benevolence was high but not when it was low.

Study limitations include the use of self‐report cross‐sectional data. The findings underscore the importance of looking beyond statistical models that test only for main and two‐way interaction effects in research examining trustworthiness attributes. Researchers should consider examining three‐way interaction effects or run the risk of having a misspecified model. Also, research to determine the relative importance of trustworthiness attributes and the conditions under which one attribute is given more weight than another is needed.

Supervisors should be made aware of the importance of treating their subordinates with benevolence. Nevertheless, because benevolence is a necessary but insufficient condition for fostering trust, employers must ensure that their supervisors have high integrity and ability or, at the very least, one of these attributes.

This study highlighted the importance of examining higher order effects in research examining trustworthiness attributes and provides what is perhaps the first empirical test of how benevolence, integrity, and ability interact to predict trust‐in‐supervisor.

The purpose of this paper is first, to assess the generalizability of the Integrative Model of organizational trust to the development of workplace trust in upward, downward, and lateral relationships. Second, it examines the relative importance of ability, benevolence, and integrity in predicting trust in supervisor, subordinate, and peer. Design/methodology/approach – Human resource professionals (n=187) from two sources (a human resource professionals’ organization and a large Canadian corporation) responded to an online survey.

The results indicate that the integrative model of organizational trust was applicable to trust in supervisor, subordinate, and peer. The results also suggest that the relative importance of ability, benevolence, and integrity in predicting trust differed according to the trustor‐trustee dyad.

A potential limitation of this study is that data regarding trust in each of the three referents (supervisor, subordinate, and peer) were obtained from the same raters. These findings need to be replicated with multi‐source data.

Given the necessity of trust for positive cooperative relationships, a better understanding of how to foster trustworthiness among individuals would be a benefit to society.

The findings provide valuable information for the development of effective and efficient trust‐building strategies for upward, downward, and lateral workplace relationships.

The paper describes a study which simultaneously examined trust in supervisor, trust in subordinate, and trust in peer. It also assessed the relative importance of the antecedents of trustworthiness across referent dyads using the relative weight analysis procedure strategy.

Despite the strong intuitive appeal of personalization (through employees or, increasingly, through the use of software applications), relatively little is known about its role in managing service relationships. This study aims to explore the burgeoning area of technology‐mediated personalization and its effects on customer commitment to service relationships.

A theoretical perspective based on integrated reviews of service research and relationship marketing is developed and used to guide the exploration of personalization effects with qualitative data.

Personalization is not always good enhancement to service: its effects have contingencies and vary across the categories. Continuity personalization seems to be a promising area for researchers and practitioners.

Personalization effects should be rigorously studied. Continuity personalization seems to offer a promising area for future research.

The intuitive belief about personalization is probably misleading. Whether or not personalization strategies help service relationships depends on their capacity to generate positive inferences on dimensions of performance, benevolence, and value provision. Out of the three types, continuity personalization offers a promising strategic option for managing ongoing customer relationships if well implemented.

The counter‐intuitive insights into personalization effects on relationship continuity address issues of theoretical and practical concerns.

In the agri-food industries, particular importance is given to distribution. Indeed, maintaining good relationships with distributors is a necessity for industries seeking sound marketing performance. In this context, Moroccan agri-food companies recognize the importance of developing customer loyalty. They focus on maintaining good relationships based on trust with their distributors. Considerable research has investigated trust in business-to-business (B-to-B) relationships; however, research in the agri-food industry needs further investigation. Indeed, some past research studied the effect of benevolence on loyalty (Chen, 2008; Rampl, Eberhardt, Schütte & Kenning, 2012) but they ignored studying the effect on two types of loyalty – attitudinal and behavioral – in agri-food industries.

The paper here contributes to the literature in a number of meaningful ways. First, we explore loyalty strategies used by agri-food industries to maintain distributors. This enables us to better understand how trust can boost agri-food B-to-B relationships and distributor’s loyalty. We also investigate exactly the trust dimension (benevolence; credibility) that affects more loyalty in the agri-food industry. A better understanding of the trust dimension should provide practical guidelines as to how to facilitate loyalty in B-to-B relationships. In addition, we test the two dimensions of loyalty and the importance of the attitudinal one. Using structural equation modeling to analyze data, our findings confirm the importance of benevolence in relationships between Moroccan agri-food industries and their distributors. Indeed, the results explain that the development of customer loyalty is influenced by the development of benevolence in relationships with distributors, especially on attitudinal loyalty.

Proponents of paternalistic leadership argue that a paternalistic leader is authoritative and at the same time, a benevolent and moral individual, and this style is effective in non-Western societies. However, past empirical studies consistently found that authoritarianism related negatively to benevolence, morality and job outcomes. The authors posit that the original proposed style probably did not exist, or at least not being a dominant style, in modern Chinese business organizations.

The authors collected supervisor–subordinate dyadic data from three independent Chinese sample in Taiwan (N = 305), Hubei (N = 350) and Jiangsu (N = 270) and utilized the latent profile analysis method to test the hypotheses.

First, authoritarianism ratings are much lower than ratings of benevolence and morality. Second, none of the identified profiles is high on authoritarianism, benevolence and morality at the same time. Third, leadership style with low authoritarianism, but high on benevolence and morality leads to the best employee outcomes.

Conceptually, the authors clarify the typical leadership styles that compose of the independent dimensions proposed by paternalistic leadership researchers. Methodologically, the authors showed that using person-centered latent profile analysis method can examine combinations of various leadership dimensions or constructs to examine a leader as a whole person. Practically, understanding a leadership style that composes of different levels of various leadership constructs may better inform managers and leaders how they could effectively influence subordinates.