Search results

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the need to evaluate perception-based quality in service encounters. It sets out to diagnose potential mismatches in how customers and front-line employees perceive quality in high-involvement service settings, based on the premise that any initiative toward quality enhancement in service encounters is advisable only when employees and customers evaluate quality utilizing common perceptual structures.

The study utilizes invariance analysis. The survey involved 165 bank branches and 1,522 respondents (463 front-line employees and 1,059 customers) and operationalized the same set of questions for both groups of participants. Multisample confirmatory factor analysis tested a series of measurement models.

Results revealed equivalence for tangibles, responsiveness and assurance but also mismatches between customers and front-line employees perceptions of reliability and empathy.

Findings add to current knowledge of how both groups of participants evaluate quality in service encounters and are discussed with reference to managerial consequences for perception-based quality mismatches.

So far only a few studies have simultaneously examined front-line employees’ and customers’ perceptions of service quality in service encounters. Unlike previous research designs, this study addresses the critical aspect of potential mismatches in how customers and employees perceive service quality, and presents a methodological procedure to detect them.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate which types of service employees provide their customers with social support and to understand why they do so.

The article employs a network‐based inventory method to evaluate a customer's commercial‐based social support network and grounded theory to develop a framework illustrating the interdependence between service providers and their customers regarding the exchange of intrinsic support and extrinsic financial incentives and gifts.

Indirect service employees who do not directly receive tips from customers emerge as key providers of social support. Also, commercial friendships are not marketplace niceties. Service providers and customers engage in a mutually beneficial exchange of social support, gifts, and tips under the guise of commercial friendships.

The article is based upon service provider and customer relationships in an American diner. Researchers may want to apply the offered model to other contexts and locals. Also, researchers may want to reconsider the idea that service providers willingly provide social support to their customers.

The hiring and training of service employees, such as cashiers, hostesses, and “bus boys,” should be taken into consideration as they may be key providers of social support. Service providers should realize the extrinsic and intrinsic benefits or providing support.

The paper empirically investigates the role of indirect service employees in providing customers with social support. Also, it demonstrates that commercial friendships are mutually beneficial relationships where service providers and customers realize extrinsic and/or intrinsic benefits from these relationships.

The objective of this paper is to respond to four research questions. The first two as how likely are college football season ticket holders to recommend (1) purchasing a similar season ticket package and (2) attending a home football game, to a friend or colleague. The third question examines if there is a difference between advocacy toward purchasing season tickets as compared to advocacy toward game attendance. Finally, we identify what factors impact advocacy for college football season ticket holders.

An online survey of 57,240 season ticket holders from 69 different National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision programs was undertaken. The data were analyzed to build a model of the drivers of advocacy in season ticket holders from a conceptual base of advocacy, trust and loyalty.

The identified drivers include both institutionally influenced factors and factors related to season ticket holder behaviors/demographics. The season ticket holder is arguably the highest level of fan for any sports organization from an affinity perspective and clearly the most important from a business perspective. This research argues that the season ticket holder should not only be the focus of ticket sales efforts but also leveraged as marketing advocates with the objective of attracting additional fans.

The value of this research is the large sample of data from season ticket holders of NCAA Division 1 football clubs and the resulting learning it provides to researchers and practitioners.

Modern commercial organisations are facing pressures which have caused them to lose personnel. When they lose people, they also lose their knowledge. Organisations also have to cope with the internationalisation of business forcing collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance. Knowledge management (KM) claims to tackle these issues. This paper looks at an area where KM does not offer sufficient support, that is, the sharing of knowledge that is not easy to articulate. The focus in this paper is on communities of practice in commercial organisations. We do this by exploring knowledge sharing in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of communities of practice and investigating how communities of practice may translate to a distributed international environment. The paper reports on two case studies that explore the functioning of communities of practice across international boundaries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of three important group process variables, namely, agreement-seeking behavior, group trust, and cognitive diversity, on decision outcomes. In addition, it seeks to examine the role of process conflict as a moderator in the relationship between agreement-seeking behavior and team effectiveness; agreement-seeking behavior and decision commitment; cognitive diversity and team effectiveness; and cognitive diversity and decision commitment.

Using a structured survey instrument, this paper gathered data from 160 students enrolled in a strategic management capstone course that features strategic decision making in a simulated business strategy game. The data from 41 teams were collected from the student population using a carefully administered instrument, and the data were aggregated only after appropriate inter-rater agreement tests were run.

Results show that the group process variables are positively related to decision outcomes. The data support the view that process conflict acts as a moderator in the relationship between agreement-seeking behavior and team effectiveness and decision commitment. Further, the results support that cognitive diversity has a positive impact on decision commitment and team effectiveness. Process conflict, which acts as a deterrent, is outweighed by the presence of agreement-seeking behavior.

Since the present research is based on self-report measures, the limitations of social desirability bias and common method bias are inherent. However, sufficient care is taken to minimize these limitations. The research has implications for both the conflict management and strategic decision-making process literatures.

This study contributes to both practicing managers and the strategic management literature. The study suggests that administrators should select those teams who are prone to agreement-seeking behavior; and team members who trust one another. Administrators need not unduly avoid process conflict because diversity in opinions and thinking and agreement-seeking behavior outweigh the negative effects of process conflict.

The findings from the study will be useful for creating congenial social environment in the organizations.

This study provides new insights about the previously unknown effects of process conflict in strategic decision-making process.

This paper provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date (1997–2016) review of the archival empirical risk-reporting literature. The reviewed papers are classified into two principal themes: the incentives for and/or informativeness of risk reporting. Our review demonstrates areas of significant divergence in the literature specifically: mandatory versus voluntary risk reporting, manual versus automated content analysis, within-country versus cross-country variations in risk reporting, and risk reporting in financial versus non-financial firms. Our paper identifies a number of issues which require further research. In particular we draw attention to two: first, a lack of clarity and consistency around the conceptualization of risk; and second, the potential costs and benefits of standard-setters’ involvement.

This chapter explores the role of ethics in shaping, underpinning and sustaining authentic leadership. Viewing ethics as a system of moral principles that govern individual behaviour and conduct, Mould discusses the basis of ethics for authentic leadership, recognising that it has multiple overlapping and conflicting sources. Recognising the multiple ‘moral’ pressures and dilemmas that leaders face, Mould asks how they can construct and live by coherent ethics in a globally minded, interconnected, culturally diverse and often incoherent world. He suggests tools that may assist in searching for ethics that support authentic leadership. The author concludes that examining the interplay between ethics and leadership practices challenges theories of authentic leadership.

Within both Western and Eastern traditions of virtue ethics, there is a Doctrine of the Mean, suggesting that errors may lie either in excess or in deficiency. The need to avoid both excess and deficiency in the allocation of finite resources is a concern in many sorts of business decisions, some with ethical implications. One finite resource is the resource of attention, and ethical problems can arise from failures to attend to important things. Both Aristotle and classical Confucianism accept the importance of paying attention to circumstances rather than following fixed rules or blindly maximising value. For organisations to give appropriate attention to different things requires suitable intra-organisational reporting and communication. Then there is still need for awareness that resources are finite, and for activity that is sustainable, highlighting the related idea of harmony, especially salient in the Confucian tradition.