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With the rapidly improving communication technologies, a growing number of people communicate with each other in online environments. In particular, social networking services (SNSs) are one of the widely used and common places that enable active communication among users. To understand what drives successful online conversations in SNSs, this study aims to explore the roles of posts and first comments in successful online conversations.

To address the purpose, the data of news-related channels in Reddit were collected and analyzed.

The study found that successful conversations tend to have the post and first comment with high scores. Also, the first comments in successful online conversations tend to be easier than those in other conversations.

The results reveal that successful online conversations can be generated not only with empathic posts but also with touching or attractive first comments. In other words, users are likely to participate in an online conversation that starts with an empathic post and first comment. Moreover, both practical and theoretical implications are presented.

This study addressed a relatively understudied process of school leadership: the principal-teacher conversation about instructional change. Two distinct conversation structures were examined: controlling conversation and transformative leadership conversation (TLC). Self-determination theory (SDT) was used to make the case that TLC is a better fit for instructional change than controlling conversation. Hypotheses were developed on the relationship between principal-teacher conversation and teacher trust in the principal, teacher autonomy and teacher vitality. These mental states were identified for empirical testing because of their influence on change processes.

The empirical study used a correlational research design with survey data. The data came from a random sample of 2,500 teachers from the population of certified teachers in a southwestern state in the USA. Useable survey responses were obtained from 1,615 teachers, for a response rate of 65 percent. Teachers in the sample averaged 15 years of teaching experience, with 7 years in their current school. Around 81% of teachers identified as female and 18 percent as male and 79% of teachers listed a racial identification as white. Hypotheses were tested in a path model using AMOS 28.0 with robust maximum likelihood (MLR).

As hypothesized, TLC had moderate to strong positive relationships with teacher trust in the principal, teacher autonomy and teacher vitality. Controlling conversation had small, negative relationships with teacher trust in the principal and teacher autonomy. Controlling conversation was not related to teacher vitality in the path analysis. Compared with controlling conversation, TLC had stronger relationships with teacher mental states.

The results of this study begin to reveal useful evidence on the inherent social-psychological mechanisms active in principal-teacher conversations. With results indicating that conversation structure has consequences for positive teacher mental states, the study directs attention to a ubiquitous yet understudied leadership process.

Service research offering a view of both the dark and bright sides of smart technology remains scarce. This paper embraces a critical perspective and examines the conflicting outcomes of smart services on the customer experience (CX), with a specific focus on chatbots.

This study uses empirical research methods to examine a single case study where an online retail service provider implemented a chatbot for customer service. Using discourse analysis, we analysed 7,167 conversations between customers and the chatbot over a two-year period.

The analysis identifies seven general themes related to the effects of the chatbot on CX: interaction quality, information gathering, procedure literacy, task achievement, digital trust, shopping stress and shopping journey. We illuminate both positive (i.e. having a pleasant interaction, providing information, knowing procedures, improving tasks, increasing trust, reducing stress and completing the journey) and negative outcomes (i.e. having an unpleasant interaction, increasing confusion, ignoring procedures, worsening tasks, reducing trust, increasing stress and abandoning the journey).

The paper develops a comprehensive framework to offer a clearer view of chatbots as smart services in customer care. It delves into the conflicting effects of chatbots on CX by examining them through relational, cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions.

Purpose: To outline recent developments in digital service delivery in order to encourage researchers to pursue collaborations with computer science, operations research, and data science colleagues and to show how such collaborations can expand the scope of research on emotion in service delivery.

Design/methodology/approach: Uses archived resources available at http://LivePerson.com to extract data based in genuine service conversations between agents and customers. We refer to these as “digital traces” and analyze them using computational science models.

Findings: Although we do not test significance or causality, the data presented in this chapter provide a unique lens into the dynamics of emotions in service; results that are not obtainable using traditional research methods.

Research limitations/implications: This is a descriptive study where findings unravel new dynamics that should be followed up with more research, both research using traditional experimental methods, and digital traces research that allows inferences of causality.

Practical implications: The digital data and newly developed tools for sentiment analyses allow exploration of emotions in large samples of genuine customer service interactions. The research provides objective, unobtrusive views of customer emotions that draw directly from customer expressions, with no self-report intervention and biases.

Originality/value: This is the first objective and detailed depiction of the actual emotional encounters that customers express, and the first to analyze in detail the nature and content of customer service work.

Increased access to flexible work arrangements has the prospect of enhancing work-family reconciliation. Under consideration is extent that managers assumed lead roles in initiating discussions, the overall volume of discussions that occurred, and the outcomes of these discussions.

A panel analysis of 950 managers over one and a half years examines factors predicting involvement in a change initiative designed to expand flexible work arrangement use in a company in the financial activities supersector.

The overall volume of discussions, and tendencies for managers to initiate discussions, is positively predicted by managers’ prior experiences with flexibility, training to promote flexibility, and supervisory responsibilities. Managers were more inclined to promote flexibility when they viewed it as a supervisory responsibility and when they believed that it offered career rewards. An experiment demonstrated that learning of professional standards demonstrated outside of one’s own unit increased promotion of flexible work options. Discussions of flexibility led to many more approvals than denials of use, and also increased the likelihood of subsequent discussions occurring, indicating that promoting discussions of flexible work arrangements can be a path toward expanding use.

The study identifies specific factors that can lead managers to support exploration of flexible work arrangement use.

This study is motivated to provide a theoretically informed, data-driven assessment of the consequences associated with the participation of non-human bots in social accountability movements; specifically, the anti-inequality/anti-corporate #OccupyWallStreet conversation stream on Twitter.

A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling approach as well as XGBoost machine learning algorithms are applied to a dataset of 9.2 million #OccupyWallStreet tweets in order to analyze not only how the speech patterns of bots differ from other participants but also how bot participation impacts the trajectory of the aggregate social accountability conversation stream. The authors consider two research questions: (1) do bots speak differently than non-bots and (2) does bot participation influence the conversation stream.

The results indicate that bots do speak differently than non-bots and that bots exert both weak form and strong form influence. Bots also steadily become more prevalent. At the same time, the results show that bots also learn from and adapt their speaking patterns to emphasize the topics that are important to non-bots and that non-bots continue to speak about their initial topics.

These findings help improve understanding of the consequences of bot participation within social media-based democratic dialogic processes. The analyses also raise important questions about the increasing importance of apparently nonhuman actors within different spheres of social life.

The current study is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, that uses a theoretically informed Big Data approach to simultaneously consider the micro details and aggregate consequences of bot participation within social media-based dialogic social accountability processes.

The field of organization development is about change and development of organizational systems. One of the major barriers to system change is organizational silence, the fear of lower level to speak truth to power, and senior leaders' reluctance to seek the truth. Consequently, senior leaders whose role is to orchestrate strategic change that will develop the organization's capabilities do not know the whole truth about their system's capabilities to achieve its purpose and strategy and live to its values. Thirty years of enabling leaders to transform their organization through safe honest, collective, and internally public conversations using a structured process called the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) has led to insights about why such conversations are powerfully transformative. After a brief description of the SFP, this chapter describes insights and supporting grounded data about why honest conversations were transformative when leaders fully embrace the practice and spirit of SFP. These insights were gained from facilitating and observing hundreds of honest conversations in progress. The findings have implications for how leaders aided by consultants can accelerate strategic change that will improve effectiveness and performance while simultaneously transforming trust and commitment.

In this paper, we offer a model of how leaders and managers can create energy for change by influencing patterns of conversation across the organization. We develop the model by linking social constructionist thought with theory from the field of positive psychology. We propose that effective leaders work with others to co-author persuasive narratives of change that generate energy by providing people (including themselves) with a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Energy is expressed in the form of support, time, money, and resources, which contribute to the success of the work. Continuous attention to crafting persuasive narratives in a collaborative way creates upward spirals of energy, and increases the probability of successful change over time. We illustrate these ideas with a case study of a successful IT change initiative in a Fortune 100 insurance company, and conclude by discussing implications for research and practice.