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In the era of the service economy, the personalized needs of customers are increasing rapidly. It often occurs that front-line employees bend organizational rules to help customers. The study sought to explore the influence mechanism of servant leadership on specific dimensions of customer-oriented deviance from the manager’s perspective, examine the mediating role of psychological security, and the moderating role of error management climate in the process.

We conducted an online survey study in China from April 10 to 29, 2023. We use online survey questionnaire technique and random sampling method for data collection. The authors collected 385 questionnaires from China and tested the model by SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0.

The results show that servant leadership significantly promotes employees' deviant customer-oriented behaviors, psychological security plays a mediating role between servant leadership and deviant customer-oriented behaviors, and error management climate has a positive moderating effect between servant leadership and deviant customer-oriented behaviors.

This study explores the influence mechanism of servant leadership on deviant customer-oriented behaviors. The results of this study not only enrich the theoretical research on the formation mechanism of deviant customer-oriented behaviors but also provide a reference for leaders to correctly view and effectively manage employees' deviant customer-oriented behaviors.

The purpose of this study is to discuss how organizations can drive organizational performance through human capital (HC) investment through systematic thinking.

This study analyzes three companies from various industries, adopts systems thinking and uses three leading indicators from the balanced scorecard framework to explore the effects of strategic orientations for HC on innovation ecosystems and organizational performance.

In terms of academic contributions, this study broadly verifies the innovation ecosystem model for organizations and reveals that customer-oriented, internal process-oriented and innovation learning-oriented HC strategies reinforce the pathways in organizational innovation ecosystems, thereby enriching the literature on innovation ecosystems.

In terms of practical contributions, this study provides a novel HC-based perspective on developmental dynamics and details the relationships among each aspect of the innovation ecosystem and HC strategies.

The proposed architecture and strategic frameworks provide a reference for corporations to implement strategic orientations of HC, drive operations in organizational innovation ecosystems and improve organizational performance.

Studies have shown that customer orientation has a substantial impact on a business's success. This study examines the effects of positive personality on salespeople's proactive customer orientation (PCO) and responsive customer orientation (RCO) by incorporating the effects of job enthusiasm and transformational leadership.

A questionnaire survey is conducted. A total of 511 questionnaires are received from Taiwan's life insurance salespeople. Partial least squares (PLS) regression is used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that positive personality influences PCO and RCO both directly and indirectly through job enthusiasm. The effect of transformational leadership is also found to be significant. Financial service companies should be concerned about the important role of positive personality and transformational leadership in promoting job enthusiasm, PCO and RCO among salespeople.

Previous studies mostly focused on the direct relationship between customer orientation and organizational outcomes, neglecting the role of individual personality. This gap leaves us wondering how a positive personality influences a salesperson's proactive and responsive customer orientation. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine the mechanisms of a positive personality, job enthusiasm, and transformational leadership on salespeople's PCO and RCO.

This paper aims at understanding how automotive firms integrate customer relationship management (CRM) tools and big data analytics (BDA) into their marketing strategies to enhance total quality management (TQM) after the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

A qualitative methodology based on a multiple-case study was adopted, involving the collection of 18 interviews with eight leading automotive firms and other companies responsible for their marketing and CRM activities.

Results highlight that, through the adoption of CRM technology, automotive firms have developed best practices that positively impact business performance and TQM, thereby strengthening their digital culture. The challenges in the implementation of CRM and BDA are also discussed.

The study suffers from limitations related to the findings' generalizability due to the restricted number of firms operating in a single industry involved in the sample.

Findings suggest new relational approaches and opportunities for automotive companies deriving from the use of CRM and BDA under an overall customer-oriented approach.

This research analyzes how CRM and BDA improve the marketing and TQM processes in the automotive industry, which is undergoing deep transformation in the current context of digital transformation.

This study aims to suggest a moderated mediation model addressing how internal integration interacts with information technology (IT) link with external customers to meet customer needs more efficiently and effectively.

This study tests the proposed hypotheses by using 268 data collected from manufacturing firms worldwide.

The results of this study reveal that internal integration plays a very important role in promoting customer satisfaction directly and indirectly by enhancing the ability to meet customers’ flexibility needs. In addition, the results show that IT link with customers strengthens this indirect influencing relationship.

By combining IT connectedness with external customers with internal capability, this study provides valuable insights into how manufacturing firms apply internal integration more effectively to enhance customer satisfaction.

Customer orientation (CO) means meeting customers’ needs better than competitors. Competitor orientation means using and acting upon the knowledge of competitors. Thus, the main aim of this study is to analyze the effects of environmental competitiveness on export performance by examining the moderating roles of these variables.

Based on data from 5,000 firms from a survey run in 2021 in Turkey facilitated by the Chamber of Commerce, the authors tested their hypotheses using partial least squares structural equation modeling and correlation analysis.

The results show that competitor orientation positively affects the relationship between a competitive environment and export performance. However, the authors do not find evidence of a significant effect on CO.

Service sector managers should sacrifice customers to gain export market share in favor of superiority with competitors.

Prior research has yet to emphasize the importance of competition intensity in export performance for service-logistics firms. However, the environmental competitiveness–performance relationship is better explained with the help of these test results and the two additional moderators suggested in this work. Moreover, the export performance indicators were gathered from an independent source.

The purpose of this paper is to research the impact of digitalization on employees' future competencies and the conditional role of human resource development (HRD) in the relationship between independent and dependent variables.

Empirical research covered 1209 enterprises from all of Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic. The research was conducted from 2019 to 2021. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), a theoretical model was tested and verified.

Confirmatory factor analysis has shown a good fit for the tested model. The purpose and character of our data showed a good alignment with the SEM partial least squares method, as the goal is to predict a construct. The model showed that employee-oriented digitalization positively affected the employees' future competencies, with no impact of customer-oriented digitalization treated as a control variable. Also, the moderating role of HRD has not been shown to be significant for the “digitalization – competencies” relationship.

Previous studies on the development of personnel competencies treated these competencies as antecedents of digital transformation and examined the formal role of HRD in building the competencies. The novelty of this study lies in exploring the pattern of interactions among the impact of an environment built by innovative technologies and HRD on the competencies of the future. Also, the research embedded in the environment of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia has contributed to the complex understanding of the transition to digitalization, as this region has often been omitted in the field of human resource management (HRM) research focused on exploring digital transformation.

Drawing upon the conservation of resources theory, this study aims to investigate whether, how and when salespeople’s substantive attribution of the organization’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects value-based selling (VBS). The authors argue that salespeople’s substantive CSR attribution increase value-based selling through two mechanisms (i.e. by lowering emotional exhaustion and increasing empathy), and treatment by customers can increase or decrease the strength of these relationships.

B2B salespeople working in various industries in China were recruited through snowball sampling to participate in the study. There were 462 volunteers (57.58% women; aged 30–55; tenure ranging from six months to 15 years) who provided valid self-report questionnaires.

Hierarchical multiple regression supported the association between salespeople’s substantive CSR attribution and VBS. The results showed that salespeople’s emotional state (i.e. emotional exhaustion and empathy) mediated the association between substantive CSR attribution and VBS. As expected, salespeople’s experiences of customer incivility weakened the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion; contrary to expectations, customer-initiated interpersonal justice weakened the mediation effect of empathy.

This study makes a unique contribution to the existing marketing literature by first investigating the role of salespeople’s attribution of CSR motives in facilitating their VBS, which answers the call to identify factors that predict VBS. In addition, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors are the first to test salespeople’s emotions as a mechanism of the link between their CSR attributions and selling behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contribution of big data in the transforming process of an IT firm to a learning organization.

The authors adopted a qualitative research approach to define and interpret the ideas and experiences of the IT firms’ employees and to present them to the readers directly. For this purpose, they followed a single-case study design. They researched on a small and medium enterprise operating in the IT sector in Düzce province, Turkey. This paper used a semi-structured interview and document analysis as data collecting methods. In all, eight interviews were conducted with employees. Brochures and website of the organization were used as data sources for the document analysis.

As a result of in-depth interviews and document analysis, the authors formed five main themes that describe perception of big data and learning organization concepts, methods and practices adopted in transforming process, usage areas of big data in organization and how the sample organization uses big data as a learning organization. The findings of this paper show that the sample organization is a learning IT firm that has used big data in transforming to learning organization and in maintaining the learning culture.

The findings contribute to literature as it is one of the first studies that examine the influence of big data on the transformation process of an IT firm to a learning organization. The findings reveal that IT firms benefit from the solutions of big data while learning. However, as the design of the research is single-case study, the findings may be specific to the sample organization. Future studies are required that examine the subject in different samples and by different research designs.

In literature, research on how IT firms’ managers and employees use big data in organizational learning process is limited. The authors expect that this paper will shed light on future research that examines the effect of big data on the learning process of the organization.

Despite the increasing attention given to product-service integration (PSI), little is known about this innovation strategy from a key decision-maker’s perspective. To address this gap, our study draws from personality psychology and decision-making (DM) logics theory to better understand why and how companies’ decision-makers strategize for PSI.

Using an abductive, empirics-first approach, we identify the study’s theoretical building blocks, followed by an exploratory quantitative analysis to generate new theory. We propose a fit-as-mediation conceptual framework suggesting that (1) specific personality traits [i.e. honesty-humility (H), emotionality (E), extraversion (X), agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C) and openness to experience (O) (HEXACO)] make decision-makers more likely to include PSI in their company’s strategy and (2) depending on their personality, they apply different DM logics (i.e. causation or effectuation) to do so. To empirically examine this, we use data from 289 SMEs’ decision-makers.

We report several meaningful relationships among our key theoretical constructs. For instance, we find that conscientious decision-makers are more likely to develop a PSI strategy via causation, whereas extravert decision-makers are more likely to do so via both causation and effectuation.

This service study is the first to apply the well-established HEXACO Personality Inventory to companies’ key decision-makers. Moreover, it contributes to the microfoundations of PSI strategy and DM logic theories.