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Purpose — This chapter is aimed at testing the strength of three different drivers to engage in dishonest behavior at work — financial gain, response to injustice, and escape from boredom — and shedding light to the power of individual and organizational values to hold down the effect of these drivers.Design/methodology/approach — We analyze the data of 167 service employees from a large retail organization, who responded to questionnaires which manipulated drivers and organizational values.Findings — As a result we find that the financial and injustice drivers are effectively triggering several dishonest behaviors, whereas — contrary to the expectations — boredom at work does not threaten employers with employee engagement in dishonest behavior. We do find weak moderating effect of individual values in reacting to the drivers for some forms of dishonest behaviors, but the role of organizational values was marginal.Originality/value — In this chapter dishonest behavior is divided into nine specific dishonest acts involving management and customers as the stakeholders whose interests are at stake. We attempt to associate these behaviors with particular drivers. We also look at the moderators in this process: individual and organizational values. To date, espoused values of the organization is an underexplored organizational instrument compared to other situational variables, for instance, the existence of codes of ethics.

From an anthropological point of view there are four fundamental ways of living on earth, which can be related to “four basic cultural types: hunting and gathering, herding livestock, village farming, and modern civilization (…). Culture can be defined as the relationship of a society to the primordial nature or law of the earth” (Lawlor, 1991, p. 142).

This study examines a cross section of the Spanish retailing branch on the adoption and use of Social Media tools, identifying users and nonusers and their impact on management experiences. The use of 2.0 technologies has also been analyzed based on company size.

An online survey among 90 Spanish retailers provides a number of interesting insights in the adoption rates, the facilitating and disruptive factors in the adoption process, the types of applications used by retailers, and their experiences from them. Prior to filling in the online questionnaires, the recipients were contacted by phone and were informed about the study. A Chi-square analysis has been carried out to contrast the suggested research questions.

Retailers using Social Media as part of their marketing strategy use most social applications for customer-related purposes and see clear benefits in improving customer relations, market communication, improving their after-sales services, and obtaining customer feedback and customer information. Although many differences do not exist between large, medium, and small companies, it is remarkable that large companies use social web tools as branding and small companies as customer service.

The main problem of this study has been the low recruitment of answers by retailers.

Customers are using such technologies in overwhelming numbers and a substantial part of the customer generated content in Social Media is about brands, businesses, and products. Having a good idea about the customer dialog online can provide businesses with very valuable information and help them understand market trends but also identify potential areas of danger and problems.

The adoption of Social Media tools is a topic much studied from demand perspective. Nevertheless, the application to business and, specifically, retailing sector is less analyzed. With this study we pretend to improve this research line from offer perspective.

Drawing on affect-based mechanisms, this chapter describes two forms of customer mistreatment, aggressive and demanding mistreatment. Tests are conducted of their lagged effects in predicting within-person fluctuation of employees’ negative mood, as well as the moderating roles of employees’ emotion regulation after work (i.e., rumination and social sharing). 1,185 daily surveys were collected from 149 Chinese customer service representatives from a call center for eight weekdays. Results supported the main effects of both forms of customer mistreatment and partly supported the moderating roles of rumination in strengthening the impacts of customer mistreatment. Implications and limitations are discussed.

A number of studies across a variety of disciplines call for further research investigating the factors that influence performance measurement (PM) systems and practices. Despite management control systems (MCS) comprising performance measurement as one of its elements, the influence of MCS on PM systems and practices has received little attention. This study attempts to address this need by examining the associations between MCS and PM practices through a survey of large Australian organisations, with MCS characterised in terms of Simons’ (1991; 1995) levers of control (LOC) framework and the objects-of-control (OOC) framework (Emmanuel et al., 1990; Merchant and Van der Stede, 2007). We find that MCS approaches and the specific LOC and OOC that these comprise influence both the purpose for which PM systems are used and the selection of KPIs, but has little influence on the use of benchmarking. Also, diagnostic MCS are associated with the design of causally structured PM systems while results-focused MCS are linked with an absence of structure. Adding to the findings are evidence that interactive LOC are not associated with strategic learning, validation and the use of causality in PM systems.

In this chapter, we summarize and build on the current state of the customer mistreatment literature in an effort to further future research on this topic. First, we detail the four primary conceptualizations of customer mistreatment. Second, we present a multilevel model of customer mistreatment, which distinguishes between the unfolding processes at the individual employee level and the service encounter level. In particular, we consider the antecedents and outcomes unique to each level of analysis as well as mediators and moderators. Finally, we discuss important methodological concerns and recommendations for future research.

This chapter summarizes a meta-analysis of 72 studies (N= 20,701) that link customer mistreatment (abusive, nasty, and rude behavior of customers toward employees) to psychological, attitudinal, and behavioral strains. Results showed that customer mistreatment related significantly to a variety of psychological and attitudinal strains (emotional exhaustion, emotional strain, job (dis)satisfaction, turnover intentions, perceived organizational support, and supervisor support) and behavioral strains (reduced customer service performance and counterproductive work behavior (CWB) directed toward organizations and customers). These results were similar to those found with general mistreatment, suggesting that mistreatment by organizational outsiders might have similar effects to mistreatment from organizational insiders. These results suggest a clear association of mistreatment with strains, but recent work is discussed that questions the typical assumption that mistreatment leads to CWB rather than the reverse.

Customer experience is a relevant concept in marketing and tourism research since its correct understanding allows companies to achieve competitive advantage and service providers can reach several outcomes such as customer engagement, loyalty, and customer satisfaction. This chapter aims to analyze one of the main outcomes of the customer experience, the customer satisfaction through online reviews, and using spatial analysis as a tool to incorporate the contextual nature of the customer experience. Thus, our study considers online rating as a measure of customer satisfaction and tries to analyze the impact of actions under the control of the service provider (price and objective quality) and actions under the control of the customer (subjective quality) on customer satisfaction.

With the Spanish hotel industry as a study framework, an empirical study is developed to analyze, through geographically weighted regression techniques, the relationship between price, objective quality and subjective quality, and online ratings given by consumers with a sample of 1870 of geolocated hotels in Spain. The findings show how a premium price, depending on the geolocation, is an indicator for better customer experiences, and they also show that objective quality is the antecedent of customer experience whose positive effect on customer satisfaction is geographically more widespread. Results show contradictory effects of subjective quality, while in some areas subjective quality does not match the product fit of customers, in others it allows hotels to provide more satisfactory experiences.

Models of value creation that have been proposed for supporting value-based management are described and analyzed, including the Balanced Scorecard, the Baldrige Quality Award Criteria, the Deming Management Method, the Service-Profit Chain, and the Skandia Intellectual Capital Model. These models are compared, their potential for guiding the identification of value drivers and performance measures for value-based management is assessed, and management issues that must be addressed if such models are to contribute to long-run value creation are explored. These issues include causally linking value drivers to each other and to financial outcomes, the extent to which the models take a dynamic, or whole-system, view of value creation, and whether multiple value drivers should be explicitly weighted and combined to form a “value index.” Finally, the substantial body of research evidence linking intangible value drivers to financial outcomes is reviewed, and some directions for further research are offered.

A book on case study research would be remiss without a chapter that introduces the reader to relevant literature on personal exchanges and face-to-face talk. Chapter 9 offers a conceptual property–space analysis for theory and research on personal exchanges including talk. The chapter describes a study on face-to-face conversation analysis (i.e., talk) in a buyer–seller context. The study includes examining forty transactions between actual insurance salespersons (n=3) and prospective clients (n=57) interacting in field settings. The chapter reports the relationships between purchase behavior and the frequency of key orientation and bargaining statements made by the salespersons and customers. The findings support the importance of studying social factors, influence, and situation variables in constructing a general conceptualization of exchange relationships.