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This paper seeks to question and discuss the relevance of organizational, customer and professional commitment for effectively managing financial service firms. In particular, it aims to study differences between employed and self‐employed finance professionals.

The authors conducted in‐depth interviews with professionals in 30 finance firms in Austria. The interviews aimed to reveal professionals' notions of commitment as it pertains to each interviewee's specific work context, whether self‐employed or employed.

Although the financial services sector requires professionals to routinely display both high customer and professional commitment, it appears that organizational commitment is unrelated to performance. While employed finance professionals experience conflicts between organizational and customer commitment (e.g. selling in‐house products that may not perfectly match customers' needs), self‐employed professionals tend to clash between customers' best interests and their own self‐interest (e.g. selling products and services for which they receive the highest commission). All professionals noted that they work in a competitive environment with a focus on individual sales. Individual performance ratings were found to prevent the development of strong branch or team commitment.

Although qualitative methods are a starting‐point for identifying serious issues, quantitative studies across larger samples are needed to evaluate the scope of the findings.

The findings imply that financial services may not benefit much from HRM efforts that strive to obtain firm‐wide or organizational commitment. In large financial service firms the routine turnover of good professionals can be curbed if management starts to pay attention to creating flexible work arrangements, and enabling professionals to commit to customers and their profession.

While prior research suggests fostering the organizational commitment of employees, this study finds the concept of organization‐wide commitment to be of less importance for managing finance firms. This lack of importance of organizational commitment was found to be independent of finance professionals' contractual status (employed or self‐employed); whereas customer and professional commitment were associated with high performance motivation.

The purpose of this editorial is two‐fold: first, to provide an overview of team‐related issues in the particular realm of contingent work arrangements, and second, to introduce the collection of articles encompassing this special issue.

The editorial is a general literature review that provides the readers of this special issue with a broader scholarly literature framework. The editorial also provides a historical context of the field. First, the phenomenon of contingent work arrangements is discussed. Second, attention is given to identification of major strategic factors, which have been contributing to the growth of contingent work arrangements. Third, team‐related issues of differentiation, integration, and cooperation are discussed.

The overview of research in the area of contingent work arrangements demonstrates that such work arrangements are diverse in their contractual structure. The rationale for which organizations use contingent work arrangements are diverse, as are the reasons why employees undertake such work outside the scope of the traditional employment model. Research in this area has grown primarily with the focus on economic, legal, and social factors influencing the expansion of non‐standard work arrangements. Less research is found in the area of individual, managerial, and organizational consequences of this expansion.

This editorial – and the special issue in particular – gives attention to understanding the array of experiences associated with contingent workers with the purpose of accumulating theoretical knowledge in this field, but also – and perhaps more importantly – to add to the transition from evidence‐based knowledge to practical advice.

This study aims to examine the direct and indirect effects of professional commitment, customer risk and independence pressure on money laundering risk judgment among bank analysts.

This study uses a within-subjects experimental research design and collects primary data via a questionnaire distributed to bank analysts in banking institutions in Malaysia.

Results show that professional commitment, customer risk and independence pressure significantly influence money laundering risk judgment (i.e. customer due diligence and money laundering reporting). The results also show significant interaction effects between customer risk and independence pressure in influencing money laundering risk judgment.

Professional commitment and situational factors are crucial in putting pressure on bank analysts responsible for performing a thorough check and due diligence to minimize money laundering risk to the bank.

As money laundering is lifeblood of crimes, understanding the factors influencing money laundering risk judgment would assist the affected institutions to manage the risk better and contribute towards the fight against crimes.

This study focuses on money laundering risk judgment. It contributes to understanding the competency of the gatekeepers, such as bank analysts, in practicing professional commitment and dealing with situational factors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possible result of librarians’ professional commitment on the delivery of quality library services. Thus, the aim is to investigate the relationship between professional commitment and library customers’ perceived service quality of the respective libraries.

This is a quantitative study which based on questionnaire survey. A cross-sectional design was adopted for this study in which data were collected from two different populations (i.e. professional librarians and their library customers) having a common facet that is library.

Overall, librarians were found committed on the professional commitment scale (PCS). The studied professional librarians showed higher commitment on the affective commitment dimension than that of continuance commitment of PCS. A positively significant relationship was appeared between professional commitment and library service quality.

No such cross-sectional study can be found that addressed the relationship between professional commitment and library service quality, particularly, in Pakistani library and information science research.

This article evaluates the effect of technostress due to implementation of sales technologies on sales professionals in terms of changes in job satisfaction and role stress and potential mitigation strategies including technostress inhibitors and job commitment.

The study utilizes a survey data collection from sales professionals in B2B consultative roles selling to business customers from construction, industrial supply and business service firms, including items that explore before and after factors around a customer relationship management implementation.

Technostress results in a decrease in job satisfaction and an increase in role stress of sales professionals. Job commitment moderates the decrease in job satisfaction, i.e. the higher the job commitment the less significant the decrease in job satisfaction.

Sales forces need to implement technostress inhibitors to help mitigate the effects of technostress in exacerbating other sales professional stressors. These inhibitors should be contextualized to the unique situation of the sales organization.

The study examines the dark side of sales technologies. Our research expands current understanding by considering new relations among technostress-creating conditions and two work-related outcomes that are salient to sales professionals, namely role stress and job satisfaction. Further, we investigate the change in these outcomes before and after the implementation of sales technologies rather than only considering them at one point of time, after the fact.

The following is an introductory profile of the fastest growing firms over the three-year period of the study listed by corporate reputation ranking order. The business activities in which the firms are engaged are outlined to provide background information for the reader.

This paper aims to draw from intimacy theory in examining the mediating effects of interactive communication and social bonds on the trust–commitment relationship.

The study is conducted in the professional services context. Qualitative and quantitative data are gathered from respondents engaged in attorney–client and real estate–client relationships. Unstructured, in-depth interviews are first conducted for use in model development. Study hypotheses are examined and mediation tests are conducted utilizing the serial multiple mediator model proposed by Hayes (2013).

Study findings indicate that intimate relationships in the professional services context are characterized by interactive communication and social bonds, and that the variables act as full mediators of the trust–commitment relationship. Though trust has a positive and significant effect on commitment in isolation, this relationship becomes nonsignificant when simultaneously accounting for the effects of the two variables.

Study findings suggest a need for programs designed to assist professional service providers in the development of intimate customer relationships. The importance of interactive communications and social bonding should be emphasized in these programs.

The study is one of the few empirical papers to investigate the role of intimacy in service relationships and the first to illustrate its mediating effects on the trust–commitment relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating influences of empowerment and professional development on role stress‐commitment relationships, while examining and confirming the effects of role stress on organisational commitment.

The results are drawn from a cross‐sectional survey of 184 front‐line employees (FLEs) from a travel service organization. Multiple and moderated regression analyses were employed to test the hypothesised direct and interaction effects.

The results show that role stressors influence affective organizational commitment in FLEs negatively. Role ambiguity did not, unexpectedly, influence continuance commitment positively, but role conflict did. Professional development and empowerment are important management tools that can be used to combat the detrimental effect of role stress on organizational commitment. The paper finds empowerment to be particularly useful in combating the dysfunctional effects of role ambiguity on affective commitment, while professional development is a key tool that helps to combat the dysfunctional effects of role conflict on affective and continuance commitment. However, there are caveats associated with the implementation of these management tools.

It is important for management to understand role stress from the FLE perspective, and strategically use intervention tools to help moderate the effects of role stress on organizational commitment components.

This study adds further support to the literature that role ambiguity and role conflict should be studied as distinct components of role stress because treating role stress as a single construct may result in suboptimal outcomes for managers, and misleading findings for researchers. In this context, the paper contributes to literature by investigating the moderating impact of empowerment and professional development on the role stress‐affective commitment/continuance commitment relationships. The findings suggest that different managerial strategies are required to combat the effect of each of these role stressors on the affective and continuance components of commitment respectively.

This paper aims to investigate the moderation effect of customer orientation variable on the influence of professional competence toward the quality of strategy implementation.

This research is quantitative explanative associative, which is trying to explain the causality relationship between exogenous and endogenous variables. The research was conducted in the Shariah banking office in Central Java Province. The population of this research is all top and middle levels of Shariah Commercial Bank in Central Java region. The sampling technique used in this research is non-probability sampling, that is, purposive sampling, which is the method of determining the sample based on certain criteria and the research sample obtained is 113 respondents. The research approach used is quantitative with the analysis tool of Generalized Structure Component Analysis.

There is influence of professional competence variable and customer orientation on quality of implementation strategy. The higher the professional competence and customer orientation, the higher the quality of strategy implementation. It is also found that customer orientation moderates the influence of professional competence variables, which are quasi-moderating and reinforcing.

This research has two sources of problems, which are research gap and business phenomenon. Research on Drucker’s business purpose (1954) is realized when a firm identifies the relationship between strategic methods and its ability to generate profits. This research attempts to solve the problem or gap between market orientation and business performance, which has been widely researched by marketing experts, but still shows controversial results. In this research, the researcher takes the definition of Narver and Slater (1990) to examine market orientation because the mostly found empirical research on market orientation and innovation (Han, et.al. 1998; Subin and Workman, 2004; Ferrel and Luke, 2000) has used this conceptualization and its associated operations. Therefore, to compare and distinguish the results of this research with the results of previous research, this research uses the definition of Narver and Slater (1990). No previous study has comprehensively studied the moderating effects of customer orientation on the relation between profesional competence toward quality of strategy implementation, especially in a commercial bank in Central Java region.