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Pursuit of meaning is at the heart of much of organizational life. It has implications for how different organizational stakeholders associate value to various organizational initiatives. Research on meaning has generally shown that effort increases meaning and favorable valuation of and willingness to pay for economic activities by organizational stakeholders. The authors build on and advance this research by offering theory and experimental evidence showing that effort, particularly at high levels, results in enhanced meaning and favorable valuation when effort does not threaten the focal stakeholders' resources through expectation disconfirmation.

Three experimental studies are designed and conducted in this research. In one study, the authors replicate prior research findings that establish labor generally increases meaning and favorable valuation. In the two subsequent studies, the authors test the proposed hypothesis in this research and check for robustness of the empirical analysis.

The authors find that any internalized threat to the focal stakeholder's resources coupled with a high exertion of effort decreases, rather than increases, meaning and favorable valuation of and willingness to pay for economic activities.

The theory and empirical evidence in this research advance the understanding of how organizational stakeholders may associate effort-induced meaning with various economic activities in counter-intuitive ways. The findings also highlight the importance of recognizing and shaping the expectations of organizational stakeholders in influencing willingness to pay in organizational settings.

This study tests the expectancy disconfirmation model using survey data from citizens who recently had police encounters. We find support for the expectancy disconfirmation model’s primary hypothesis that increased disparity between expectations of police performance and actual service inversely affects citizen satisfaction with the way the police handle encounters. This finding persists for both voluntary (e.g. breaking and entering victims) and involuntary (e.g. traffic citations) police encounters. Our results also suggest that the scope of the expectancy disconfirmation model is limited. For example, the disparity between expectations and actual service is not correlated with citizen satisfaction with the police in general. Overall, the results show that the expectancy disconfirmation model is useful in that it provides conceptual guidance in an area of research that has been relatively void of theory, and can also help identify needed changes in police practices.

Casting employers as customers, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between expectations, perceptions and disconfirmation beliefs with the satisfaction of employers regarding the competencies possessed by fresh engineering graduates hired by such employers in the Indian context.

Using data collected from 284 employers, the authors have hypothesized and examined a partial mediation model in which disconfirmation beliefs mediate the relationships between expectations and perceptions, and employer satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors have tested if this mediated relationship is moderated by the age and sex of respondents representing employers.

Results indicate that employers’ satisfaction can be explained from the framework of the expectancy-disconfirmation theory. Employers’ expectations and perceptions are established to be associated with employers’ satisfaction with new hires, and positive disconfirmation mediates these relationships. Results also indicate that age moderates the effect of predictor variables employers’ expectations and employers’ perception on the mediator disconfirmation. Sex, however, did not moderate any relationship.

The results demonstrate the usefulness of the expectancy-disconfirmation theory for studying employer satisfaction with competencies of recent engineering graduates in India. Findings are relevant to multiple stakeholders including employers hiring engineering graduates, engineers and technical institutions.

Expectancy-disconfirmation theory has been successfully applied to measure customer satisfaction in consumer behaviour research, while satisfaction of employers has been studied in the field of organizational behaviour. The paper stands out in the literature as one of its major implications is to extend the expectancy-disconfirmation theory to predict employers’ satisfaction.

Research in economics, finance and decision science has shown that consumers are familiar with unit‐to‐unit variability, and in the context of services it has been demonstrated that consumers often anticipate and perceive performance heterogeneity. However, satisfaction models to date have failed to explicitly treat expectations as distributions. In this study, expectations were modeled along two dimensions – mean and variance of expected performance – which were manipulated together with actual performance in a true experimental design. The findings indicate that the expected variance in performance had an impact on perceived disconfirmation. Specifically, at low levels of incongruity (i.e. small absolute performance deviations from the expected mean), a high expected variance in performance reduced the level of perceived disconfirmation. Conversely, at high levels of incongruity (large absolute performance deviations from expectations), the expected variance in performance exerted minimal influence over perceived disconfirmation. These findings are reconciled and discussed using the zones of indifference and tolerance, and assimilation processes.

The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of the disconfirmation of expectations of crowding and mall accessibility, on stress and two marketing outcomes, satisfaction and promoter scoring.

Data were obtained through two face-to-face surveys from mall shoppers that answered them at two different moments of their shopping experience, before entering the mall and before leaving it. Results are obtained from 230 customers that answered the two questionnaires.

The findings suggest that stress indirectly influences customer promoter scoring through satisfaction, while disconfirmation of expectations influences it directly and indirectly.

These results also suggest that stress and disconfirmation of expectations about crowding and accessibility are important in determining promoter scoring. To reduce stress and increase satisfaction and promoter scoring, managers should focus on exceeding customers' expectations about mall accessibility and on ensuring that customers experience a lower level of crowding than they expected.

The article examines Net Promoter Scoring, an outcome that has attracted managers' attention but little is known about its antecedents. The paper provides evidence of the effect of disconfirmation of expectations and negative emotions on promoter scoring.

Research on perceived risk and multiattribute models with uncertain attributes has shown that consumers are familiar with unit‐to‐unit variability of products and services, and can expect some kind of performance level distribution. This has led to the modelling of expectations along two dimensions – expected mean performance and some measure of its variance. This perspective is in accordance with theories on decision making in economics, finance and decision science. Satisfaction models, however, implicitly assume that expectations are unidimensional, and so far, no research has examined the impact of expected performance heterogeneity on the satisfaction processes. This is surprising, particularly in services marketing, as a high degree of performance heterogeneity is a frequently cited feature of service encounters. In this study, different levels of expected performance heterogeneity were manipulated using a unique laboratory simulator. The results clearly show that expected performance heterogeneity can have impact on the satisfaction process. In particular, at small levels of actual disconfirmation the presence of uncertainty in expectations improves the level of disconfirmation, shifting it towards “better than expected”, and improving overall satisfaction. At higher levels of disconfirmation, uncertainty in expectations did not show any effect on disconfirmation levels.

The purpose of this study is to integrate expectancy disconfirmation theory (EDT) to explore cognitive beliefs and affect influencing an individual's intention to repurchase in online marketplaces.

The paper used EDT to conduct an empirical study and data were collected from a total of 303 bidders of online auctions. A structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to assess the relationships of the research model.

The findings show that bidders' disconfirmation of online auctions is positively associated with their satisfaction, which in turn is positively associated with their repurchase intentions.

Both bidders' expectation of policy and auctioneers' performance of policy are important determinants of disconfirmation. Auctioneers need to recognize the distinctive roles of information policy in selling and bidding rules. Besides, neither bidders' expectation of sellers' reputation nor their expectation of service quality has a significant relationship with disconfirmation. This finding implies that in a mature e‐commerce environment bidders pay more attention to the sellers' performance than their prior expectation.

This study, which aims to shed light on bidder behavior in online auctions, is the first study that has applied an EDT‐based model to investigate the determinants of repurchase intention in online auctions.

Although online health communities (OHCs) and online patient reviews can help to eliminate health information asymmetry and improve patients' health management, how patients write online reviews within OHCs is poorly understood. Thus, it is very necessary to determine the factors influencing patients' online review behavior in OHCs, including the emotional response and reviewing effort.

Based on expectation-disconfirmation theory, this study proposes a theoretical model to analyze the effects of service quality perception (i.e. outcome quality and process quality perceptions) and disconfirmation (i.e. outcome quality and process quality disconfirmations) on patients' emotional response and reviewing effort. The authors test the research model by using empirical data collected from a popular Chinese OHC and applying ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and zero-truncated negative binomial (ZTNB) regression models.

Both service quality perception and disconfirmation have a positive effect on patients' positive emotional intensity in textual reviews, and disease severity enhances these relationships of process quality. Moreover, there is an asymmetric U-shaped relationship among service quality perception, disconfirmation and reviewing effort. Patients who perceive low service quality have higher reviewing effort, while service quality disconfirmation has the opposite relationship. Specifically, patients' effort in writing textual reviews is lowest when perceived outcome quality is 3.5 (on a five-point scale), perceived process quality is 4 or outcome quality and process quality disconfirmations are −1.

This study is the first to examine patients' online review behavior and its motivations and contributes to the literature on online reviews and service quality. In addition, the findings of this study have important management implications for service providers and OHC managers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how satisfaction is generated towards e-learning platforms.

This work aims to analyse the differences in the functioning of the model that explains how satisfaction is generated among users of e-learning platforms if expectations are measured before entering into contact with the service or afterwards. The statistical analysis was completed by developing a structural equation model using the SmartPLS 2.0.M3.

The results show that, if the expectations are measured before entering into contact with the good or service, disconfirmation plays a major role in the model. If the expectations are measured after entering into contact with the good or service, the main role is played by expectations in the model. Of the variables included, perceived usefulness and effort expectancy affect satisfaction, not thus enabling conditions and social influence.

The authors study the difference between the results obtained when using the cross-sectional design, where all the variables are mediated once the consumer has entered into contact with the good or service, and the half-longitudinal design, where expectations are measured beforehand.