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This study aims to investigate the main and interactive effects of three employee attributes, namely, employee friendliness, helpfulness and respectfulness, on customer satisfaction in Mainland China.

A 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design enabled an eight-scenario study depicting a service experience manipulated by employee friendliness (high/low), helpfulness (high/low) and respectfulness (high/low).

It is found that the effect of respectfulness has the strongest impact on customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction generated by helpfulness is higher when respectfulness is high rather than low, while the interaction between helpfulness and friendliness is not found, even though helpfulness exerts a stronger effect than friendliness on customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is also maximized when all three positive interpersonal attributes all jointly presented. Interestingly, the absence of respectfulness tends to trigger a negative effect, while the display of friendliness results in a positive effect.

Beyond the joint positive effects on service outcomes, different interaction patterns reveal that the display of friendliness is desirable and beneficial to enhance interpersonal outcome. However, the communication of respect is crucial, and, as such, managers and employees need to strive for a good balance on how to demonstrate these behaviours in critical moments such as service recovery. The findings from relative and interactive effects of three employee attributes are new in the literature and provide significant theoretical and managerial contributions for both researchers and managers.

This study takes the first step in decoding the cultural meaning of employee attributes through integrating Chinese traditional philosophy, Li (i.e. politeness), into a specific service setting by examining its comparative effects with other attributes.

Online employee reviews have a substantial impact on employee recruitment, retention and the overall perception of a company’s image, making them a crucial element of its online reputation. Consequently, these reviews play a vital role in shaping the company’s competitiveness in the talent market. This study aims to investigate the role of employee loyalty in online reputation in the tourism and hospitality sector.

This study collected online reviews posted by 334,428 employees across 173 companies in the tourism and hospitality sector. Then, this study proposed a method for measuring employee loyalty toward the company through text comments. Furthermore, the role of employee loyalty in online reputation through regression models was analyzed.

Employee loyalty is positively associated with the closed-form evaluations, and the length and readability of open-ended comments is directly and positively associated with review helpfulness and is indirectly associated with review helpfulness through employee online reviews. Employees’ perception of job instability has a significant moderating effect on the above relationships.

This study contributes to the literature on loyalty in the tourism and hospitality industry, online reputation and employee risk perception. These findings offer a more profound understanding of the extra-role behaviors demonstrated by loyal employees, provide a theoretical foundation for the formation of a company’s online reputation and contribute to helping the tourism and service industry better address risk events. These conclusions provide valuable insights for companies in the fields of human resource management and online reputation management.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to reveal the impact of employee loyalty on the company’s online reputation and provides important theoretical and practical implications for management.

This article explores four dimensions of frontline employee (FLE) friendliness (humorous, informal, conversational, and approachable) to propose a relevant measurement instrument of the influence of FLE friendliness on relationship quality and perceived value, as well as its indirect influence on repatronage intentions. Recent studies suggest FLE friendliness, defined as a tendency to convey an affective customer–employee social interaction, is a critical determinant of relationship marketing, but few scholars agree on its dimensionality. This study seeks a deeper understanding of FLE friendliness by investigating its different dimensions in various service contexts.

The mixed-method design, including both qualitative and quantitative research, offers a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of FLE friendliness.

The content analysis suggests FLE friendliness is multidimensional and composed of humorous, informal, conversational, and approachable behaviors. The results of a quantitative survey, conducted across four service contexts, validate this four-factor model. A second quantitative survey across two service contexts reveals the weights and relative importance of the dimensions, and then a third quantitative survey across three service contexts confirms that FLE friendliness is a significant driver of relationship quality, perceived value, and repatronage intentions (indirectly).

This study contributes to relationship marketing literature by strengthening the conceptual foundations of FLE friendliness, clarifying the dimensionality of the construct, developing a comprehensive measurement instrument, and extending previous research on the customer–employee interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways a manager in a coaching role may influence employees to embrace a learning orientation based upon the growth mindset. Conceptual in nature, this paper uses recent research, interpretations, explanations and suggestions to propose how manager-as-coach can informally and formally apply basic interventions to assist employee learning and change.

Based upon a review of relevant literature of theory and practice using several search tools, the authors have isolated a few critical areas to explore to include role of the coach, performance appraisal – the stimulus for manager-as-coach interaction with an employee, feedback orientation and environment, the growth mindset and learning orientation and the dynamics of self-regulated learning. Information from these areas is integrated to inform practitioners of approaches to take in a manager-as-coach role.

Included for each of the main segments presented are specific, practitioner “Commitment advice/action agendas” for manager-as-coach to stimulate and guide employee learning. These agendas contribute sound, practical information to the body of information concerned with manager-as-coach.

A contribution this work makes is to propose how learning orientation and the growth mindset are intertwined to the extent they assist the manager-as-coach supply the motivational support for employee learning. The resultant learning may lead to one or more of: improved work performance, individual development, attitudes toward learning and increased employee commitment or engagement.

Customer-centric measures such as customer satisfaction and repurchase intent are important indicators of performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine what is the strength and significance of the path coefficients in a customer satisfaction model consisting of various customer-centric measures for different types of ski resort customer (i.e. day, weekend and ski holiday visitors as well as season pass holders) in a ski resort in Canada.

The results were analyzed using the partial least squares structural equation modeling approach for the four different types ski resort visitors.

There appeared to differences in the strength and significance in the customer satisfaction model relationships for the four types of ski resort visitors indicating that the a priori managerial classification of the ski resort visitors is warranted.

The research pinpoints differences in the strength and significance in the relationships between customer-centric measures for four different types ski resort visitors, i.e. day, weekend and ski holiday visitors as well as season pass holders, which have significant managerial implications for the marketing practice of the ski resort.

The purpose of this paper is to test the relationship between performance appraisal (PA) reactions and employee outcomes in terms of affective organizational commitment and work performance.

The paper presents the results of a cross‐sectional survey of 803 employees from three organizations located in Norway. The survey was conducted in 2005.

The findings reveal that perceived helpfulness of PA was directly related to affective commitment. The relationship between perceived helpfulness of PA and work performance was significant only for employees reporting high levels of perceived regular feedback.

The two most important limitations, which are discussed in more detail at the end of the paper, are the cross‐sectional nature of the study and the reliance on self‐reported questionnaire data.

The positive relationship between PA reactions and affective organizational commitment highlights the importance of positive PA reactions. At the same time, the relationship between PA reactions and work performance was moderated by regular feedback, which suggests that formal PA cannot compensate for low levels of regular feedback.

Future studies could apply longitudinal research designs and supervisor‐ or peer‐ratings of work performance.

The finding of a positive relationship between PA reactions and work performance only for employees who experience that they receive high levels of regular or day‐to‐day feedback.

Given the growing importance of blockchain technology (BT), the authors use the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT), which posits that BT adoption intention depends on the complementarity between UTAUT and blockchain transparency (BTRAN) and examine it in a new setting: the boundary condition of perceived helpfulness.

The authors review the major conceptual literature on both UTAUT and BT to identify their principal common factors. They examine the complementarity between UTAUT and BTRAN and further test the moderating effect of perceived helpfulness. The authors used the PLS technique for data analysis because this technique can test the direct and interaction effects.

The complementarity between UTAUT and BTRAN strongly affects BT adoption intention. The authors further show that perceived helpfulness moderates the relationship between adoption intention and usage behavior. At high levels of perceived helpfulness, usage behavior increases rapidly with adoption intention.

The results indicate that UTAUT is a valuable theory to identify the determinants of adoption intention, confirming its robustness in blockchain-enabled supply chain management. The combination of UTAUT and BTRAN can contribute a plausible approach to the strategy literature: the complementarity effect might create more benefits than adopting a single practice.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to identify the most salient attributes that influence customer satisfaction with retail banks in Kuwait and to determine the level of the overall satisfaction of the customers of these banks.

A multiple‐attribute approach proposed by Shin and Elliott in 2001 was employed. This approach was applied in the analysis of data collected from a convenient sample of 863 actual customers of retail banks in Kuwait.

The most crucial attributes for predicting customer satisfaction with retail banks in Kuwait were fast service, courtesy and helpfulness of employees and availability of self‐banking services. The vast majority of the customers of retail banks in Kuwait (nearly 81 percent) are either satisfied or very satisfied with the services of their banks.

A number of very important attributes, such as those related to loans and credit cards, were not examined due to social reasons. The unavailability of lists of existing customers and their contacts made it not possible to draw a random sample from the target population of this study.

To maintain a competitive edge in the market, the managers of retail banks in Kuwait need to be updated about technological advances and to invest in those that satisfactorily enhance technology‐based encounters with their customers. These managers also need to focus on minimizing encounter failures in service delivery. For a retail bank in Kuwait, sufficient recovery efforts are needed so that dissatisfied customers do not end up defecting.

Use of a single‐item approach to measure customer satisfaction is common. This approach has been shown to suffer from inherent drawbacks, rendering its practical utility questionable. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the present study represents the first attempt to apply Shin and Elliott's multiple‐attribute methodology to retail banking services in a different culture.

This study sought to examine the relationship between trust‐in‐supervisor and willingness to help coworkers as well as the moderating effect of perceptions of organizational politics on this relationship.

A field survey using a structured questionnaire was used to gather data from 106 employees of a medium‐sized company that had businesses in the manufacturing, travel, and education industries. Participation was voluntary and employees completed the questionnaire anonymously.

Moderated multiple regression results indicated that trust‐in‐supervisor was positively related to employee willingness to help coworkers among employees perceiving low levels of organizational politics but not among those perceiving high levels of organizational politics.

The limitations of this study include reliance on cross‐sectional data collected using self‐reports from employees of a single organization. Future research should examine other forms of spontaneous workplace behaviors as outcomes of trust and identify other mitigating factors that may enhance or inhibit such behaviors. Future research also is needed to address the question of why trust predicts helping.

Employers can realize the benefits of employee helpfulness stemming from supervisory trust only if they can establish a workplace that is not politically charged. Therefore, trust must be augmented with organizational interventions and strategies that discourage a high level of politicking.

This study provides what is perhaps the first empirical test of the joint contribution of trust and perceptions of organizational politics on willingness to help. In addition, the findings of this study extend the organizational politics literature by showing that perceived politics might also act as a moderator of relationships.

This study conceptualizes commercial hospitality in the form of a conceptual framework, which it operationalizes by means of a questionnaire. A survey using this questionnaire was conducted in Switzerland and Thailand in order to investigate tourists’ levels of satisfaction with commercial hospitality in Switzerland and Thailand and to assess the conceptual framework. The questionnaire was filled in by 1001 tourists in both countries, 601 in Switzerland and 400 in Thailand. The results suggest that tourists in Switzerland are more satisfied with the hospitality in the context of tourism service than tourists in Thailand. The results also serve as an indication that the questionnaire used in this study is able to uncover cultural differences in hospitality in a tourism service context. It is assumed that domestic tourists are accustomed to local practices and are therefore more critical in assessing tourism employees’ hospitality skills and behavior.