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The purpose of this paper is to assess how expectation management can contribute strategically to communication management, and how understanding and managing expectations can increase organizations’ sensitivity toward stakeholder voices and concerns.

An example of mapping and identifying expectations is presented as a result of a thematic analysis of qualitative interview data, collected from six stakeholder groups of the media industry.

Expectation types and gaps can be identified through the use of systematic expectation mapping, conceptualized in this paper as “expectation management.” Expectation management analyzes expectation types and priorities, and it assists in crafting response strategies. Four types of expectations (must, will, should, and could) were identified in an empirical study of the media industry.

As the empirical study focussed on one industry in one country, the findings should be considered an introduction to expectation mapping and expectation management, to be further developed in other settings.

Organizations can gain strategic advantages by using expectation management to deepen communication management. New skills and processes may be needed to enable communication professionals to analyze and understand the core level of expectations.

Expectation management can help organizations respond to current societal pressures and help publics voice their concerns toward organizations.

A new concept with strategic value is presented. The reported study of mapping and identifying expectations helps to clarity and interpret factors that shape stakeholder relationships and satisfaction on a deeper level.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of career concerns on CEOs’ use of expectations management to meet or beat analysts’ quarterly earnings forecasts. The authors posit that early career-stage CEOs are less (more) likely to use expectations management than are late career-stage CEOs if the market views expectations management as an opportunistic strategy (efficient process) due to reputational capital concerns.

The authors obtain data for CEO career stages and CEO compensation from ExecuComp, analyst earnings forecasts from the detailed I/B/E/S database, financial statement data from quarterly Compustat and stock returns from the daily CRSP database over the period 1992–2013.

The results are consistent with the opportunistic hypothesis and early-stage CEOs seeking to build reputational capital by avoiding the perception of engaging in an inefficient managerial strategy. The authors find robust evidence that late career-stage CEOs are more likely to engage in expectations management than early career-stage CEOs. Furthermore, the authors show that late career-stage CEOs tend to employ expectations management to boost the value of their equity-based compensation.

The findings have important implications because the authors document a different implication of the “horizon problem” related to CEOs’ opportunistic forecasting behavior and the manipulation of analysts’ forecasts for CEOs who are approaching retirement.

The results have practical implications for analysts who provide earnings forecasts for firms whose CEOs are in early or late career stages and for investors who use such analysts’ forecasts in firm valuation models.

The authors contribute to the literature on expectations management by documenting how reputational incentives of CEOs affect the likelihood that managers engage in expectations management. The authors show that an important managerial incentive to engage in expectations management is CEO career concerns. Furthermore, the authors show that CEOs who are in early stages of their careers choose not to engage in expectations management due to the market’s perceived degree of opportunism pertaining to this strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the quality of service of a South East Asian country's military facilities management organisation.

An interview survey and questionnaire survey were used to obtain a description and summary of stakeholders’ expectations and the extent to which they were being satisfied by the services provided.

The method provides a useful means of identifying and prioritising varying expectations between stakeholder groups and of indicating any mismatch in expectations in the management of military facilities.

The development and use of a method to test and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the management of military facilities helps in providing better value for money.

In addition to re‐affirming Parasuraman's overall dimensions of service expectation, the empirical summary of the stakeholders’ expectations obtained in this way is of practical value for the service provider in developing a strategy for expectation management. For the case studied, it is also apparent that although the current processes in service delivery are well understood by all involved stakeholders, there is a need for further improvement with regards to their expectation levels. It is also one of the very few reported studies on the management of military facilities.

Editors of employee magazines may be torn between diverging expectations among their stakeholders. The management might be interested in strategically supportive communication, whereas employees might expect objective, independent, or critical coverage. Based on quantitative data, the paper aims to analyze how the editors perceive these expectations, how they see their professional role in this field of tension and how critically the magazines report.

The authors conducted a quantitative survey of 197 editors of employee magazines and a quantitative content analysis of 200 articles of employee magazines.

Editors perceive differences regarding the expectations of management and employees. These discrepancies, in turn, contribute to the experience of role conflicts. Our analysis reveals three types of editors: the voice of the management, the critical observer and the consensus-oriented mediator.

The study addresses the scarcely investigated area of conflict in which editors of employee magazines work. It is one of the first studies to analyze editors' perceived expectations of stakeholders, their professional self-perception and potential role conflicts with a quantitative survey. For the first time, quantitative methods are used to examine the causes of editors' role conflicts.

Despite its significance in salespeople management, salespeople expectation management has received little attention in the literature, especially in the industrial marketing literature. In response, the purpose of this study is to leverage the expectation confirmation theory to present a conceptual framework that provides an effective tool for salespeople expectation management.

This study first explores the application and strategic implications of expectation-confirmation theory in salespeople expectation management and theorizes that salespeople establish pre-expectations (expectations that are developed before joining the firm), experience multiple stages of the expectation-confirmation process throughout their sales career with a firm and – in each stage – establish either a longer-term commitment to or permanent disengagement from the firm.

A winning strategy for sales organizations is to recognize salespeople expectations and to meet or beat these expectations. Salespeople expectation management is particularly important in sales organizations that frequently find aligning sales force management strategies with organizational imperatives to be challenging.

This study extends expectation-confirmation theory by presenting a conceptual framework that: identifies the existence of pre-expectations of salespeople and their outcomes; recognizes that the expectation-confirmation process occurs across multiple stages in the salespeople’s career cycle; recognizes that the level of expectations in previous stages of one’s career cycle influences the level of expectations in subsequent stages; and conceptualizes the non-linear relationship between expectations, tenure and turnover intentions.

The multiple expectation-confirmation framework can be used for effective salespeople expectation and turnover management and may also serve as a general model of organizational interventions.

Entrepreneurial profits flow from differences in expectations between buyers and sellers regarding the future value of resources. This article investigates whether differences in expectations can be influenced by an entrepreneur to produce greater profits. It is argued that there are several points in the entrepreneurial process where such interventions can occur and that the use of these techniques should be associated with superior wealth creation. The article also explores the ethical implications of influencing stakeholders in this way.

The past decade has witnessed a surge in research focused on universal career development needs. In contrast, the purpose of this paper is to offer a contingency perspective based on self-efficacy theory by examining the relationship between the employees’ perceived mode of employment and expectations of career development opportunities attached to the employer. The authors hypothesized that perceived mode of employment determines employees’ expectations about receiving career development opportunities offered by the employer.

Responses from 203 banking employees were obtained through a structured questionnaire. Perceived employment mode was identified through Ward’s method of cluster analysis. The proposed hypothesis was tested by using one-way analysis of variance.

Employees across all modes of employment (knowledge-based, job-based, contract-based and alliance-based) were found to be similar with respect to their need for career development programs. However, employees positioned in knowledge-based and alliance-based modes were also interested in career appraisal and career training.

The study contributes to the existing body of knowledge on career management by imparting preliminary insights into the way employees’ expectations of organizational career management opportunities vary according to their perceived mode of employment based on self-efficacy theory.

An effective performance management must track level of employee engagement, ensure employee feedback on all aspects and ensure that the people act on that information. Also, it must ensure accessibility of essential conditions to perform. Considering the challenges associated with existing performance management system, present study attempts to discover factual expectations from the employees. The paper also establishes required conditions for fulfilling such expectations.

Present study attempts to discover factual expectations from the employees using the Balance Scorecard approach (BSC). Furthermore, using Quality Function Deployment (QFD), relation between employers' expectation and requirements necessary to fulfill such expectations has also been determined.

The suggested model has been developed as House Of Performance Management (HOPM) outlining potential leveraging points for enhancing the performance, based on which immediate actionable measures for effective and efficient performance management can also been advocated. The HOQ suggested in this paper can be source of reference while developing performance management system for an organization. Besides, it can help the Human Resource team to discover strategic opportunities and set targets.

Effective goal setting, pooled with a method to track progress and identify obstacles, contribute to attainment of bottom to top line results. However, designing and implementing such performance management system has been associated with many challenges like lack of top management support, perception of the process as time-consuming, failure to communicate clear and specific goals and expectations, lack of consistency, etc. (Managing employee performance, 2019). Hence most organizations have been increasingly looking for effective ways of assessing employee performance that can promote stakeholders' satisfaction, employee engagement and continuous improvement.

Many criticisms questioning the role and the efficiency of business consultants have been addressed. However, although a great deal of research has been carried out on business consultancy, little has been written on business consultancy from the consultant's viewpoint. In order to gain a detailed view of the situation from an internal consultant's perspective, an investigation of how business consultants perceive their role and contribution within their clients' organisations was undertaken. Drawing on different perspectives, this study aims to demystify the role of business consultants, and to ascertain how they perceive their role within their clients' organisations.

A series of interviews were conducted, where business consultants were asked to comment on issues related to the nature of the relationship with their clients, the pros and cons of their role and also the amount of control and discretion they exercise over the different projects in which they are engaged. Interview data from 17 business consultants from a variety of fields, such as change management, information technology, corporate finance and human resource, are analysed using an interpretive frame.

The research findings reveal that differences exist between the rather pejorative conclusions of previous research and the conclusions of this study. Whereas previous research highlighted the omnipotence and the more or less deontological practice of consultants, the data analysis from this study concludes that business consultants appear very humble in their approach to their relationship with clients, and believe that moving clients forward is their ultimate goal. The findings also enable the study to demonstrate that business consultants are conscious of the amount of control and discretion that is passed on to them by clients, and do recognise that criticisms of their role can be at times justified.

The study has value for both consultants and clients. The role determinants model presented in the study highlights the main characteristics of the role of business consultants and helps both clients and consultants to rethink their approach to the consulting process.

Consumer expectation not only influences purchase decision but also post-purchase satisfaction and word-of-mouth (WOM). This study aims to develop theories of initial expectation management by suggesting when it is desirable for new products to raise or lower consumer expectations. It systematically examines the interplay of product value and consumer heterogeneity in the dynamic process of new product diffusion under competition.

Drawing on traditional diffusion and choice models, this study develops an agent-based model to formalize and analyze how consumers’ initial expectations of a new product influence the interdependent processes of product sales, consumer satisfaction and WOM. The simulation analyses in controlled settings help understand the underlying mechanisms in a stepwise manner.

The results show that, although the optimal strategy for low-value products is to induce consumer expectations higher than product value, high-value products are better introduced with expectations formed close to it. The results also highlight an important drawback of “under-promising” strategies in reducing the base and volume of WOM. Further, the analysis illustrates how consumer heterogeneities in product valuation and initial expectation affect the effectiveness of expectation management. For high-value products, both heterogeneities reduce the effectiveness of the optimal strategy. For low-value products, however, value heterogeneity enhances the effectiveness, whereas expectation heterogeneity reduces it.

Firms introducing new products should be sensitive to how consumers value the product and form expectations about it. Different from firms that must rely on aggressive advertising to sell inferior products by building up high expectations, those with superior products can rely more on the power of consumer WOM, which is much less costly and thus gives them a competitive advantage. Firms should also pay attention to how diversified the consumers are in product valuation and expectation. The expectation management strategy is more effective when consumers form more similar expectations. Inferior firms may leverage this mechanism to neutralize their disadvantages.

The articulated mechanisms help push forward the research on new product diffusion and consumer expectation management. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to systematically analyze the impact of consumer heterogeneity on the effectiveness of expectation management.