Search results

The purpose of this paper is to extend Zablah et al.’s (2012) findings regarding the proper way to treat customer orientation (CO) to the study of CO among B-B salespeople in one of the most important emerging economies, India.

The authors of this study hired a professional market research firm based in Chennai, a large metropolitan city in Southern India, to manage data collection. The authors used a competing models approach to test the relationship between constructs.

CO among frontline employees operating in one of the largest emerging economies is best treated as a psychological construct that is both directly and indirectly related to performance via its ability to reduce stress and improve engagement. This finding strengthens the view of CO as a universal human work value and, more broadly, that such values operating across different cultural setting do exist. In addition, external customer mindset appears to offer a superior means to measure CO than does the widely used CO component of the SOCO scale. This conclusion is based not only upon the fact that it conceptually corresponds with the psychological nature of CO, but also that in this initial examination it exhibits a greater ability to explain employee job performance.

Managers who are able to screen and hire employees with greater CO work values should experience improved performance outcomes and also less customer ambiguity and greater satisfaction among their frontline employees. Since CO proscribes the proper way to deal with customers, greater levels of CO beliefs would counteract customer ambiguity among frontline employees operating in any environment. Accordingly, when filling frontline positions, managers should actively seek out employees who earnestly embrace the role of taking care of customers. Managers are advised to not only emphasize on salespeople whose foremost role is to take care of their customers but also to find ways to familiarize them with their products and to provide them with information regarding customer characteristics such as their background, the relationship history (especially past service and product failures), and unique preferences.

Research on the commitment to customer service (CCS) typically considers either trainable behavior or external stimuli such as financial incentives vital to CCS. Utilizing the cultural context of Confucian Asia, this study proposes a novel approach that shifts the focus towards the antecedents of the informal institutional environment.

This research considers four informal institutions typical for Confucian Asia about their influence on CCS: power distance, perceived individual independence, openness to change, and informal network ties. Hypotheses are tested in a structural equation model using data obtained from a South Korean subject pool.

Results show that informal institutions like power distance and network ties, and mediators like perceived individual independence and openness to change are positively related to CCS. Power distance and network ties also have a direct positive effect on openness to change. Moreover, power distance negatively affects perceived individual independence.

The authors' findings contribute to the service management literature by showing that a given CCS of service employees can be explained by antecedents of the company's informal institutional environment.

From a human resource perspective, the informal institutional environment should be taken into account when establishing a supporting organizational culture and designing management training programs.

This research introduces the institutional view to services management research, focusing on the role that informal institutions play. In particular, factors like power distance and network ties that influence CCS are tested for the first time.

This paper aims to investigate the extent to which a firm's customer focus drives several interlinked facets of supply chain management and their relationships to customer service and financial performance.

Drawing on diverse streams of research, the authors develop and test an integrated model in which customer focus is proposed to foster supply‐chain relational capabilities, leading to beneficial performance outcomes. This study's empirical validity is enhanced by collecting data from over 200 US manufacturing firms and testing the model using SEM.

This empirical investigation documents significant positive relationships between (a) customer focus and supply‐chain relational capabilities, (b) customer focus and customer service, (c) supply‐chain relational capabilities and customer service, and (d) customer service and financial performance.

This study holds the important implication for managers that, in order to be effective, supply chain partners must reconfigure their supply chains to be more customer oriented and continually develop and leverage the relational competencies in order to enhance firm competitiveness.

Interdisciplinary in nature, this study is one of the first to conduct empirical supply chain management research using multiple and complementary theoretical perspectives, including strategic management and relationship marketing in order to gain a better understanding of the nuances involved in fostering strategic collaboration among supply chain partners.

The research objective of this paper is to study the broad context of emotional labor and dissonance and its importance to service marketing. This knowledge would provide a better understanding of the factors that contribute to job performance and job satisfaction amongst high contact service workers.

A literature review is used to define and set out the main conceptual framework and propositions for further research.

Three key hypotheses divided into six sub parts are set out to test the relationships between emotional dissonance and customer orientation, job satisfaction and performance.

The study should be extended beyond the conceptual stage by the conduct of empirical research across high contact service workers in different businesses and industries and also to explore the role of geographical and cultural settings on emotional dissonance.

The managerial implications would extend to improving the recruitment of customer service employees and evaluating the effectiveness of staff training programs. It would also develop among human resources personnel a good understanding of the role of emotional dissonance and its contribution to employees' job satisfaction and performance.

This paper fills a gap in knowledge on the role of emotional dissonance among high contact service workers. It provides a sound multi disciplinary framework for the study of emotional dissonance in service marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to accelerate research related to the employee-facets of service management by summarizing current developments in multiple research streams, providing propositions, and articulating new directions for theory and empirical inquiry.

Seven scholars provide short reviews of the core topics and findings from four employee-related research streams – collective turnover, service climate, emotional labor, and occupational stress; and generate propositions to guide future theoretical and empirical work. Four distinguished service scholars – David Bowen, Ray Fisk, Christian Grönroos, and Jochen Wirtz comment upon these research streams and provide future directions for accelerating employee-related research in service management.

All four research-streams yield insights that have the potential to advance service management research. Commentaries from the distinguished scholars further integrate this work with key concerns within service management including technology-enablement, transformative services, and service strategy.

This paper is unique in its scope of coverage of management topics related to service and its aim to promote interdisciplinary dialog between service management scholars and researchers conducting employee-related research relevant to services.

Considering recent changes in sales practices, such as the sales role becoming more strategic, increased reliance on technology for sales activities, increased stress from adding technological responsibilities to the sales role and decreased avenues of social support (such as traditional forms of community) to cope with work-related stressors, there is a need to reconsider Verbeke et al.’s (2011) classification scheme of determinants of sales performance, which was based on literature published before these critical changes became apparent. This paper aims to conduct a systematic review of sales performance research published during 1983–2018 to propose an extension to Verbeke et al.’s (2011) classification.

This paper followed a systematic approach to the literature review in five sequential steps – search, selection, quality control, extraction and synthesis – as suggested by Tranfield et al. (2003). In total, 261 peer-reviewed journal papers from 36 different journals were selected for extraction and synthesis.

The findings make the following additions to the classification: strategic and nonstrategic activities as a new category, technological drivers of sales performance and job-related psychosocial factors as a broader category to replace role perceptions. Derived from the job demand–control–support model, three subcategories within the category of job-related psychosocial factors are psychological demands (encompasses role perceptions and digital-age stressors such as technostress creators), job control and work-related social support.

This paper identifies that manager’s role in facilitating technology skills, providing informal social support to remote or virtual salespeople using technology, and encouraging strategic behaviors in salespeople are future research areas having good potential. Understanding and building positive psychology aspects in salespeople and their effect on sales performance is another promising area.

Newly added technological drivers draw the attention of sales firms toward the influence of technology and its skilful usage on salesperson performance. Newly added strategic activities makes a case for the importance of strategic participation in salesperson performance.

This review extends Verbeke et al.’s (2011) classification scheme to include recent changes that sales profession and literature have undergone.

This study examines the influence of different user innovator mindsets on new product development (NPD) performance. The current research explores the relative impact of a product-focused user innovator mindset vs a customer-focused mindset on feedback volume and feedback diversity and investigates the effect of each type of feedback on product improvement and product diffusion.

This study examines these relationships using two distinct types of data. Data on user innovator mindset, feedback characteristics and user innovator improvisation were obtained via an online survey. Archival data on NPD performance measures were acquired directly from an online research database, and results were obtained using confirmatory factor analysis.

The authors find that while neither type of user innovator mindset directly influences NPD performance, user innovators, who are highly customer-focused, have a significant advantage in sourcing knowledge from users in the form of a higher volume of feedback and more diverse feedback. In turn, feedback volume appears to positively influence product improvement, while feedback diversity positively influences product diffusion. Finally, the effect of both types of feedback on product improvement is enhanced for user innovators who are highly improvisational.

This research highlights the important role that customer focus plays in directly obtaining knowledge from customers (i.e. customer feedback) and the effects of that feedback on NPD performance. This study provides evidence that a user innovator's interest in accurately understanding the needs of their peers improves their access to external knowledge and enhances their innovation efforts.

Fitness service organizations often promote the personal training service by attributing competent features, qualifications, or/and service provision of fitness service providers to efforts or talents. This study aims to investigate whether and when the promotional attribution of fitness service providers' competent features, qualifications, or/and service provision contributes to customers' compliance with service instructions.

The authors developed the experimental stimuli of performance attribution promotion (i.e. effort attribution and talent attribution) and validated them via a pretest (N = 400). Utilizing the validated stimuli, the authors conducted an experiment (N = 400) employing a single-factor (performance attribution promotion: effort vs talent) between-subject design. The authors performed partial least squares structural modeling (PLS-SEM) to test our hypotheses.

The results revealed the interaction effect of performance attribution promotion and customers' implicit mindset on customer participation expectation. Specifically, when customers were high in implicit mindset (i.e. incremental-minded), attributing competent features, qualifications, or/and service provision of fitness service providers to effort (vs talent) increased customer participation expectation. Yet, when customers were low in implicit mindset (i.e. entity-minded), such an effect did not occur. Further, the authors identified customers' intention to comply with service instructions as a downstream consequence of the aforementioned interaction effect.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. It enriches the performance attribution literature by finding its new consequences and boundary condition. Moreover, the findings aid fitness service practitioners in developing strategies for eliciting customers' compliance with service instruction through performance attribution promotion.

Profit margins are easily destroyed when companies focus on internal issues versus the external conditions that affect customers. Revenue comes from the outside, from customers buying products or services, not from implementing new technology, re‐engineering business processes or building great teams. Focusing on external forces increases the bottom line. In fact, by shifting to an external focus, companies can often increase profits from 5 to 10 percent.

The paper aims to explore the relationship between customer mindsets and customer citizenship behavior. This study used the cognitive-affective-behavioral model to examine how customer mindsets relate to customer citizenship behavior. In addition, it investigated the mediating effect of customer brand engagement and moderating role of brand trust.

The study used a self-administered online survey from 412 respondents using cellular mobile operating brands. Partial least square structural equation modeling was used to analyze the collected data.

The results revealed that growth-mindset customers directly and significantly influence customer citizenship behavior. The impact of a fixed mindset on customer citizenship behavior is indirect through customer brand engagement. The moderating findings revealed that the effect of brand trust on the relationship between customer brand engagement and customer citizenship behavior is higher than that between the fixed mindset and customer brand engagement.

The findings provide valuable insights for marketing and brand managers to design marketing campaigns considering different mindsets to generate customer citizenship behavior among customers.

This study provides new avenues in consumer psychology and behavior by unfolding the underlying mechanism through which mindsets lead to customer citizenship behavior, contributing to existing knowledge by extending the cognitive-affective-behavioral model.