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This paper aims to, building on the concept of relational benefits, relationship marketing investments, gratitude, satisfaction and favorable reciprocal behaviors, examine the mechanism of cultivating relationships with valued customers at an upscale restaurant.

To capture the traits of the population (upscale restaurant customers who perceive relationship marketing investments by experiencing relational benefits), upscale restaurant customers with membership cards were contacted in the survey. Structural equation modeling was used to test measurement and structural models.

Empirical findings indicated that confidence and social benefits positively contributed to relationship marketing investments, whereas special treatment benefits were not significantly related to relationship marketing investments. In turn, relationship marketing investments positively affected both gratitude and satisfaction; relationship marketing investments were also more associated with gratitude than satisfaction. Gratitude positively evoked favorable reciprocal behaviors; however, satisfaction did not trigger favorable reciprocal behaviors.

The integration of relationship marketing investments and gratitude into the conceptual model would allow the current findings to generate rich theoretical and practical implications that the extant hospitality literature has not elucidated.

This research aims to examine the role of consumers' brand trust and attachment on advocacy intention before and after the occurrence of brand misconduct in retail banking. In addition, the influence of brand attachment on consumers' willingness to switch, advocate for and forgive brands is examined in a post-misconduct scenario.

Data were collected through a self-administered online survey questionnaire. A total of 304 valid and usable responses from Australian participants were analysed using IBM SPSS 27.0.

The findings reveal that brand attachment mediates the positive relationship between trust and advocacy intention. Furthermore, brand attachment (1) dilutes consumers' switching intention and (2) strengthens their willingness to forgive the bank after misconduct.

Results suggest that retail banks should create strong brand attachments with their consumers. In addition to brand trust, brand attachment will generate greater advocacy intention among consumers. Moreover, practitioners in retail banking can leverage brand attachment to mitigate the negative impact of brand misconduct.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to examine the impact of brand attachment on the consumer–bank relationship within the context of brand misconduct. The study is also unique in its analysis of the mediating role of brand attachment between brand trust and advocacy. This research further adds to the current literature by suggesting that strong and positive customer connections to the brand facilitate communication and marketing efforts after brand misconduct and that these are effective in maintaining consumer-bank relationship.

This paper aims to comprehensively and systematically review the state of customer relationship management (CRM) research on hospitality and propose future research agenda.

All hospitality-related CRM articles since its introduction as a concept in 1988 were collected. The retrieved articles were then chronologically and thematically analyzed.

Hospitality CRM research has rapidly grown from the initial relationship marketing concept into social CRM. Five research foci were identified, including CRM planning and implementation process, organizational support, technology and tools, customer perspectives and characteristics and outcome and impact. Three potential pitfalls were observed in the existing literature. A comprehensive research framework incorporating the five research domains and three key players was proposed.

Hospitality practitioners should take an integrated perspective on the five major domains of CRM and the three key players to ensure that informed decisions can be made.

This study contributes to the literature through its qualitative and critical assessment of existing hospitality CRM literature, which can guide future research.

With more than half of customer-experienced disruptions attributed to first-tier suppliers, supplier resilience (SRES) is fundamental to the resilience of the supply chain. However, little is known about the relational aspects that engender SRES, from the purview of the supplier. The purpose of this paper is to examine the explanatory role of suppliers’ relationship commitment dimensions (i.e. affective and continuance), which may foster SRES through customer benevolence. Moreover, the impact of customer benevolence on SRES is examined considering varying levels of industry dynamism.

Survey data from 207 manufacturing firms are utilized to test the hypotheses taking potential endogeneity issues into consideration.

Affective and continuance commitment induce customer benevolence, which furthers SRES. Specifically, affective commitment is the most potent approach to induce customer benevolence, while the dampening effect of industry dynamism is more palpable at the higher levels of industry dynamism.

This study did not account for specific disruption types and the contingent effects of power asymmetry.

This study empirically demonstrates that suppliers can leverage customer benevolence via relationship commitment to achieve SRES. However, the efficacy of customer benevolence to engender SRES is limited to environments not characterized by high levels of industry dynamism.

This paper highlights the role of relational mechanisms in achieving resilience from the purview of a supplier using survey data.

With the advent of the resource-based and dynamic capabilities views of the firm, researchers of collaborative relationships have raised the question as to whether superior management of such relationships does indeed explain observed differences in collaborative performance of individual firms. While most research to-date has concentrated on antecedents and development of such management capabilities, in this chapter we propose a comprehensive construct aimed at capturing what constitutes collaborative capability. Results of an exploratory field study of vertical relationships in the software service sector suggest that collaborative capability consists of structural, cognitive, and affective dimensions. Based on our findings, we believe that the three dimensions of collaborative capability act as complements rather than substitutes, and that superior collaborative performance depends on a proper balance of the three dimensions.

Tour guides often use humor to entertain tourists, but the process of tour guide humor (TGH) affecting tourists’ positive word of mouth (PWOM) remains unclear. To fill the gap, this study aims to investigate how TGH enhances tourists’ PWOM through perceived relationship investment, perceived wellness value and trust in tour guides.

A comprehensive mediation model was proposed based on social exchange theory (SET). Data were obtained from 335 tour group tourists and analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Results present that TGH positively predicts tourists’ PWOM. Perceived relationship investment, perceived wellness value and trust in tour guides not only play mediating roles between TGH and tourists’ PWOM, respectively, but also jointly provide two sequential mediation paths (TGH → perceived relationship investment → trust in tour guides → tourists’ PWOM and TGH → perceived wellness value → trust in tour guides → tourists’ PWOM).

The findings have practical value for tour guides and travel agencies to use TGH to improve tourists’ PWOM.

The major contribution is that a reciprocity-based framework rooted in SET was proposed to parse the complex process of TGH promoting tourists’ PWOM. Furthermore, this study enriches current knowledge by confirming that perceived wellness value is not only available in wellness tourism but can be experienced from TGH in mass tourism.

The purpose of this paper is to pursue the following two objectives. First, this study examines how social capital indicators (reciprocal norm and social network) cause ethical consumption behavior by conceptualizing it as value co-creation specific to socially responsible firms. Second, it aims to verify whether corporate trust, which is another core indicator of social capital, mediates between social capital indicators and ethical consumption behavior.

For study subjects, the author selected general public located in the city of Seoul. A total of 307 respondents were used for statistical analysis after discarding unusable questionnaires. For the purpose of judgment sampling, the author selected those respondents who had prior purchase experience of the products or services provided by socially responsible firms.

This study tested core elements of social capital (reciprocal norm, social network and corporate trust) as predictors of ethical consumption behavior. In particular, the study newly conceptualized and validated ethical consumption behavior as one encompassing the civic engagement behavior whose premise is well encapsulated by value co-creation principle. The results demonstrate that the social network and reciprocal norm significantly influence ethical consumption behavior directly as well as indirectly through corporate trust.

The significance of this study may be that it adds to current literature on ethical consumption behavior by validating an empirical model of ethical consumption behavior from the perspective of consumer engagement paradigm. No previous studies of ethical consumption behavior empirically tested this model previously, only offering conceptual similarity between ethical consumption and consumer engagement. The study’s result may provide some insights as to the utility of value co-creation strategy for socially responsible firms as a useful way to promote ethical consumption behavior.

This study’s result may provide some useful insights as to how socially responsible firms can improve their performance by understanding what makes their customers voluntarily engage in favor of the firms to create shared values. In particular, the finding on the corporate trust mediating between bonding network and ethical consumption behavior sheds useful insights for the firms on how they should garner customer trust to trigger ethical consumption behavior. In this sense, socially responsible firms need to focus their resources on publicity or endorsements by highly respected celebrities designed to stress the firms’ trustworthiness and create favorable corporate image.

The finding that reciprocal norm has a significant impact on ethical consumption behavior also provides strategic implications on how to enhance the effectiveness of corporate messages. That is, the socially responsible firms should implement some corporate strategies designed to raise authentic corporate image of the firms by hiring the socially disadvantaged and returning some portion of profit back to society. By doing this, the socially responsible firms can expect to instill some sense of reciprocity into their current as well as potential customers.

Despite this conceived linkage, no previous research has empirically approached ethical consumption from the perspective of civic engagement to examine whether ethical consumers voluntarily engage in firm-specific engagement behavior that fulfills their civic responsibility. Therefore, the present research embarks on a new approach to conceptualize ethical consumption as a construct that embodies civic engagement that is conceptually encapsulated by the principle of value co-creation.

Stakeholders often engage in actions aimed at either benefitting or punishing firms for their behaviour. Such behaviours can have very serious implications for various types of firm performance, including financial performance. Though one might expect that the investigation of possible precursors of such “stakeholder action” would be a priority of researchers in stakeholder theory, to date research within the stakeholder literature directed towards understanding stakeholder behaviour has been somewhat scarce. In this chapter, I present common themes and assumptions that prevail in the existing research on stakeholder action, identify certain important questions concerning such assumptions and suggest avenues for future research on stakeholder behaviour.

This study aims to investigate the psychological mediating mechanisms through which omnichannel integration affects customer word-of-mouth (WOM) behaviors in omnichannel retailing.

Guided by prior omnichannel retailing studies, the authors identify taxonomy of customer WOM behaviors with three archetypes, namely, face-to-face WOM, online store WOM, and social media WOM. Then, the authors draw on social exchange theory (SET) to explain how omnichannel integration influences customer WOM behaviors through the mediating roles of perceived personal preference fit and perceived social relatedness. The authors empirically tested the model using structural equation modeling and multiple mediation analysis with a field survey of 335 omnichannel customers.

Perceived personal preference fit positively influences face-to-face WOM and social media WOM, whereas perceived social relatedness is positively associated with face-to-face WOM, online store WOM, and social media WOM. Furthermore, transactional integration and relational integration positively affect perceived personal preference fit, whereas relational integration has a positive effect on perceived social relatedness. Finally, perceived personal preference fit mediates the effects of transactional integration and relational integration on face-to-face WOM and social media WOM. Perceived social relatedness mediates the effects of relational integration on face-to-face WOM, online store WOM, and social media WOM.

The authors' study advances the omnichannel retailing literature by proposing a taxonomy of customer WOM behaviors in omnichannel retailing and identifying the mediating mechanisms through which omnichannel integration influences customer WOM behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effects of power distance and collectivistic orientations on the effectiveness of intrinsic, extrinsic and reciprocal motivators in promoting employees’ willingness to cooperate for organizational interest. An integrated theoretical framework which incorporated cultural influence on need priority and on legitimacy of social exchange was established to develop the hypotheses.

This study used the methodology of information-integration theory to test the research hypotheses.

This study found that power distance orientation enhanced the effectiveness of extrinsic motivator but mitigated that of intrinsic motivator, and was irrelevant to that of reciprocal motivator. In contrast, collectivistic orientation mitigated the effectiveness of extrinsic motivator but enhanced that of reciprocal motivator, and was irrelevant to that of intrinsic motivator.

Managers may use reciprocal motivators for employees with high collectivism in order to increase their willingness to cooperate for the interest of the organization. Meanwhile, extrinsic motivators may be utilized for employees with high power distance but may not be as effective for those with low power distance. However, managers should not expect intrinsic motivators to be as attractive to those with high power distance as to those with low power distance.

By integrating multiple cultural orientations and multiple work motivators in one study, this research clarified the differential moderating effects of power distance and collectivistic orientations on the effectiveness of intrinsic, extrinsic and reciprocal motivators in promoting employees’ willingness to cooperate. Potential confounding problems in prior studies derived from the correlation between cultural values and coexistence of multiple motivators were discussed.