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The creativity of retail employees seems to be of the utmost importance for ensuring the performance of organizations in service settings. This paper contributes to the existing theory by investigating the direct and indirect effects of goal orientations on the creativity and performance of retail employees. The authors propose a framework depicting the relationships between goal orientations and employee creativity and performance, including the intervening effects of self-efficacy and customer orientation.

The study was conducted with retail frontline employees of a large retail bank in Portugal. The sample consists of 267 valid responses. Structural equations are used by applying the maximum likelihood method to test the conceptual framework.

Results are broadly supportive of the hypotheses. Learning orientation is, directly and indirectly, related to creativity, but only indirectly to performance. As to performance orientation, it is indirectly related to creativity through self-efficacy and customer orientation, and directly as well as indirectly, to performance. The authors investigate the extent to which the effects of goal orientations on creativity and performance are mediated by self-regulatory mechanisms, namely self-efficacy, and customer orientation.

The results recognize that learning and performance goals are neither mutually exclusive nor contradictory, which collide with past empirical evidence showing that learning goals are generally associated with more favorable outcomes and performance goals with more negative or equivocal ones. These outcomes underscore the need and relevance for managers to foster both goal orientations to promote the creativity and performance of retail employees, representing a particularly salient issue in retail businesses characterized by significant interpersonal interactions.

Brand love is associated with consumer behaviours that are key for organisational performance. However, research on the antecedents of brand love is sparse. The current research draws on the information processing model as well as on the experiential approaches to consumer behaviour to develop a model comprising a novel set of antecedents.

To test the research hypotheses, we resort to two samples, which implied the collection of usable 1,018 questionnaires. For hypotheses testing, we resort to structural equation modelling.

Both functional constructs as well as more symbolic/emotional ones are positively associated with brand love. In addition, constructs with a more functional nature tend to have an indirect effect on brand love, whereas constructs with a higher level of abstraction tend to mediate the effects of more specific brand qualities. Finally, brand love is related with important outcomes, including loyalty, word of mouth and willingness to pay a premium price.

This research has a cross-sectional nature. Moreover, we rely on a single informant, but the procedural remedies as well as the statistical tests we conducted suggest that common method variance is not a concern.

The findings suggest that managers should emphasise both functional as well as emotional/symbolic aspects to strengthen the links between brands and consumers, which will be beneficial for both sides.

This study is the first to investigate the relationship between a number of symbolic and functional brand aspects and the development of brand love feelings.

Customers play a key role in value creation. Not surprisingly, research has investigated customers’ motivations to engage in the creation of value. Thus, this study aims to assess the link between mood-regulatory processes and customer participation in value creation.

This study develops a model that relates mood-regulatory processes to customer participation and customer value creation, and tests it with a sample of 419 hotel customers, using partial least squares estimation.

It is found that mood clarity relates directly with customer relational value; mood monitoring relates directly with customer participation as well as directly and indirectly with customer economic and relational value; and mood repair relates directly with customer participation and customer economic value, as well as indirectly with customer economic and relational value.

This is a cross-sectional study limited only to hotels in Iran. This is the first study to evaluate the relationship between mood regulation with customer participation and value creation. Hospitality service organizations interested in promoting customer participation may consider mood as a segmentation criterion.

Value creation theory was applied to identify the relationship among customer mood regulation, participation, economic value and relational value, as it is first attempted in the hospitality studies.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between the interaction of the social media manager’s customer orientation and the service climate perceived by supervisors, on the customer’s perception of brand authenticity and, through it, on the willingness to pay a price premium.

This study uses triadic data from 200 social media followers, 20 social media managers and 20 supervisors from a range of industries.

The findings show that the customer orientation of the brand social media managers interacts with their work context to influence social media followers’ perceptions of brand authenticity, and ultimately, their willingness to pay a premium price. Finally, product involvement moderates the relationship between brand authenticity and willingness to pay a premium price.

This study shows how and when the disposition of brand social media managers affects the attitudes and intentions of the social media followers. Further research should continue this novel line of research and explore in greater depth the impact of social media managers and their environments.

Social media managers’ values should fit those of their organization. This organization-person fit reflects on social media and improves social media followers’ perceptions of brand authenticity and, consequently, their willingness to pay a premium price.

Leveraging participation in social media is currently a key issue for firms. However, the internal determinants of successful social media usage have received limited attention from researchers. Therefore, this research contributes to the social media literature by suggesting the need to consider the characteristics of social media managers and their context to promote the outcomes of social media usage, specifically brand authenticity and willingness to pay a premium price.

This paper aims to investigate how personal values relate to the psychological contract employees establish with their employers.

The sample consisted of 223 frontline employees from a major Portuguese company. The paper used stepwise regressions analysis to test the research hypotheses.

Collectivistic-oriented values were generally related to psychological contract features such as long time frame, lower tangibility, flexibility, inequality and collective regulation. Conversely, individualistic-oriented values were generally associated with a short time frame and a more tangible, stable, equal and individually regulated type of contract with a narrow scope.

This study uses cross-sectional data collected from a single Portuguese company. While common method bias could potentially affect the results, various procedural remedies were used to control for it. Finally, the study relied on stepwise regression, which is a data-driven approach.

The study supports the contentions that internal dispositions are related to psychological contracts.

This paper innovates by exploring how employees’ personal values are associated with the psychological contract from a feature-oriented approach. In addition, this study was carried out in Portugal, highlighting the importance of exploring existing models and theories in different cultural contexts.

This study aims to investigate the configurations that drive employee service recovery. Rather than analyzing the net effects of individual antecedents of service recovery, which is the common approach in the literature, this study uses a configurational approach to investigate how five antecedents (customer service orientation, rewards, teamwork, empowerment and customer service training) combine to yield employee adaptive and proactive service recovery behaviors.

The study collects responses from 90 frontline employees through an online survey. Building on configurational theory, the authors developed and empirically validated four research propositions by using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.

Three equifinal configurations of managerial practices result in either employee proactive or adaptive service recovery behaviors. Two of these three configurations result in both adaptive and proactive behaviors. In addition, the findings show that two out of the three configurations that lead to proactive behavior in service recovery also lead to the simultaneous existence of proactive and adaptive behaviors in service recovery. None of the sufficient configurations require the presence of all managerial practices. These results underscore that managers do not have to act on every single managerial intervention area to promote service recovery.

The study advances the knowledge on the antecedents of employee behavior in service recovery by investigating how these antecedents combine to yield different recipes for developing either employee adaptive or proactive behavior in service recovery.

The findings provide insights for managers into the different combinations of practices that can be used to develop employee proactive or adaptive behavior in service recovery.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that relies on a configurational approach to understand the combinations of managerial practices that result in employee proactive and adaptive behaviors in service recovery.

This chapter seeks to conceptualize a new approach to the identification of the factors influencing the adoption of a political risk assessment (PRA) function. By making use of firm value maximization and risk aversion and considering the rationale for risk management activities, a number of determinants are identified which can be deployed in future PRA studies. A model for predicting the PRA adoption decision is proposed. Geographical contextualization in one or more emerging markets (EMs) provides a further dimension of originality as well as reflecting an increasingly important international business phenomenon. Political risk (PR) and political risk assessment (PRA) are of increasing importance in the context of the growth and development of emerging markets (EMs). The latter provide opportunities for inward investment from more developed economies. There has also been a rapid growth in outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) from emerging markets to other economies. This chapter adds to the current understanding of PRA by examining this issue in emerging markets (EMs) through the model developed here.

Channel performance is a key marketing and organisational issue, given the potential and actual impact in the accomplishment of organisational goals. A recent trend in distribution strategy has been the increasing utilisation of multiple channels across sectors. Because of the newness of these channel systems, it is important to understand how they influence key channel performance indicators. With this purpose, a study was conducted in a sample of 62 UK financial services organisations. The research considered several indicators of channel performance, which were statistically reduced to two broad dimensions: sales and profitability. The results show that multiple channels are associated with higher sales performance and lower channel profitability. However, the statistical significance of the results was observed to depend on the extent to which multiple channels were being used. In addition, this article analyses the relationship between the number of channels and company size and product type. Implications for future research are derived.

The purpose of this paper is to aim to understand the factors influencing the magnitude of change in distribution channels. Distribution channels are slow to change due to a number of factors. Yet, the distribution mix is a vital part of a company's competitive position and companies must, therefore, constantly examine their mix of channels to most closely approximate the changing needs of its customers. It therefore is important to look at the factors influencing change in distribution.

A model of channel change is developed and tested with data from financial services organizations in the UK. In addition to quantitative data, the researchers also collected qualitative feedback.

The degree of channel change is related to: volatility in customers' needs; the sophistication of the target customer; product sophistication; environmental conflict; volatility in competitors' strategies; scope economies; and company size.

The sample size is relatively modest, although this has not prevented the emergence of significant results.

The results of the study are important for both academics and practitioners. It helps alert practitioners to the factors that affect channel change. For academics, it demonstrates that this complex subject can be researched. It also raises some research issues that might be taken on board in future studies.

This article is one of the first to test a set of hypotheses regarding the drivers and inhibitors of change in distribution systems at the micro level.

The use of multiple channels is increasingly an option for many products. Yet, despite their popularity, little is known in a systematic way about such channel structures. In particular, there is a lack of research in respect of the reasons why multiple channels of distribution emerge. This work proposes to attempt to deal with this problem by developing and testing a model comprising a set of hypotheses regarding the circumstances under which companies go multi‐channel.

The work draws on the organisational environment literature and, in particular, the sources of environmental uncertainty. Data were collected from firms in the UK financial services industry through personally administered questionnaires. Research hypotheses were tested using logistic regression.

The results suggest that customer heterogeneity, customer volatility and environmental conflict positively influence the choice of multiple channels, whereas intermediary heterogeneity and volatility may reduce the need to use such channel strategies.

The extent to which results can be generalised is limited by the relatively small sample size and by the focus on financial services. Additionally, it is also possible that channel typologies other than that considered in this study might have yielded different results.

The degree of environmental uncertainty is an important issue affecting multiple channel choices, and should be considered at the channel design stage.

This study has helped understand the drivers of multiple channel strategies, a poorly understood topic.