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Reviews, from an anthropological perspective, three 1993 additions to the Gulf Publishing Company's “Managing Cultural Differences” Series. This trilogy is comprised of the volumes Developing the Global Organization: Strategies for Human Resource Professionals, Transcultural Leadership: Empowering the Diverse Workforce, and Multicultural Management: New Skills for Global Success. Examines the five concepts of globalisation, diversity, multiculturalism, transcultural, and empowerment central to the trilogy and to anthropology, and as they are used in both. Views the global paradox — a bigger world economy requires the more powerful smallest of players (e.g., entrepreneurs) — as a useful framework for understanding these and related concepts as they operate in the global village today, and as they may be employed throughout and beyond the 21st century. Finally, reports on: (1) the training, transformation and development tasks of global managers of complexity in business as well as in government, academia, and the military; and, (2) the intercultural learning strategies through which these tasks are achieved and through which these managers, the multicultural workforce and teams they lead, and their organisations are empowered to contribute, collaborate and fully participate in producing their major project: Service, country, group, business, or social structure through the mixture of peoples or technology” (p. 242). This suggests a process, a becoming. In Developing the Global Organization, Robert T. Moran, Philip R. Harris and William G. Stripp continue that globalisation is both a way to think and to act. Specifically, it moves individuals “away from parochialism towards transnationalism”. And it nurtures a state of mind geared toward a more effective use of personal and organisational resources (p. 299).

This chapter presents an investigation of the relationship between psychological entitlement and stress. Empirical and conceptual evidence is considered suggesting that Conservation of Resources (COR) theory may apply differently to employees with a heightened sense of entitlement. Using attribution and COR theory, a conceptual framework is offered predicting that entitlement is positively associated with subjective stress, based on the logic that psychologically entitled employees develop unjustifiably inflated levels of self-evaluative internal coping resources such as self-esteem and self-efficacy that promote unmet expectations. It is also proposed that political skill and the ability to manage perceptions of competency may attenuate this relationship. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the challenges associated with managing psychologically entitled employees.

Proposes responding to earlier calls for further research into “fraudulent” or “feigned” customer complaints, and providing insights which explore and describe the motivations and forms of such deliberate “illegitimate” customer complaints.

Critical incident technique was utilized in analyzing 104 interviews with customers who had knowingly made an illegitimate complaint within the six months prior to the interview. Data collection stopped at the point of theoretical saturation and was subsequently analyzed according to the coding procedures advocated by Strauss and Corbin (open, axial and selective coding).

Two key insights emerged from data analysis. First, coding procedures revealed four distinct forms of customer complainants. These are labeled; “one‐off complainants”, “opportunistic complainants”, “conditioned complainants”, and “professional complainants”. Second, six main motives for articulating fraudulent complaints were uncovered during data analysis. These are termed; “freeloaders”, “fraudulent returners”, “fault transferors”, “solitary ego gains”, “peer‐induced esteem seekers”, and “disruptive gains”.

The study is constrained by its exploratory design and qualitative methods employed. Subsequently, future studies could employ survey methods to improve empirical generalizability. Future studies could adopt a more inclusive approach and incorporate insights from employees, managers, and other relevant actors within service encounters.

Practical implications highlighted by the study include a need for businesses to examine and, in many cases, reevaluate their personnel training, customer complaint and service recovery procedures. Furthermore, managers may wish to enforce mechanisms wherein customer complaints are monitored and tracked in a manner that assists in the identification and challenging of re‐offending fraudulent complainers.

The study constitutes the first systematic attempt to explore and describe illegitimate customer complaining behaviors.

Many jurisdictions fine illegal cartels using penalty guidelines that presume an arbitrary 10% overcharge. This article surveys more than 700 published economic studies and judicial decisions that contain 2,041 quantitative estimates of overcharges of hard-core cartels. The primary findings are: (1) the median average long-run overcharge for all types of cartels over all time periods is 23.0%; (2) the mean average is at least 49%; (3) overcharges reached their zenith in 1891–1945 and have trended downward ever since; (4) 6% of the cartel episodes are zero; (5) median overcharges of international-membership cartels are 38% higher than those of domestic cartels; (6) convicted cartels are on average 19% more effective at raising prices as unpunished cartels; (7) bid-rigging conduct displays 25% lower markups than price-fixing cartels; (8) contemporary cartels targeted by class actions have higher overcharges; and (9) when cartels operate at peak effectiveness, price changes are 60–80% higher than the whole episode. Historical penalty guidelines aimed at optimally deterring cartels are likely to be too low.

The purpose of this study is to more closely examine the trait antecedents and outcomes of frontline employee productivity propensity. The study is the first to use a job demands-resources perspective on productivity propensity and it reveals that the inclusion of the construct into service worker personality studies significantly improves the explanatory ability of hypothesized models.

The study follows a job demands-resources perspective and uses an empirical study that included two subsamples: banking and health care. Path analyses were performed using two-group modeling to test the hypotheses. Mediation and hierarchical regressions were also used.

The findings indicate that the conscientiousness trait has a consistent effect on productivity propensity. More importantly, the findings reveal that productivity propensity influences role ambiguity, job satisfaction and self-rated service performance and that the addition of the construct into personality studies significantly improves the explanatory ability of personality models.

This study presents further evidence that productivity propensity is an important construct in services research. Beyond previously established influences on bottom-line service productivity and manager-rated work performance, the current work indicates that it also influences FLE stress, engagement and work outcomes.

Managers work under pressures to ensure service productivity and are well aware of the importance of selecting job applicants who will fit the service role. This study provides additional evidence that the productivity propensity work resource should be considered when selecting employees. The work also suggests that customer workload and the standardization of the service environment impacts the influence of productivity propensity on service outcomes.

Given the importance of transformative service experiences that uplift the experiences of consumers and employees, the productivity propensity of frontline service employees not only impacts the ability of the employee to satisfy customer needs, but also leads the employee to experience increased job satisfaction.

This work is the first work to consider the effects of productivity propensity from a job demands-resources perspective and, as such, the first to examine the influence of the construct on job satisfaction and service delivery.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of organizational controls, both formal and informal, over the goal orientations of frontline employees. The goal orientations of employees, namely, in frontline settings, have been associated with a number of positive outcomes for organizations. Not surprisingly, past research has identified several personal characteristics with an influence on goal orientations. However, the contextual variables that influence employees’ goal orientations remain unspecified.

The authors distributed approximately 1,350 questionnaires through the frontline employees of a Brazilian bank and obtained 296 usable responses. The questionnaire relies on previously validated scales. The final confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) obtained a good fit and provided evidence of scale validity.

Overall, our results suggest that both formal and informal control mechanisms play a significant role explaining employees’ goal orientation. However, informal control mechanisms were found to play a more significant role explaining employees’ goal orientation.

This paper relies on employees from a single organization. In addition, it has a cross-sectional nature. The procedural and statistical remedies employed in this study suggest that method variance is not a concern.

The results show that managers may resort to control mechanisms to influence the goal orientations of frontline service employees in a manner that is consistent with organizational objectives.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that examines the impact of control mechanisms on employees’ goal orientation.