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Ambidextrous frontline service employees (FSEs), capable of delivering quality services and carrying out sales responsibilities too, are crucial to service firms. This study seeks to extend ambidexterity research by examining how a manager's goal orientation could influence FSEs' ambidextrous conversion. The authors draw on achievement goal theory and conceptualize a link between a manager's achievement goal orientation and employees' service–sales ambidexterity (SSA). The authors then apply conservation of resources theory to complement this high-level conceptualization, hypothesize mediating roles of important resources that can facilitate employees' SSA, and the authors test them empirically.

This study adopts a questionnaire survey design. The empirical test relies on multilevel path analyses of dyadic data from 341 FSEs and 39 managers of a major logistics service company in Taiwan.

Managers with a prominent learning goal orientation can facilitate and foster FSEs' SSA through developmental inducements and change-related self-efficacy, two important resources for their ambidextrous conversion. Managers with a strong performance-avoid goal orientation instead might hinder employees' SSA conversion, due to a negative impact on developmental inducements. Furthermore, SSA enhances FSEs' service delivery value and sales performance.

By analyzing and empirically testing the influence pathways of essential resources perceived by FSEs, which channel the effects of a manager's goal orientation to employees' SSA conversion, this study offers insights about how managers can support and foster FSEs' service–sales ambidextrous conversion.

This study aims to examine how a manager’s learning goal orientation (LGO) influences frontline service employees’ (FSEs’) engagement in cross-selling activities. Such engagements must exist before they can achieve service–sales ambidexterity. Drawing on achievement goal theory and the meaning-making perspective, this study predicts that learning-oriented managers encourage and foster FSEs’ cross-selling behaviors by facilitating their ability to derive positive meaning from the cross-selling initiative. They do so by conveying high-quality information about the initiative and related changes to individual employees, as well as by encouraging the formation of a collective perception of open communications within the work unit.

Hierarchical (nested) data from 39 managers and 357 FSEs of a major logistic service company are used to test the hypotheses.

As predicted, a manager’s LGO relates positively to FSEs’ cross-selling activities, through sequential mediations of the hypothesized communication mechanisms and employees’ benefits-finding.

A manager’s LGO is an important antecedent of FSEs’ cross-selling behaviors. This study establishes this influence and clarifies the processes by which it occurs. This study also extends previous research by specifying the important role of employees’ meaning-making, which prompts them to adopt cross-selling, as a mediator of the multilevel communication influences that result from their managers’ LGO.

Motivated by situational strength theory and multi-level theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose a cross-level model to examines whether virtual community citizenship behaviors (VCCBs) are affected by consumers’ individual differences on reciprocity, other consumers’ collective citizenship behaviors at community-level (members citizenship behaviors, MCBs), and their interaction effects.

The research model is tested with a sample of 340 consumers collected from the 34 virtual communities of consumptions (VCCs). Because consumers are embedded in communities, the authors employ the hierarchical linear modeling for data analyses.

The findings reveal positive effects of individual’s prosocial values and community-level MCBs, and a negative effect of exchange ideology, on VCCBs. There is a significant cross-level moderation effect of MCBs such that MCBs reduce the negative influence of exchange ideology on VCCBs.

This research suggests that participation in VCCs could be simultaneously driven by the dispositions to help and to get fair reciprocity, while such effects are constrained by others’ citizenship behaviors within the VCC. Future research should identify other contextual factors that could confine or amplify the personality-behavior links in the context of VCCs.

Managers who intend to build a VCC of high co-creation should establish mechanisms that could facilitate norm of VCCBs. Also, it is crucial to take into account the participants’ dispositions on reciprocity in recruiting community members and developing member portfolio.

This is one of the first studies to offer insights regarding the role of community-level citizenship behavior as a strong situation to mitigating the influences of individuals’ reciprocity-based dispositions.

Based on prior studies, the performance of customer relationships depends highly on the characteristics of the e‐service. However, the strength of this association can be impacted when businesses employ multichannel services (e.g. offering online and offline services). With multichannel services, any inconsistency in perceived quality across channels may result in customer distrust toward a service provider. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of inconsistent quality on the association between e‐service quality and customer relationships in a university context.

This study conducted a web survey and 318 respondents who have both physical and e‐service experiences were collected. The inconsistent quality across channels was divided into three groups by k‐means clustering approach. Next, the hypothesized associations were analyzed using regression analysis based on three groups.

The results show that inconsistent quality has different impacts on the association between e‐service quality and customer relationships across the three groups. Especially in the positive disconfirmation group, the investment in e‐services will be in vain because certain e‐service sub‐constructs lose their impact on customer relationships.

The findings of this study provide implications for improving customer relationships under different cross‐channel quality inconsistency conditions for managers.

This study extends the concept of expectancy disconfirmation theory to the multichannel service context and pioneers the exploration of the moderating effect of cross‐channel quality inconsistency in customer relationships, contributing to the understanding of the literature about the impacts of inconsistent quality on customer relationships.

This paper aims to link academic classifications of service innovation with practical activities by firms to detail the essence of service innovation.

This research employs both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The qualitative study features interviews with senior managers from 590 companies, covering nine industries in Taiwan, to gather practitioners ' perspectives on service innovation. A content analysis details specific forms of service innovation. The quantitative study provides a homogeneity test and two-sample proportions test to examine differences in service innovation perspectives/activities across organizational characteristics.

The interview data link three types of service innovations to 11 associated elements and 25 labels, derived from 659 potential service innovation incidents (550 new service concepts, 82 new service processes, and 27 new service business models). This study also shows that elements of service innovations vary by company size, service innovation experience, and industry life cycle.

The three types of service innovations enable businesses to benchmark and modify their current service innovation activities. Service managers can use the results of this study to develop their own service innovation strategies and concrete action plans.

This pioneering study links the viewpoints of academics with practical service innovation activities and empirically shows that service innovation is dissimilar, depending on various organization characteristics.

This study explores the impact of two factors that are prominent in the service literature: customer participation and service expectation. Owing to the interactive nature of services, customers often participate in the co‐production of the service. In addition, customers normally enter into the service with certain expectations regarding the level of service they are likely to receive. The survey argues that the participative roles adopted by customers in service specification and delivery and their pre‐encounter service expectations influence how customers attribute the causes of service failure. Finally, the implications from the findings are discussed and directions for future research are provided. The effect of emotional response caused by a service failure on locus attributions remains to be further investigated.

This paper aims to increase the understanding of social and technical factors contributing to successful supplier‐retailer collaboration. The objective is to identify the necessary supply chain architecture for supplier‐retailer collaboration, and demonstrate how it influences supply chain performance.

Five pairs of suppliers and retailers in Taiwan were studied with each pair serving as a unit of analysis. In each case, data pertaining to eight relationship variables critical to collaboration between supplier and retailer were collected and analyzed. A comprehensive supplier‐retailer relationship model is developed with five specific research positions: supplier‐retailer business relationship (interdependence, intensity, trust) affects long‐term orientation; supplier‐retailer business relationship affects supply chain architecture (information sharing, inventory system, information technology capabilities, coordination structure); long‐term orientation affects supply chain architecture; supply chain architecture affects the level of supplier‐retailer collaboration; and supplier‐retailer collaboration enhances supplier‐retailer performance.

Overall, with the exception of duration, all variables are found to be critical to supplier‐retailer collaboration. It is the intensity, as opposed to the duration, of the relationship that influences the retailer‐supplier relationship.

The proposed model demonstrates how eight critical social and technical variables are directly and/or indirectly related. This knowledge will enable the management of supplier‐retailer networks to produce better supply chain collaboration and performance.

An issue devoted to the Second International Conference on Electronic Business, in December 2002, in Taiwan. Included are six papers, taken from a total of 205 papers that were originally submitted, accepted and included in the conference proceedings.