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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.

Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) are very much a part of the Scottish tourism landscape in 2011. Some regional tourism stakeholders have created DMOs to manage their respective regional attractions, but until now, this has not been the case with north‐east Scotland. As a prelude to the potential creation of a regional DMO, the purpose of this paper is to empirically evaluate tourism business leaders' attitudes and likely acceptance of the DMO's structure and functions.

The Thomas‐Kilmann Conflict Mode (TKCM) was utilised to provide an evaluative framework, with discussion of the assertiveness versus cooperativeness needs of tourism business stakeholders in the region. The TKCM's measurement instrument was utilised along with a purpose‐built questionnaire to gather information about tourism leaders' interaction orientations and their level of support for the formation of a DMO, its structure and functions.

Tourism leaders in north‐east Scotland are collaboration‐oriented. Initial findings indicate that on balance, tourism businesses (as expressed by their managers/owners) are persuaded by the attractiveness of collaboration at an integrated regional level, but would nevertheless prefer a certain degree of competition. In addition, organisational size and membership of existing destination management networks appear to moderate the interaction choice preference.

First, the scale and questionnaire instrument developed to test attitudes toward a DMO formation have not been exhaustively evaluated, nor have the potential moderating factors been comprehensively assessed. A more robust and validated scale should be developed and moderators clearly modelled. Second, current sample size is limited and may not provide an adequate basis for generalisation. In future, a larger sample should be employed. Finally, this research is exploratory in scope, and future research, designed along an evaluative and analytical basis, is encouraged.

Collaboration within a new DMO in marketing to new markets and the support for this is not challenged, but some competition among tourism providers will continue. It is likely that the disparity between tourism performance in the city and rural areas will continue in the near future. The role of the DMO will therefore involve enlarging the customer base and raising the tourism profiles of both city and rural locations, in order to create a level playing field.

This research is the first to utilise the TKCM and Instrument to assess tourism business leaders' assertiveness versus cooperativeness orientations, prior to the initiation of an alliance in a region. The paper shows that this approach holds viability for future research in this direction, especially the potential of TKCM as a predictive framework for interorganisational interaction and collaboration.

Based on the resource-based view and dynamic capabilities theory, this study aims to examine the complementarity between market orientations and launch proficiency as a driver of new product performance.

In this research, an on-site survey of Iranian, research and development- intensive, manufacturing firms was carried out to examine the proposed hypotheses. Based on the 179 workable survey responses, a covariance-based structural equation modeling was applied to verify the proposed theoretical model.

The empirical findings reveal that the effects of market orientation or launch proficiency alone are not significant while the complementarity between them significantly influences new product performance. These research outcomes suggest that this complementarity leads to a bidirectional co-specialization relationship in firms, promoting both market intelligence generation processes and product-launch capabilities, and therefore resulting in superior new product performance.

The current characterization of the resource-based theory signifies that strategic resources merely have potential value and actualizing this value needs complementary organizational capabilities. Furthermore, the literature notably lacks empirical findings supporting these complementarities. Therefore, the findings concerning the bidirectional co-specialization between market orientation and launch proficiency not only provide empirical support for the dynamic capabilities theory but also address recent research calls to identify and calibrate the importance of dynamic capabilities for leveraging market orientation on new product performance.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of core self‐evaluations (CSE) as a coping resource in customer service roles.

Questionnaires were administered to 265 service providers, measuring CSE, burnout, social stressors involved in interaction with customers (perceived customer negative behaviors and emotional regulation performed by service providers) and coping resources (service orientation and social support).

The results show that CSE is negatively related to service provider burnout as reflected in depersonalization and emotional exhaustion, and positively related to a sense of accomplishment. CSE was also negatively related to perceived customer negative behaviors and to emotional regulation. The results show a partial mediation effect of emotional regulation on the relationship between CSE and burnout. Service orientation and social support were found to interact with CSE and enhance its effect on social stressors.

The use of a non‐randomized sample might bias the results.

The results can inform managerial practices designed to enhance service providers' resources of coping with role stressors.

The study introduces a fundamental personality trait, CSE, to the area of service and shows its effect on burnout through its relationship with situational stressors and interaction with coping resources.

The extant literature suggests that performance may be a function of the degree to which market information is systematically collected, disseminated and responded to (i.e. market orientation). However, the majority of empirical research on the market orientation to performance relationship has focused on manufacturers and has not distinguished between incumbents and new entrants. Our study of incumbent firms involves the market orientation to performance relationship in the context of services in the growing and competitive Internet industry. We found that market orientation did not directly affect performance, nor did the interaction of market orientation and perceptions of new competitors. However, perceptions of traditional competitors directly affected performance and interacted with market orientation to affect performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate guilt proneness as a prosocial salesperson trait and its impact on outcomes important to the firm, the customer as well as the salesperson. Specifically, the authors look at how this variable relates to job effort and the indirect effects on customer satisfaction. The corollary purpose is to uncover how managers influence these constructs through positive outcome feedback.

Prosocial motivation theory grounds the conceptual model which the authors test through survey implementation. The final sample consisted of 129 business-to-business (B2B) salespeople working across multiple industries in India. Latent moderated structural equation modeling was utilized to test the proposed model.

The results suggest that guilt proneness positively influences the likelihood that a salesperson adopts a relational orientation, which has a direct effect on individual effort and an indirect effect on customer satisfaction. Supervisors have the ability to amplify this effort through positive outcome feedback, but only when relational orientation is low. Their support had no effect on salespeople with a high relational orientation.

The study is unique in that it combines an overlooked prosocial trait with a B2B Indian dataset. We provide value for firms because our results show that guilt-prone salespeople put more effort into their job – ”something universally desirable among sales managers” – through the development of a relational orientation. The authors also give practical implications on how to support salespeople given their level of relational orientation.

This study investigates the impact of the degree of process maturity on the degree of patient orientation in the context of radical process changes. The study is based on a sample of healthcare providers in Ukraine which experiences a fundamental transformation of its healthcare system.

The investigation was conducted among the full population of the chief physicians from 53 medical institutions (hospitals, general practitioners centers, dental clinics, and maternity clinics) in one of the largest cities in Ukraine. We investigated the maturity of the process of interaction with patients as perceived by these top managers. We applied variance-based structural equation modeling (SmartPLS3).

The study shows that each stage of process maturity predetermines the following one. With regard to the impact of each stage of process maturity on patient orientation, all stages show a positive and significant relationship toward patient orientation, i.e. even the lowest stage of maturity is critical for patient orientation. A further contradictory finding to extant literature is, that based on the set of indicators, the process appears to be in different stages at the same time. This speaks against the regular sequence-based approach toward process maturity.

Although it has been assumed that higher degrees of process maturity are associated with higher customer (patient) orientation, this work shows that the relationship holds also for each stage of process maturity separately. This research is based on a very unique sample – the almost complete set of chief physicians and their deputies of practically all medical institutions of a large city.

Online games based on a freemium business model face the monetization challenge. The purpose of this paper is to examine how players’ achievement orientation, social orientation and sense of community contribute to willingness to pay (WtP).

A multi-method study of an online game community is used. Interviews and participant observation are used to develop an understanding of social and achievement orientations followed by the development of hypotheses that are tested using survey data.

The findings indicate that a sense of community is positively related to WtP, whereas satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the service provider is not. The authors examine the moderating role of players’ achievement orientation and social orientation and find that while a stronger connection to the community may encourage achievement-oriented players to pay, the opposite is indicated for socially oriented players.

Decision makers need to understand that not all players are potential payers; while socially oriented users can help to maintain and grow the community, achievement-oriented players are more likely to pay for the value they extract from the community.

While communities are held together by people with common interests, which intuitively suggests that WtP increases with the strength of connection to the community, the authors find this only applies in the case of players with an achievement orientation. For those with a social orientation, WtP may actually decrease as their connection to the community increases. These perhaps counter-intuitive findings constitute a novel contribution of value for both theory and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an interactionist framework for examining how the cultural dimension of collectivism interacts with workplace attributes to influence organizational commitment.

These issues are studied by using a longitudinal survey to examine the development of affective organizational commitment by a racially diverse set of young professionals in the USA.

Consistent with predictions, results showed a significant two‐way interaction between the cultural dimension of collectivism and organizational rewards on employees’ commitment.

These results suggest that research may benefit from the development of theory that simultaneously considers the role that workplace attributes and cultural values play in shaping organizational commitment.

The findings of this study suggest that organizations may increase existing employees’ commitment by strategically managing the types of rewards they provide to employees with different cultural values.

While an extensive amount of research has been conducted on affective organizational commitment, the question of whether employees’ cultural values influence commitment formation is still largely unanswered. Thus, this study provides initial evidence on the interactive effect of culture and rewards on the formation of employee commitment.

Organizational development and change may be initiated from two different starting points. A diagnostic approach begins with an examination of problems to assess and correct dysfunction. In contrast, the Appreciative Inquiry approach begins by identifying an organization’s strengths as resources for change. An experimental study was conducted to compare the processes and outcomes that arise during the first phase of each approach. Results show that both approaches lead to different but favorable and complementary outcomes. Both participant gender and the gender construction of the dyads in which individuals participated moderate these effects in unexpected ways. The implications for understanding the processes by which both methods work, and the potential for combining them, are discussed