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In important interpersonal service interactions with a frontline employee (FLE), consumers at times fail to carry out their share of responsibility in the execution of the service, resulting in a situation of “consumer created emergency”. This might defeat the consumer's goal of availing the service (termed as consumer failure). This study explains the role of employee's hope in managing consumer failure in the situation of consumer created emergencies.

Hypotheses were tested in three experiments that simulated service emergency across a general printing service situation and a travel service situation.

The study shows that: (1) FLE hope has a positive effect on consumer satisfaction, and is mediated by the consumer's assumed effort by the FLE; (2) the effect of FLE hope on consumer satisfaction changes with changing levels of consumer hopefulness about the service outcome; (3) despite situation of consumer created emergency, consumer failure results in low consumer satisfaction due to attribution error and (4) external attribution by the FLE could not significantly rectify consumer's attribution error and hence could not alleviate consumer dissatisfaction.

The study suggests relevance and pathways of managing emotions and attributions of consumers and FLEs for superior performance outcomes.

The study theorizes and tests the role of hope, which is an important positive emotion during emergencies because frontline service settings have heretofore predominantly focused on managing negative traits and outcomes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis for healthcare systems worldwide. There have been significant challenges to managing public and private health care and related services systems’ capacity to cope with testing, treatment and containment of the virus. Drawing on the foundational research by Frow et al. (2019), the paper explores how adopting a service ecosystem perspective provides insight into the complexity of healthcare systems during times of extreme stress and uncertainty.

A healthcare framework based on a review of the service ecosystem literature is developed, and the COVID-19 crisis in Australia provides an illustrative case.

The study demonstrates how the service ecosystem perspective provides new insight into the dynamics and multilayered nature of a healthcare system during a pandemic. Three propositions are developed that offer directions for future research and managerial applications.

The research provides an understanding of the relevance of managerial flexibility, innovation, learning and knowledge sharing, which offers opportunities leading to greater resilience in the healthcare system. In particular, the research addresses how service providers in the service ecosystem learn from this pandemic to inform future practices.

The service ecosystem perspective for health care offers fresh thinking and an understanding of how a shared worldview, institutional practices and supportive and disruptive factors influence the systems’ overall well-being during a crisis such as COVID-19.

Despite the increasing prominence of value co-creation (VCC) in extant research, the area of customer co-creation is in its infancy and many aspects are not well-understood. This paper aims to important work from the individual psychology literature with the concept of VCC and offers empirical evidence to untested theoretical claims regarding the role of the individual in VCC.

The investigation begins with reviews of the literature of individual psychology and VCC to compare the concepts they use to explain the role of the individual in co-creation. The results of the theoretical development are empirically derived using a multiple vignette-based study to examine relationships between individual characteristics and the activity of VCC.

The authors find a positive effect of a customer’s prosocial orientation, perspective taking and involvement on VCC. However, a customer’s extraversion does not affect the degree of VCC. The desire-to-participate mediates these relationships.

This study offers a foundation for some of the central claims about VCC and encourages a precise understanding of the impact of individual customer psychology in value co-creation with firms. Implications for the service-dominant logic of marketing and core work in psychology are discussed.

Managers seeking to design co-creative ecosystems need to know about the individuals they are co-creating with. In this research, the authors clearly exemplify how managers can use in practice a theoretical understanding of individuals to better direct the activity of VCC.

This paper provides both new theoretical knowledge from the parallel literature review and exciting empirical results from the authors’ investigation into phenomenological claims regarding VCC.

This paper aims to complement the current understanding about user engagement in electronic word-of-mouth (eWoM) communications across online services and product communities. It examines the effect of the senders’ prior experience with products and services, and their extent of acquaintance with other community members, on user engagement with the eWoM.

The study used a sample of 576 unique user postings from the corporate fan page of two German firms: a service community of a telecom provider and a product community of a car manufacturer. Multiple regression analysis is used to test the conceptual model.

Senders’ prior experience and acquaintance positively affect user engagement with eWoM, and these effects differ across communities for products and services and across their influence on “likes” and “comments”. The results also suggest that communities for products are orientated toward information sharing, while those discussing services engage in information building.

This research explains mechanisms of user engagement with eWoM and opens directions for future research around motives, content and social media tools within the structures of online communities. The insights on information-handling dimensions of online tools and antecedents to their use contribute to the research on two prioritized topics by the Marketing Science Institute – “Measuring and Communicating the Value of Online Marketing Activities and Investments” and “Leveraging Digital/Social/Mobile Technology”.

This research offers insights for firms to leverage user engagement and facilitate eWoM generation through members who have a higher number of acquaintances or who have more experience with the product or service. Executives should concentrate their community engagement strategies on the identification and utilization of power users. The conceptualization and empirical test about the role of likes and comments will help social media managers to create and better capture value from their social media metrics.

The insights about the underlying factors that influence engagement with eWoM advance our understanding about the usage of online content.

This study aims to conceptualize and test the effect of consumers’ perceptions of complaint handling quality (PCHQ) in both traditional and social media channels.

Study 1 systematically reviews the relevant literature and then carries out a consumer and manager survey. This approach aims to conceptualize the dimensionality of PCHQ. Study 2 tests the effect of PCHQ on key marketing outcomes. Using survey data from a German telecommunications company, the study provides an explanation for the differences in outcomes across traditional (hotline) and social media channels.

Study 1 reveals that PCHQ is best conceptualized as a five-dimensional construct with 15 facets. There are significant differences between customers and managers in terms of the importance attached to the various dimensions. The construct shows strong psychometric properties with high reliability and validity, thereby opening up opportunities to treat these facets as measurement indicators for the construct. Study 2 indicates that the effect of PCHQ on consumer loyalty and word-of-mouth (WOM) communication is stronger in social media than in traditional channels. Procedural justice and the overall quality of service solutions emerge as general dimensions of PCHQ because they are equally important in both channels. In contrast, interactional justice, distributive justice and customer effort have varying effects across the two channels.

This study contributes to the understanding of a firm’s channel selection for complaint handling in two ways. First, it evaluates and conceptualizes the PCHQ construct. Second, it compares the effects of different dimensions of PCHQ on key marketing outcomes across traditional and social media channels.

This study enables managers to understand the difference in efficacy attached to different dimensions of PCHQ. It further highlights such differences across traditional and social media service channels. For example, the effect of complaint handling on social media is of particular importance when generating WOM communication.

This study offers a comprehensive conceptualization of the PCHQ construct and reveals the general and channel contingent effects of its different dimensions on key marketing outcomes.

This paper aims to conceptualize and empirically test the determinants of service interaction quality (SIQ) as attitude, behavior and expertise of a service provider (SP). Further, the individual and simultaneous effects of SIQ and its dimensions on important marketing outcomes are tested.

The narrative review of extant research helps formulate a conceptual model of SIQ, which is investigated using the univariate and multivariate meta-analysis.

There are interdependencies between drivers of SIQ that underlines the need to conceptualize service interaction as a dyadic phenomenon; use contemporary multilevel models, dyadic models, non-linear structural equation modeling and process studies; and study new and diverse services contexts. Meta-analysis illustrates the relative importance of the three drivers of SIQ and, in turn, their impact on consumer satisfaction and loyalty.

The meta-analysis is based on existing research, which, unfortunately, has not examined critical services or exigency situations where SIQ is of paramount importance. Future research will be tasked with diversifying to several important domains where SIQ is a critical aspect of perceived service quality.

This study emphasizes that, although the expertise of an SP is important, firms would be surprised to learn that the attitude and behavior of their employees are equally important antecedents. In fact, there is a delicate balance that needs to be found; otherwise, attitudinal factors can have an overall counterproductive effect on consumer satisfaction.

This paper provides an empirical synthesis of SIQ and opens up interesting areas for further research.

The probability distribution of major length and aspect ratio (major length/minor length) of wear debris collected from gear oil used in planetary gear drive were analysed and modelled. The paper aims to find an appropriate probability distribution model to forecast the kind of wear particles at different running hour of the machine.

Used gear oil of the planetary gear box of a slab caster was drained out and charged with a fresh oil of grade (EP-460). Six chronological oil samples were collected at different time interval between 480 and 1,992 h of machine running. The oil samples were filtered to separate wear particles, and microscopic study of wear debris was carried out at 100X magnification. Statistical modelling of wear debris distribution was done using Weibull and exponential probability distribution model. A comparison was studied among actual, Weibull and exponential probability distribution of major length and aspect ratio of wear particles.

Distribution of major length of wear particle was found to be closer to the exponential probability density function, whereas Weibull probability density function fitted better to distribution of aspect ratio of wear particle.

The potential of the developed model can be used to analyse the distribution of major length and aspect ratio of wear debris present in planetary gear box of slab caster machine.

An original systematic review of the academic literature on applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in the human resource management (HRM) domain is carried out to capture the current state-of-the-art and prepare an original research agenda for future studies.

Fifty-nine journal articles are selected based on a holistic search and quality evaluation criteria. By using content analysis and structural concept analysis, this study elucidates the extent and impact of AI application in HRM functions, which is followed by synthesizing a concept map that illustrates how the usage of various AI techniques aids HRM decision-making.

A comprehensive review of the AI-HRM domain’s existing literature is presented. A concept map is synthesized to present a taxonomical overview of the AI applications in HRM.

An original research agenda comprising relevant research questions is put forward to assist further developments in the AI-HRM domain. An indicative preliminary framework to help transition toward ethical AI is also presented.

This study contributes to the literature through a holistic discussion on the current state of the domain, the extent of AI application in HRM, and its current and perceived future impact on HRM functions. A preliminary ethical framework and an extensive future research agenda are developed to open new research avenues.

This study aims to refine the concept of value applied to value co-creation (VCC) by adding religious values. The concept of religious value co-creation (RVCC) is offered because the concepts of value and VCC that have been explored by previous researchers have not touched transcendental values or divine values. So far, the concept of value and VCC onlyfocused on transactional motives with worldly goals but had not succeeded in fulfilling religious needs. The literature review on the concept of value and VCC was carried out from 1990 to 2020, especially regarding the dimension of value creation.

A qualitative method was used to review articles related to the purpose of this study. Harzing’s Publish or Perish application is used to filter relevant articles as data sources. The selected articles only involved databased from Scopus (97 articles) and Google Scholar (115 articles). After going through a rigorous selection, seven articles were successfully analyzed.

The results of the analysis show that the concept of value only emphasizes business values and does not yet have religious values, especially Islamic values.

Future studies can be developed by examining the relationship between RVCC and its antecedent and consequence variables.

This study fills the theoretical gap and provides new insight into the concept of value, especially VCC by adding religious values. This research contributes to the development of the concept of value and VCC so that the two concepts become more holistic. Religious value is urgent to be considered, especially when the organization offers products based on religion and becomes one of the uniqueness that is not easily imitated. This uniqueness is believed to be able to bring about strong differentiation through superior values that have touched the level of non-transactional motives. For organizations that offer products with a religious basis, this differentiation is urgent to create.