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Since the merger of Lloyds and TSB banks in 1995/96, the number of operational staff working within the company has increased two‐fold, paving the way for Lloyds TSB to develop a new company training program, aimed specifically at operational and support staff. The training closely matches participants’ experience and current job, and ties into the national qualification network outside the bank.

The purpose of this paper is to engage with contemporary gender and entrepreneurship theories to gain insights into the division of labour, capitals and capacities and gendered identities within husband and wife heterosexual copreneurial businesses. This paper acknowledges copreneurship as a constituent sub group of research within family business and in doing so, the wider small business domain.

A multiple exploratory interview approach was used, with data generated through face-to-face in-depth interviews and ethnographic participant – observer multi-setting observation. This approach provided exceedingly rich and detailed data, and thus insights into the complex relationships found within copreneurial businesses.

The interviews generated a large amount of qualitative data, which were organised into themes through a process of recursive abstraction. Expelling the myth of the “male lead entrepreneur”, this study found that entrepreneurial identity and roles and responsibilities within a copreneurial business are shared and complementary, and are dependent upon the unique capacities and capitals of each partner. While there is evidence of duties that could be stereotypically described as either “men’s work or women’s work”, there was no apparent role tension between the partners. Thus, no partner’s contribution was deemed more valuable than the other.

By examining the division of labour and unique value/contribution of both men and women within the copreneurial/familial relationship the stereotyped perception of the husband being the lead (male) entrepreneur is challenged in favour of the more complementary capacities, roles, responsibilities and, thus, value of each actor/participant.

In this study the authors aim to explore the impact of customer misbehavior on frontline employees and managers and to elucidate the management tactics and strategies that managers employ in an attempt to minimize the impact of customer misbehavior on the workplace.

Following a discussion of the research design and methodology employed, the findings of 88 in-depth interviews are presented.

These data suggest that customer misbehavior impacts on frontline employees, managers, and managerial strategies. Three main effects of customer misbehavior on customer-contact employees are uncovered: physiological, cognitive, and attitudinal. These are connected with four main management challenges: conflicting pressures, recruitment and retention, counseling and motivation, and time expenditure. Finally, data analysis finds evidence of six main ways in which managers attempted to reduce or to alleviate harmful customer misbehavior: selective recruitment, changes to training and induction procedures, enhanced rewards, work-team design, increase counseling, and alterations to the servicescape.

The authors recommend that practitioners undertake a misbehavior audit that explores not only the extent of customer misbehavior but also the mechanisms, systems, and procedures the organization has for identifying, recording, and attempting to minimize the effects of dysfunctional customer behavior.

This study contributes insights into how customer-contact personnel and managers are both affected and cope with customer misbehavior. These insights are helpful for service managers faced with customer misbehavior and academicians interested in how employees respond to contemporary customers.

Aims to: supply an exploration and description of the extent to which strategic marketing planning is being undertaken by UK rugby union clubs; and identify, explore and outline the main intra and extra‐organizational barriers and impediments to the development of planning within rugby clubs. Begins with an overview of relevant literature. First, existing views on the content, processes and obstacles to strategic marketing planning are reviewed. Second, the topics of sports management, organization and sports marketing planning are introduced and discussed. After the presentation of the research design and methodology employed, the findings of an exploratory study into the extent and the barriers to strategic marketing planning within UK rugby union clubs are presented. Finishes with a discussion of conclusions and implications for both theorists and practitioners.

There has been considerable research into the barriers to the development of market orientation. However, whilst researchers have alluded to the importance of top management knowledge, skills and commitment, the issues of leadership style has been largely overlooked. This lacuna in marketing theory is despite numerous indirect references to the importance of leaders in developing a market oriented culture. The objective of this study is to explore and describe the role of top management leadership style in influencing the process of market orientation development. Begins with a review of existing definitions of and perspectives on the content and components of market orientation. Thereafter extant research into the barriers and processes of market orientation are examined and critically appraised. Following a discussion of the research methodology adopted, the findings of a survey of leadership style and market orientation are presented. Concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for theory and practice, highlighting the importance of this avenue of research.

Marketing theorists and practitioners have for many years extolled the need for and the value of developing a concept which has become known as a “market orientation”. Indeed, since the early 1950s a variety of researchers have argued that a market orientation is frequently associated with high levels of performance. However, despite the widespread acceptance of the merits of a market orientation, researchers have found comparatively low levels of adoption within British industry. The relatively limited extent of market orientation development is possibly explained through the findings of a number of studies which conclude that a wide range of organizational barriers impede market orientation. However, this paper argues that extant research into the barriers to market orientation is frequently restricted by the explicit concentration on management‐level barriers to the detriment of shopfloor‐derived impediments. Hence, via the exploratory case study of two retailing organizations, a typology of the barriers to market orientation development at the shopfloor level is presented. Implications for theorists and practitioners are identified and an action plan discussed.

Although dysfunctional behaviors by customers is increasingly being recognized by both scholars and practitioners, “illegitimate” complaining, in the form of fraudulent returns by customers, is under‐researched. The aim of this study is to address this gap in extant knowledge through explicitly focusing on uncovering factors which permit consumers to exploit retailers' liberal return policies when fraudulently returning products that they know they have used or damaged.

In‐depth interviews were utilized as the main data collection method. Interviews were conducted amongst service employees and customers. A total of 87 interviews were conducted with front‐line employees and managers of 12 general retail outlets. Customer interviewing involved 96 interviews. Potential customer informants were randomly contacted with a request to participate in a study of customer service and returning goods.

Data analysis revealed ten main factors that appear to be related to customers' likelihood of successfully, fraudulently returning products.

As with other similar studies of this nature, the findings and implications are limited by the research design and methods employed. However, these limitations also indicate potentially fruitful avenues of future research. Future studies could employ different methods and explore differing contexts to gauge the generalizability of findings.

The findings of the study have a range of implications for practitioners and policy makers. Insights are generated into the extent of fraudulent returning and the factors which facilitate successful fraudulent returns. As such, practitioners could use such insights to reduce the frequency of such episodes. Public policy implications centre on highlighting the issues which policy makers may wish to consider.

The current study is the first to explore how (rather than, why) consumers exploit firms' return policies and fraudulently defraud retailers. As such, a fundamental and stark contribution centres on the finding of widespread, recidivist fraudulent returning among those interviewed. Ten facilitators of fraudulent returning were identified, providing rich insights into how customers are able, successfully, to return used and damaged products.

The purpose of this paper is to explore poor service encounters from the customer's perspective.

Multiple autoethnographic accounts of overwhelmingly dreadful customer experiences at a department store were gathered and analyzed. The writers of the accounts were asked only to chronicle their experiences, and not directed to comment specifically on retail employee behaviour. Thus a different approach to dysfunctional service employee behaviour is offered to complement research on service sabotage, internal marketing and service delivery gaps.

Department store customers, especially the younger ones, have very low opinions of retail frontline employees. Common to all the autoethnographic accounts was a cynicism towards the actions of such employees that pervaded the customer perceptions of retail service encounters. Overcoming customer cynicism was identified as a key objective of employee training.

The approach, based on multiple autoethnographic accounts, provides insights that can be overlooked with traditional customer satisfaction surveys. It is particularly useful for eliciting constructive feelings of experiences. By its nature, it can be difficult for researchers to forecast the ground that may be covered by the scribes, and therefore to plan a research project around the method.

The findings are relevant to those involved in training retail frontline employees. They strongly suggest that training, through functional scripts and handy customer service tips, is inappropriate for creating successful service encounters with cynical customers, and may even encourage service sabotage behaviours from severely bored employees.

The methodology is novel in the context of retail customer experiences. The findings bring customer cynicism to the fore, and question the viability of continuing with retail formats that require monotonous and uninspiring roles to be played by retail employees.

While the links between customer word-of-mouth and desirable organizational outcomes have been widely studied, the possibility that customers might routinely exaggerate their consumption experience stories has been neglected. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The first exploratory study examined exaggerated and unexaggerated word-of-mouth and the targets of such activities. The second exploratory study focussed on customer-exaggerated negative word-of-mouth and its drivers. The two experimental studies generated deeper insights into attributions of service failure and exaggerated negative word-of-mouth.

This research explicitly addresses customer exaggeration regarding service consumption and the reasons customers engaged in such behaviors. Study 1 focussed on the scope and targets of exaggerated word-of-mouth, and Study 2 concentrated on identifying the drivers of exaggerated negative word-of-mouth. Studies 3 and 4 experimentally elucidated the cognitive mechanisms leading to exaggeration.

Contributions include deeper understanding of the phenomenon of exaggerated negative word-of-mouth and developing and testing a model of the factors associated with consumers’ exaggerated negative word-of-mouth.

Implications include possible organizational and public policy actions to prevent Pinocchio customers from exaggerated negative word-of-mouth.

This paper explores the nature and scope of exaggerated customer word-of-mouth and contributes insights in four ways. First, this research explores the scope of consumer exaggeration during word-of-mouth storytelling and the intended targets of such communications. Second, this research focusses on exaggerated negative word-of-mouth and develops a conceptual model of the drivers of such activity. Third, the theory is tested and contributes empirical insights into exaggerated negative word-of-mouth. Fourth, through experiments, insights are gained into the cognitive mechanisms leading to exaggeration and the effects of attribution differences in personal vs service provider blame.

In an era in which two‐thirds of interactions between firms and customers occur by telephone communications, the impact of customer telephone rage on employees' service‐related attitudes and beliefs is worthy of study. Telephone or “phone rage” involves occurrences of employee‐ or firm‐oriented injurious speech, aggression, anger, or antagonism that customers undertake during customer‐firm telephone interactions. The aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual model of the direct and indirect links between perceived customer phone rage and employee‐customer rapport, functional quality delivery, customer service orientation, retaliation intentions, negative word of mouth, and affective commitment.

To test the developed hypotheses, the author deemed a self‐administered postal survey the most appropriate data collection method. In total, 257 fully completed questionnaires were received and analyzed via structural equation modeling.

Of the eight hypothesized associations between phone rage and employee–customer rapport, functional quality delivery, customer service orientation, retaliation intentions, negative word of mouth, and affective commitment, seven are found to be significant. Three previously accepted associations are also found to be significant.

This study contributes in a number of ways. First, the paper develops a conceptual model that depicts service‐related dynamics, perceived customer rage, and employees' behavioral intentions. Second, this study also contributes methodologically through operationalizing, pretesting, applying, and testing a seven‐item scale of the level of perceived customer phone rage, from the perspective of the recipient (the employee). The third contribution of the study centers on the empirical insights gained. The study provides empirical evidence in support of the wider application of Huefner and Hunt's extension of Hirschman's framework.