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Controversy exists about the shape of the relationship between loyalty and profitability. This paper aims to address the possibly nonlinear effects of behavioral loyalty (BLOY) on customer spending (as a proxy for profitability). Building on social exchange theory and the norm of reciprocity, it examines the asymmetries between BLOY and customer spending and the moderating influence of personal communication (PCOMM) as a social reward and dispositional positive reciprocity as process evidence.

Study 1a (n = 309) gathered customer data from four restaurants and Study 1b (n = 252) data from hotel guests after they checked out. Study 2 is an experimental study with two manipulated factors (BLOY and PCOMM). In total, 295 participants from a large German online panel completed the study.

The results indicate an inverted-U shaped relationship between BLOY and customer spending: after reaching a turning point, customers gradually curb spending as their BLOY further increases. High PCOMM acts as a reciprocal response while triggering additional customer spending particularly at higher levels of behavioral loyalty; positive reciprocity adjusts the differences in customer spending when social rewards such as PCOMM are present.

The asymmetric relationship between BLOY and customer spending is tested only for hedonic service settings.

Not all loyal customers spend more – companies need to meet their reciprocal obligations before they can benefit from increased customer spending.

The present research re-considers the nature of the relationship between BLOY and customer spending and reveals an inverted-U shaped relationship, with a turning point beyond which greater customer loyalty decreases customer spending. It finds converging process evidence for the mechanism of reciprocity underlying this relationship. This study also details the financial impact of BLOY on the firm by investigating actual customer spending.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the main effects of agent conscientiousness and reciprocity norm and the interaction effect of these two factors on layoff decisions in firm‐employee relationships.

A scenario‐based experiment with 331 business professionals was conducted and three regression models were run to test three hypotheses proposed in the paper.

The norm of reciprocity reduces decision‐making agents' tendency to lay off employees in the face of an environmental change. In addition, the norm of reciprocity interacts with decision‐making agents' conscientiousness in influencing their layoff decision.

The limitations of this study are the use of single‐agent decision scenario and the specific focus on one aspect of agent personality – conscientiousness and its collective influence on layoff decisions. In a broader picture, the results of this study support the cross‐level analytical approach to investigating organizational phenomena, in which individual‐level and organizational‐level factors interact and determine organizational outcomes.

Recruiting and promoting managers who exhibit high levels of conscientiousness, coupled with proactively cultivating the norm of reciprocity with employees, are critical to a firm's thrust in attaining and sustaining stakeholder management practices with the emphasis on employees' well‐being.

While the extant literature focuses largely on the effects of layoff and the individual perceptions of downsizing and layoff, this paper examines what actually influences decision‐making agents' layoff decisions. The paper expands the literature by investigating the impacts of agent conscientiousness and reciprocity norm on layoff decisions.

Management scholars investigated the motivational aspects of volunteers, mainly focusing on their positive reciprocity – individuals feel obligated to reciprocate whenever they receive benefits from others – but neglected the possible role of negative reciprocity, the tendency to retaliate in case of mistreatments. Based on motivational functions theory and the norm of reciprocity, this paper proposes a framework assessing other-oriented and self-oriented motives as the main antecedents of volunteers’ intention to stay in non-profit organizations (NPOs).

Covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) and the PROCESS macro were used to empirically validate and test the hypothesized conceptual model on a sample of 379 volunteers actively involved in Italian NPOs.

Positive reciprocity partially mediated the relationships between volunteers’ other-oriented motives and self-oriented motives and their intention to stay. Instead, negative reciprocity fully mediated the relationship between self-oriented motives and intention to stay but not the relationship between other-oriented motives and intention to stay.

Managers and marketers of NPOs should pay more attention to volunteers’ attitudinal and behavioral signals to encourage within-organization positive reciprocal attitudes and discourage negative reciprocal attitudes. This represents a strategic lever to prevent volunteers from quitting the organization – which is one of the most critical challenges for NPOs’ management – and improve their intention to stay.

This is one of the first studies that simultaneously investigate the mediating role of both positive and negative reciprocity of volunteers actively involved in NPOs. Moreover, the constructs of other-oriented and self-oriented motivations are statistically validated as two separate psychological dimensions impacting on volunteers’ turnover. Finally, the study has been conducted in the Region of Tuscany (Italy) which, despite its centuries-old tradition of volunteerism, has received scant attention by non-profit scholars.

Pervasive and rampant workplace incivility effects have called for more studies on antecedents and possible deterrents of the onset of negative organizational behaviors. Based on social exchange theory (SET), this study proposes a framework investigating the underlying mechanisms of team–member exchange (TMX) on instigated incivility.

The hypothesized model explores the combined effect of interventions on teams and organizational levels. Indeed, the personal norm of negative reciprocity (PNR) and the psychological contract violation (PCV) are hypothesized as mediating variables of such a relationship. The model is empirically tested using covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) on a sample of 330 employees of organizations with a team-based design. PNR and PCV resulted as a full mediating variable of the relationship between TMX and instigated incivility.

Findings suggest that, by encouraging high-quality TMX, human resource (HR) managers could reduce employees’ willingness to instigate incivility toward colleagues other than team members. However, focusing only on TMX may be insufficient because of the role played by individual attitudes and organizational levers such as PNR and PCV.

The authors enrich current works on incivility by analyzing the role of positive sentiments in minimizing deviant behaviors. Further, the authors investigate negative organizational phenomena through a positive lens and contribute to building a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that might produce uncivil behaviors.

This study aims to investigate the process of service gifting (i.e. unexpected upgrades or benefits) and examine why service gifts do not always result in firm-beneficial reciprocal behaviors from consumers.

Through a series of three studies including both scenario-based and game-theory-based experiments, this research proposes and empirically validates a conceptual model that examines the effect of service gifts on firm-beneficial reciprocal behaviors, and the role of collective social connection and norm of positive reciprocity (NPR) in this process.

The findings of this research show that the consumer’s feelings of collective social connection mediate the link between the provision of service gifts and firm-beneficial outcomes. Furthermore, an individual’s adherence to NPR moderates this process. Specifically, individuals with a strong adherence to NPR do not display increases in collective social connection following the receipt of a service gift. Those who are low in NPR follow the expected pattern of increased collective social connection leading to reciprocation.

Future research may further generalize the model to other situations such as high vs low context cultures. Longitudinal field experiments can be used to further investigate collective versus relational social connection, which can be either a by-product or a primary benefit derived from service delivery.

The results of this research reveal the critical role of collective social connection which has been largely ignored in service gifting research. It encourages managers to use service gifting to directly boost consumers collective social connection. Furthermore, it offers managers insight into why service gifts do not always result in firm-beneficial outcomes because of the moderating role of NPR.

The roles of social connection and the norm of reciprocity have been under-studied in both theoretical and empirical work on service gifting. This paper demonstrates that, contrary to traditional thought, those typically expected to reciprocate the most (i.e. high in NPR) may not realize increased collective social connection leading to reciprocation following receipt of a service gift.

This study aims to explore the process that, from abusive supervision, leads to the different kinds of workplace deviant behaviors, using the norm of negative reciprocity as the main mechanism that can trigger this process.

This study is based on a literature review from organizational behavior and reciprocity fields and builds a theoretical model on the relationship between abusive supervision and workplace deviance within organizations.

This study develops a theoretical model where abusive supervision causes a feeling of injustice, which can motivate employees to seek revenge in the form of workplace deviant behaviors. Moreover, negative direct balanced reciprocity will moderate the relationship between the desire for revenge and minor interpersonal workplace deviance; negative direct non-balanced reciprocity will moderate the relationship between the desire for revenge and severe interpersonal workplace deviance; negative generalized balanced reciprocity will moderate the relationship between the desire for revenge and minor organizational workplace deviance; negative generalized non-balanced reciprocity will moderate the relationship between the desire for revenge and severe organizational workplace deviance.

Previous studies have used negative reciprocity as a moderator, but for the first time, it is split in direct and generalized and in balanced and non-balanced. In particular, when direct negative reciprocity is present, the revenge will take the form of interpersonal workplace deviance; when generalized negative reciprocity is present, the revenge will take the form of organizational workplace deviance. On the other side, when balanced reciprocity is present, revenge will take the form of minor workplace deviance, while when non-balanced reciprocity is present, revenge will take the form of severe workplace deviance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how we can understand social media interactions better by explicating the process of social capital formation on Facebook from a reciprocity perspective.

This study observed users who got tagged on Facebook by his/her friends and how s/he responded to that tagging activity. In total, 4,666 posts and 418,580 comments from The New York Times Facebook page were collected for the observation.

A majority (77.87 percent) of users who were tagged by their friends showed reactions to their tagging. In detail, 33.63, 44.20, and 0.04 percent of users responded by comments, “Likes”, and “Shares”, respectively. In total, 90.11 percent of the comments and 98.58 percent of the “Likes” were expressed on a comment or sub-comment, and only 9.89 percent of the comments and 1.42 percent of the “Likes” were expressed on a post. This indicates that a high percentage of users respond to their tagging notification, and they prefer dialogic responses to non-dialogic responses.

Previous studies have focused on photo tagging activity in social media, but user tagging activity had not been studied enough. This study examines the effects of Facebook tagging activity from a reciprocal perspective.

The ubiquity of mobile phone use has generated a common phenomenon called phubbing, a reference to snubbing someone in social settings and instead concentrating on one's phone. Despite numerous adverse effects of phubbing argued in previous research, the group of phubbers is growing intensively. The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential transmission of phubbing between marital partners to raise public awareness of the propagation of phubbing.

A two-wave study with a 3-month interval was conducted, using matched husband–wife data from 253 Chinese couples. Husbands and wives separately completed questionnaires about their spouses’ phubbing and their marital quality. The dyadic data analysis method was applied to test the research hypotheses.

The results confirm the transmission of phubbing and show a pronounced gender asymmetry in the process of phubbing transmission. Phubbing could be transmitted from wives to husbands, but not vice versa. Specifically, only wives' phubbing significantly undermine relationship quality, while relationship quality was negatively related to both husbands' phubbing and wives' phubbing.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the mechanism of phubbing transmission and provide support for reciprocity theory and social role theory. Results can cause public attention to the transmissibility of phubbing and provide enlightenment on the management of personal phone behavior and offer insight into research on technology use in other types of interpersonal relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the existing fraud studies and theory (fraud triangle) from bureaucratic crime perspectives. Importantly, this paper answers calls on research, exploring the routines of interaction both micro- and social psychological constructs in studying fraudulent behaviours. These aspects are relatively new, which have a little attention from auditing and fraud literature.

Experienced fraud perpetrators were used for this study. A semi-structured interview technique was used, allowing to uncover rich descriptive data on the personal experiences of participants. It allowed them to tell and illustrate why and how they get involved in fraudulent activities.

Many explanations, from a wide variety of perspectives, have been advanced to explain why people commit fraud in bureaucracy. Using reciprocity and exchange theory as a basis, it was found strong evidence for expanding fraud triangle theory (Cressey, 1953) as a predictor of individual’s intention to commit white-collar crimes. Evidence of these results provides a new challenge to other accounts of why systemic fraud would or would not occur. In this point, it highlights the concepts of social exchange and the norm of reciprocity serve as a useful beginning for explaining the factors that cause someone to commit occupational fraud. Generally, a number of distinct empirical and theoretical contributions arise from the current study.

This paper contributes to the enrichment of fraud theory and literature, from psychological perspectives. With regard to the reciprocity between peers within and outside organisation, it offers theoretical frameworks about the reasons for the decisions to commit white-collar crimes. As such, it advances fraud and auditing studies.

This study aims to build on the well-documented case of the Olympus scandal to dissect how social networks and corporate culture enabled corporate elites to commit fraud across multiple generations of leaders.

A flexible pattern matching approach was used to identify matches and mismatches between behavioural theory in corporate governance and the patterns observed in data from diverse sources.

The study applies the behavioural theory of corporate governance from different perspectives. Social networks and relationships were essential for the execution of the fraud and keeping it secret. The group of corporate elites actively created opportunities for committing misappropriation. This research presents individuals committing embezzlement because the opportunity already exists, and they can enrich themselves. The group of insiders who committed the fraud elaborated the rationalizations to others and asked outside associates to help rationalise the activities, while usually individuals provide rationalizations to themselves only.

The social processes among actors described in this case can inform the design of mechanisms to detect these behaviours in similar contexts.

This study provides both perspectives on the fraud scandal: the one of the whistle-blowers, and the opposing side of the transgressors and their associates. The extant case studies on Olympus presented the timeframe of the scandal right after the exposure. The current study dissects the events during the fraud execution and presents the case in a neutral or a negative light.