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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between patients’ provider communication effectiveness and courteousness with patients’ satisfaction and trust at free clinics.

This cross-sectional survey (n=507), based on the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems instrument, was conducted in two Southeastern US free clinics. Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to identify patient subgroups (clusters) with similar but not immediately visible characteristics.

Across the items assessing provider communication effectiveness and courteousness, five distinct clusters based on patient satisfaction, trust and socio-demographics were identified. In clusters where communication and courteousness ratings were consistent, trust and satisfaction ratings were aligned with these domains, e.g., 54 percent rated communication and courteousness highly, which was associated with high patient satisfaction and trust. When communication effectiveness and courteousness ratings diverged (e.g., low communication effectiveness but high courteousness), patient trust and satisfaction ratings aligned with communication effectiveness ratings. In all clusters, the association was greater for communication effectiveness than for provider courteousness. Thus, provider courteousness was important but secondary to communication effectiveness.

Investment in patient-centered communication training for providers will improve patient satisfaction and trust.

The study is the first to examine individual provider communication components and how they relate to patient satisfaction and trust in free clinics. LCA helped to more fully examine communication constructs, which may be beneficial for more nuanced quality improvement efforts.

The paper's aim is to investigate the antecedents and outcomes of the relationship between providers and consumers of a “high‐credence” service, in Hong Kong.

A model of antecedents and outcomes was constructed. Relationship quality was conceptualized as the degree of trust in and satisfaction with the service provider. Data collected in face‐to‐face interviews with over 200 clients of 12 health‐care clinics questionnaire survey were analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling, to test six hypotheses.

The findings support the hypotheses and show that the service providers' expertise, empathy, likeability, and communication effectiveness significantly influenced relationship quality, leading in turn to the likelihood of re‐patronage and word‐of‐mouth recommendation.

The study suggests ways in which service providers can improve the quality of the customer relationship. Findings can be generalised only with caution, given the focus on health‐care delivery in a Chinese society. Future research could usefully investigate other high‐credence service sectors.

Empirical data have examined the association between four possible antecedents and relationship quality in a real‐world setting, and suggest practical actions for planners of customer relationship strategy in the high‐credence context.

Effective communication is a key factor in presenting Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) awareness and prevention campaigns, and delivering treatment programmes, particularly in South Africa where different ethnic groups and a diversity of languages and educational attainment levels are encountered. Language is an important element of such communication. The purpose of this paper is to examine the communication effectiveness of AIDS-related intervention messages.

Case-based semi-structured interviews, with 42 employees from three construction organisations, and with six telephone counsellors from a service provider, were used to explore language in the HIV/AIDS context in the construction industry in the Western Cape region.

Workers’ knowledge about HIV (a key element in prevention and willingness to engage in treatment regimes) tended to align with their level of education. African cultures may inhibit the use of plain language about AIDS. Graphic posters with text in different languages were the most preferred communication media, but need periodic refreshment to remain effective. For toolbox talks and other company presentations, a comprehensive approach to language differences is limited, and appropriate confirmatory feedback loops are not used – the message sent is not always the message received. The recruitment and training processes for service provider counsellors ensure a more comprehensive grasp of HIV knowledge and a more consistent approach to communication.

Construction organisations should be more careful in their HIV/AIDS campaigns and programmes, ensure better targeting of audiences and pay more nuanced and sensitive attention to language needs, gender differences and cultural contexts with respect to communicating with workers in ways that engage them more fully about HIV/AIDS, stigma and disclosure.

Communication effectiveness is pivotal in the provision of intervention management by construction firms. Ineffective language and communication processes directly and adversely influence HIV/AIDS intervention management success.

Organizational diversity training is designed to enhance employees' skills and competencies regarding diversity and its management. The question of its effectiveness, and the conditions under which it thrives, remains a matter of debate. Unlike previous studies that have predominantly focused on the perspective of training participants, this study shifts the lens to the viewpoints of diversity training providers in Germany – a country where the formal requirement for diversity management was implemented relatively recently. The primary objective is to ascertain the critical factors influencing training effectiveness from the providers' perspective.

This research draws upon case studies based on document analysis and qualitative interviews with diversity training providers across Germany.

The investigation reveals that the effectiveness of diversity training, as perceived by providers, hinges on several key factors: the organizational environment (including the widespread recognition of diversity issues and the presence of an organizational diversity framework), the attributes of diversity trainers (notably their personal familiarity with diversity) and the setting and design of the training (such as venue, duration and a blend of instructional approaches). A notable barrier to achieving effective training outcomes is the lack of supportive conditions within client companies, exemplified by limited training budgets, which impedes the accurate assessment of training effectiveness.

This study marks a novel contribution to the field by explicitly focusing on the perspective of diversity training providers in Germany. It provides new insights into the importance of the organizational context surrounding diversity education within the private sector.

Given the fierce competition in financial services, service failure management and trust restoration tactics are becoming strategic priorities. Studies investigating trust restoration have increased over the years due to the significance of trust in services and the frequency of trust violations. Drawing on the sense-making and defensive approaches of attribution theory, this study aims to explore the effectiveness of various trust recovery tactics (e.g. apology, explanation, and investigation) in financial services considering the prevalence of service failure severity.

Based on a scenario-based survey, this study gathered data from 402 consumers of different banks in Pakistan. The study analyzed the data using ordinary least square regressions and structural equation modeling.

The study indicated that explanation is more effective in repairing character-competence and commitment-based trust, while investigation remained highly effective for inducing congruence-based trust. Interestingly, an apology was more effective for communication-based trust repairing, while context-based trust recovery was unaffected against all recovery tactics. Despite the prevalence of severe service failure, recovery actions proved fully effective for character-competence and commitment-based trust while partially effective for congruence-based trust recovery. This study also found that severe service failure undermines the effectiveness of recovery actions in repairing communication and context-based trust.

The study extends the literature on trust recovery by integrating sense-making and defensive attribution theory. The sense-making approach contributes to the existing knowledge on trust recovery by elucidating how consumers and service providers develop a shared understanding to facilitate the recovery mechanism of multidimensional trust in financial services.

Most previous research in the domain of relationship marketing has focused on the antecedents of loyalty and commitment in industrial markets, distribution channels or consumer goods. This study, however, models the antecedents of clients’ relationship commitment in the context of a professional service, high in credence qualities (where customers have difficulty in confidently evaluating service quality, even purchase and consumption) ‐ i.e. personal financial planning services. The impact of four key explanatory variables (communication effectiveness, technical quality, functional quality and trust) are examined. The results support the hypothesized model and show communication effectiveness to be a key driver of all antecedent variables, and the single most powerful determinant of relationship commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to find how mature the Polish commercial production companies are in their information technology (IT) sourcing practices, what they do, the practices that are successful, the challenges experienced and the outcomes.The paper presents and critically evaluates the results of a study of IT outsourcing management processes in selected industrial enterprises operating in Poland. Dynamic business contexts, globalisation and advances in IT make the development of IT sourcing models challenging in both theory and practice. This paper examines the principles and practice of sourcing IT and business processes in Poland, a country much under-represented in the literature. Little research has been conducted on the strategic rationale behind IT sourcing decisions, the resulting challenges and the potential or actual consequences of such decisions. This paper addresses these gaps in the understanding of IT sourcing processes by way of examining the types of sourcing models and solutions among manufacturing companies operating in Poland, and by identifying the most problematic and critical factors in effective IT sourcing collaborations. The outcomes are assessed against findings from the broader empirical outsourcing literature, and lessons are drawn for Polish client firms and those in similar economies.

A survey methodology of a limited number of organisations in Poland was used. The study was designed to address the process of managing IT sourcing relations in production companies operating in Poland. The main objective of the study was to formulate working hypotheses to be used in further research on the sourcing models used in the IT sphere. Additionally, the study was designed to provide information on: the potential respondent reactions to the research problem, the understanding of the notions and terms used in the survey questionnaire and the evaluation of the research instrument itself.

Organisations (and their employees) are generally well aware of their IT needs, and that they select quite well providers that suit their particular requirements. In their selection processes, organisations carefully consider not only the providers’ experience and the range of services on offer but also their flexibility in response to the client’s demands, the location and the trust formed in the course of previous cooperation. Communication between the parties typically takes the form of telephone conversations and e-mails. The majority of respondents reported more than one type of problems faced in the course of outsourcing. Problems concentrated in the areas of communication (52 per cent) and organisation (48 per cent), followed by difficulties in enforcing the terms of the contract.

It is a selective sample, focuses only on production companies and does not look at the offshore outsourcing market that has grown up in Poland, but rather what domestic polish organisations do in their sourcing practices.

The organisations still struggle with the organisation and management of relations with their external service providers while getting reasonable results. They have much to learn from the published literature on managing the outsourcing life cycle.

There is a need for better inter-organisational cooperation.

Poland is very underrepresented in the outsourcing literature – there are no examples of surveys like this in the English literature.

This study examines how professional service firms' communication effectiveness (affiliative communications style, social dialogue and information provision), social cognitive capital and rapport established between an auditor and SME client are instrumental in influencing the latter's evaluation of the technical quality of an audit.

The study combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies to create a cross-sectional survey covering four geographic regions in an emerging economy – Thailand. The authors examine the hypotheses by employing social interaction theory.

A study of 744 SME executives plus post-survey interviews with three audit partners revealed that an affiliative communications style and information provision are positively associated with the rapport developed between financial auditor and client, and that rapport, in turn, had a strong association with client perceptions of audit quality. In addition, affiliative communication style, information provision and social cognitive capital had a direct (positive) association with perceptions of audit quality. The effects of communication effectiveness and social cognitive capital varied, depending on whether or not the SME client possessed formal accounting qualifications.

The study contributes to the literature on the business-to-business professional services, and accounting in particular, by explicating the important roles of communication effectiveness, rapport, and social cognitive capital in the relationship between an auditor and a client. Moreover, the paper reveals that the differences in educational background of clients result in differential impacts of communication effectiveness and social cognitive capital on rapport and perceptions of audit quality.

This study aims to examine the relationship between service providers' communication style and customer satisfaction and how service criticality and nature moderate this relationship.

The methodology included systematic sampling of consumers of professional services.

Although a service provider's communication style significantly relates to customer satisfaction, the relationship is moderated by service criticality and service nature. To enhance customer satisfaction, communication characterized by high affiliation is more important in high‐ than in low‐critical situations. Low dominance in communication is more important in low‐critical situations, but the level of dominance is unimportant in high‐critical situations. On the other hand, high affiliation is more important for credence services, but the level of affiliation is unimportant for experience services. Low dominance is more important for experience services, and high dominance is more important for credence services.

The findings imply that service firm managers need to train their employees to consider the criticalness and the nature of the service being sold and then how to adjust their communication style accordingly. Because the research reported here focuses on professional services, future research needs to determine the effects of communication style on customer satisfaction for other types of services.

In conclusion, the findings generally support the theoretical orientations of the social interaction model and script theory in that there is a positive relationship between customers' satisfaction with service providers' communication style and with the service rendered. However, service criticality and the service nature need to be considered when deciding on the optimum service employee communication style.