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Luxury companies have expanded globally, but little attention is given to the difficulties associated with expansion to culturally different countries, especially when focusing on training salespeople in rapport-building behaviors. To address this discussion, we answer these research questions: (1) Does the luxury fashion brand country of origin affect the rapport-building strategies of salespeople?; (2) How do luxury fashion employees classify customers from collectivistic cultures with emerging economies, such as that in Brazil?; and (3) What are the rapport-building strategies used by these salespeople for each of these luxury fashion customer segments?

The authors conducted in-depth interviews with salespeople, managers and team supervisors from four global luxury retailers from Britain, France and Italy that operate in Brazil. In total, the authors interviewed 20 employees with an average of greater than 7 years of experience in luxury sales. The authors based their analysis on a theoretically generated coding guide and content analysis theories.

When expanding to culturally different countries, retail companies should adopt glocal strategies, especially when luxury is involved and when customers demand exclusive attention from companies. Additionally, the authors suggest that the effectiveness of rapport building strategies is culturally dependent and should be adapted to the microlevel, especially for continental countries that are culturally diverse.

This is employee-view research, with no inputs from customers or corporate managers. Luxury fashion brand stores did not grant permission for official research within their employees nor the observation of their customers during in-store interactions. Researchers interviewed employees as individual professionals, and their identities will remain anonymous.

When expanding to culturally different countries, luxury retailers should give special attention to the adaption of sales strategies, training and sales guidelines.

This study focuses on customer-employee rapport from the company's perspective.

Online innovation communities are central for many organizations seeking to advance their innovation portfolio. While these communities rely on consumers to collaborate in the innovation process, it remains unclear what drives these consumers to perform value co-creation activities and what value dimensions they derive as a result. This paper aims to advance the understanding of value co-creation in the online collaborative innovation context. Specifically, it aims to examine social and individual factors driving such activities, and the value derived from the perspective of the member.

A self-administered online questionnaire was used to collect data from collaborative innovation community members yielding 309 complete responses. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data, using variance-based structural equation modelling with partial least squares path modelling in SmartPLS.

Results confirm that distinct social and individual factors facilitate individual value co-creation activities, including the provision of feedback, helping, rapport building and information sharing. Furthermore, the research confirms the mediating role of learning on these relationships.

This study contributes to the micro-foundation movement in marketing by undertaking an independent examination of value co-creation activities and their nomological network.

A shift in the mindset of managing for collaborative innovation is required, from a focus on collaborative product development to the management of an online community where members derive value from their co-creation activities.

This research is the first to offer insight into important individual and social pre-conditions and subsequent value outcomes of four common value co-creation activities. It informs practice about how to facilitate value co-creation activities and contribute to the co-creation of value for online innovation community members.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and contextualize the processes of leadership development through mentoring in a Leadership Learning Lab (“the Lab”) and to explore the implications and applications of the Lab's approach as a social learning space.

The authors used a constructivist grounded theoretical approach and conducted semi-structured interviews with participants in the Lab, which operated out of a leadership center in a mid-sized Canadian business school.

The findings show that participants used their individual life experiences to practice leadership development through mentoring in a social learning space of prescribed uncertainty. The participants identified with becoming flexible, self-actualized leaders by learning to view their own experiences and those of their Lab partners through a leadership lens.

This study contributes to an understanding of the “doing” of leadership development in a social learning space and highlights three relational processes through which leadership development emerged through mentoring: rapport-building, democratization and reflection.

This research seeks to test a model examining the antecedents and outcomes of interpersonal rapport in a professional service context. The four antecedents examined are familiarity, mutual self‐disclosure, extras, and common grounding, and the outcomes examined are trust, satisfaction, and word‐of‐mouth communication.

The study employs a survey methodology to obtain the opinions of 121 dental patients regarding their relationships with dental professionals. The hypothesized relationships in the model were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The research findings indicated that all four antecedents were positively related to rapport. Rapport was also found to be related to customer satisfaction and word‐of‐mouth communication, but rapport was not found to be related to trust. Post hoc analysis suggests that rapport appears to be related to trust early in relationships, then becomes less important, but re‐emerges as a driver of trust in very mature relationships.

Since rapport appears to be important to generating word‐of‐mouth, managers should foster and reward rapport‐building behavior.

The study empirically verified four antecedents of interpersonal rapport in services, and supports the role of rapport as an important mediating variable in relationship development. The research also supported prior findings on the unique contribution of rapport to positive word‐of‐mouth communication.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of calculative, affective and normative commitment on bank employee-customer rapport and customer satisfaction. The mediating effect of rapport between each of the three types of commitment and customer satisfaction is also examined.

Structural equation modelling by Partial Least Square method is used for analysing the data on 212 bank customers in Bangladesh.

Results indicate that affective and normative commitment of customers has strong influence in developing rapport, whereas the impact of customers’ calculative commitment on rapport was found to be non-significant. The study also found that rapport has a complementary mediation effect between the three types of commitment and customer satisfaction.

While providing training to front line employees, bank management should make them aware that not all customers may have the same level of positive attitude or cooperation for the rapport-building procedure. Employees should understand that different customers will respond differently to their efforts for building rapport due to their pre-existing commitment levels towards banks. Bank management should acknowledge that customers’ current level of commitment may be further strengthened or weakened by successful or unsuccessful rapport building with banks’ employees and thereby re-evaluate their satisfaction level with the bank.

The study contributes to the relationship literature by exploring the mediating role of rapport between commitment and customer satisfaction, and by considering the influence of normative commitment on customer-employee rapport in financial services.

Consequent upon the intense competitive nature of today's business environment, service businesses are seeking for the most creative but effective means of attracting and retaining customers. One of the ways is to build quality relationship via interpersonal relationship with customers. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two ways of building interpersonal relationship with customers – respect and rapport, and their impact on overall customer perceived relationship quality, as well as the role of context/environment.

This preliminary study reports on empirical results from a survey of customers of dental clinics in Malaysia. Data from a questionnaire survey of 563 respondents were analysed using factor analysis, Pearson correlation and hierarchical multiple regression analysis. The authors estimated the direct effect of respect and rapport on relationship quality as well as the moderating effect of context (cosmopolitan vs traditional milieu).

The results show that both rapport and respect are important in building quality relationship with customers. Environment/context has a direct effect on relationship quality. Context moderates the relationship between rapport and relationship quality but does not moderate the relationship between respect and relationship quality.

This research is of practical use to service companies (especially healthcare service providers) interested in developing effective strategies for building quality relationship with customers. Building good rapport and respecting customers are useful relational strategies to pursue.

The effect of rapport and respect on relationship quality in the Asian context has not been studied before. The paper sheds light on the overlooked dimensions of respect and service sector (small healthcare businesses) and also highlights the contextual implications of the findings.

This study aims to capture the mediation role of customer–frontline employee rapport on customer satisfaction and affective, calculative and normative commitment by using three alternative models. It also verifies the moderation effect of relationship age on the rapport-satisfaction link in each alternative model.

The survey data collected from bank customers were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with the partial least square (PLS) method.

Results confirmed rapport as a significant mediator between satisfaction and each of the three types of commitment. Relationship age significantly moderates the links between rapport to affective and normative commitment but not to calculative commitment.

Additional findings from “importance–performance analysis” suggest that satisfaction is more import to customers than rapport for developing commitment, so further investigations can reveal the underlying reasons. Also, complementary mediation shows one or more missing mediators, which calls for future research.

Managers need to use rapport strategically with customers in different relationship ages to build different types of commitment. Specific tactics to build rapport and possible long run implications for developing affective, calculative and normative commitment have been discussed in the “note to practitioner” section.

Using “broaden-and-build” theory, the study extends the literature by confirming the mediation influence of rapport on satisfaction and three types of commitment relationships.

This paper accounts for, and reflects upon, the research design and the methodological approach adopted in ethnographic research with young people. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to reinforce the significance of conducting qualitative participatory and innovative methods with young people, alongside the value of rapport building.

Qualitative participatory methods are understood as the most appropriate way to empower and respect young people in the research process. Alongside such methods the ethnographic nature of the research is discussed in conveying the importance of rapport building with young people in the field. In doing so the paper examines a number of important considerations when conducting youth research.

The triangulation of qualitative methods was fundamental in exploring and understanding young people’s lives in each locality and allowed for deep and meaningful explorations of specific themes. The additional and complementary methods employed alongside traditional methods were particularly suited to understanding young people’s everyday lives, as complex experiences are not always conveyed through traditional methods alone. Conducting participatory methods produced narratives around safety, security and governance in public places.

Being reflexive and adapting to a research setting in order to enhance the process of building and maintaining trust with young people is the most important facet when conducting youth research. Giving careful consideration to the impact of a researcher’s presence in the field needs to be carefully navigated.

This chapter draws on longitudinal and cross-sessional research to explore the use of Bottery's variant of portrait methodology in understanding the individual experiences of a group of Chinese top-up students when they study a one-year top-up programme in a UK university. The rationale for using Bottery's variant was to understand only the perceptions of these students in their particular context, during a specific period of time in their life. Data were collected three times using semi-structured interviews, and individual portraits were produced after each set of interviews, based on the interview transcripts. The findings of the research and also the comments of the participants suggest that the use of portrait methodology helped enhance the trustworthiness of the research and also self-awareness and self-reflection of the participants. Researchers may face challenges when adopting Bottery's variant of portrait methodology in research, in particular relating to portrait writing and rapport building with the participants.

The purpose of this study is to consider the potential use of social marketing to enhance safety compliance in a biomedical research laboratory.

This project used focus group discussions (n = 32) and semi-structured interviews (n = 10) to gather information on occupational health and safety professionals’ perceptions of safety culture, knowledge of barriers and facilitators of safety at the worksite and insights on how to effectively communicate safety information to employees through a campaign effort.

Results outlined the barriers (e.g. structural obstacles, lack of awareness of policies, perception of occupational safety and health professionals as safety police) and facilitators (e.g. rapport building, partnering with formal leadership and demonstrating the value of services) of safety and safety communication.

Results from this work add to theoretical and practical knowledge regarding how risk may be effectively addressed by using social marketing and health behavior theories to promote voluntary adherence to existing rules and recommendations.