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The paper aims to clarify how an incumbent retail organisation explores digitalisation for its existing business.

The paper draws from an in-depth case study of home-furnishing retail giant, IKEA conducted with semi-structured interviews, participant observations and document analyses.

In the exploration phase of digitalisation, three major activities – interpreting, interrelating and integrating – illuminate how the exploration process can be organised in practice.

Although digitalisation ranks amongst the most significant ongoing transformations in retail businesses, research on how incumbent retail organisations have engaged in exploring digitalisation in practice has remained scarce. The paper contributes insights into digitalisation processes in retail businesses that may also apply to other trends affecting the retail industry.

The major objective of the study is to investigate the effect of selected customer retention strategies (fair pricing, online marketing and frequent communication) on perceived service quality and organisational performance within the retail sector in Zimbabwe. Also, the study sought to understand the moderating role of ICT on the effect of customer retention strategies on perceived service quality and organisational performance.

A cross-sectional survey of 280 employees within Zimbabwe's retail sector was adopted and respondents were selected using simple random sampling method. A structured questionnaire with Likert type questions was used to gather data.

The study findings indicate that the performance of organisations within the retail sector is influenced by superior service quality, selected customer retention strategies and also moderated by the use of ICT.

The study contributes to the business management body of knowledge by assessing the effect of selected customer retention strategies (fair pricing, online marketing and frequent communication) on perceived service quality and organisational performance within the retail industry of an emerging economy. The study is also unique in that it used ICT to moderate the effect of selected customer retention strategies on perceived service quality and organisational performance.

Retail organizations that consider a service ecosystems view of sustainability focused on transformation have the potential to contribute to the wellbeing of individuals, business and society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the transformative nature of sustainable retail fashion organizations and their impact on wellbeing within a sustainable retail service ecosystem.

A qualitative in-depth case study research design was implemented using four sustainable fashion brands. Data were collected from multiple sources including secondary data from company websites and publicly available reports and interviews with founders and/or high-ranking managers within the organization.

Three overarching themes critical to transformation in sustainable retail service ecosystems were identified: (1) embedded core purpose or ethos, (2) relevance of fit and (3) breadth and depth of message. Corresponding wellbeing elements were found within the three themes – community and society wellbeing, environmental wellbeing, business strategy wellbeing, consumer wellbeing, leadership wellbeing, employee wellbeing, stakeholder and value chain wellbeing and brand wellbeing.

Future research offers an important opportunity to further explore the relationships between sustainability, TSR and wellbeing in other service contexts.

The paper contributes to transformative service research literature by conceptualizing a sustainable retail service wellbeing ecosystem framework.

Incumbent retail organisations need to develop new capabilities to adapt with the increasingly competitive retail landscape. Despite the growing relevance of innovation in retail practice, the strategic management of innovation in retailing is still vastly under-researched. This explorative study thus aims to investigate how incumbent retail firms can organise for innovation from an organisational ambidexterity perspective.

A single-case study of an established Swedish retail firm was conducted from December 2016 to July 2018 and followed up in June 2021. The authors followed the process of implementation of organisational changes aimed to increase innovation in the company, particularly the introduction of a digital marketing initiative and a corporate innovation hub. Data collection was based on nine semi-structured interviews and participant observations and unstructured interviews from 13 meetings and workshops. An abductive approach to data analysis was followed, iteratively comparing theoretical concepts and empirical data using open, axial and selective coding to distil findings into aggregated themes.

Given the inherently limited formalisation of innovation processes in most retail organisations, structural ambidexterity appears to be necessary when the aim is radical, strategic retail innovation. Structural mechanisms are able to safeguard the space and resources to focus on long-term research and projects with higher risk and uncertainty; however, integration of innovation activities to the mainstream organisation is critical. Pursuing contextual ambidexterity, wherein instead of structural solutions, employees are empowered to divide employees' time between innovation-related and efficiency-related tasks, is more likely related to retail innovations that are incremental and operational.

The paper contributes to the emerging topic of strategic management of innovation in retailing, by explicating how incumbent retailers can organise for innovation depending on the type of innovation that is aimed for, using organisational ambidexterity as a novel perspective.

This paper aims to reveal gendered leadership constructs that hinder a competency-based view of leadership in Swedish-based global companies and the implications for leadership recruitment and development to top management positions.

The paper is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews, which have been analyzed using a gender analytic framework to identify how senior management, Human resource management and leadership trainees are discussing leadership and career development.

Three themes were identified as clouding the issue of gender-equal leadership practices thereby creating an opaque gendered lens of who is defined as eligible for leadership positions. The three themes were: symbols as gendered images, counting heads – preserving the existing system and illusive gender inclusion.

Recruitment practices were identified as contributors to homosocial practices that perpetuate male-dominated leadership representation. However, specific recruitment practices were not fully explored.

The potential use of gender equality as a sustainable management practice for competitive organizations to recruit and develop talented people.

To create resilient and gender-equal recruitment and leadership development practices.

This research offers an original perspective on gender representation at the senior management level in global companies by revealing gendered leadership constructs in the leadership recruitment and development process as antecedents to unequal gender representation in senior management positions.

Salesperson performance is accepted as a relevant factor of retailing success. However, scarce studies reveal the relationship between sales performance and brand relationship. The purpose of this study is both, from one side, to empirically demonstrate the impact of salesperson brand attachment (SBA) on sales performance and, on the other side, to identify the mediators of this relationship in small retailing.

A survey was conducted with a sample of 206 small retailers from different sectors of an emerging country. The proposed model was tested using partial least squares–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS3.

The results demonstrated that SBA is relevant to driving sales performance through two relevant paths – one following SBA–satisfaction–performance and one path following the SBA–commitment–performance. The model was able to explain 63% of the outcome performance.

Regarding small retailers, where the owners, employees and managers have higher levels of interaction than the large national retail chains, the marketing executives must invest in improving the attachment to the brand and create emotional bonds and cognition between marketers and the brand. They must develop strategies to promote job satisfaction and organizational commitment because they determine performance.

Despite the relevance of small businesses for economies worldwide and the importance of salesperson brand relationships, no study has been developed to demonstrate the impacts of such relationships on salesperson performance in retailing. Furthermore, in addition to the central role of organizational commitment in the sales research, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore how to mediate the relationship between brand attachment and sales performance.

El rendimiento del vendedor se acepta como un factor relevante para el éxito del comercio minorista. Sin embargo, los estudios que revelan la relación entre el resultado de las ventas y la relación con la marca son escasos. El propósito de este estudio es, por un lado, demostrar empíricamente el impacto del apego a la marca del vendedor (SBA) en el resultado de las ventas y, por otro lado, identificar los mediadores de esta relación en el comercio minorista.

Se realizó una encuesta con una muestra de 206 vendedores de pequeños minoristas provenientes de diferentes sectores de un país emergente. El modelo estructural se analizó mediante ecuaciones estructurales basada en mínimos cuadrados (PLS-SEM) utilizando SmartPLS3.

Los resultados mostraron que el SBA es esencial para impulsar el resultado de las ventas a través de dos caminos relevantes: uno siguiendo el SBA-satisfacción-rendimiento y la otra dirección siguiendo el SBA-compromiso-rendimiento. El modelo fue capaz de explicar el 63% del rendimiento.

Con respecto a los pequeños minoristas, donde los propietarios, empleados y gerentes tienen niveles más altos de interacción que las grandes cadenas minoristas nacionales, los ejecutivos de marketing deben invertir en mejorar el apego a la marca y crear vínculos emocionales y cognitivos entre los vendedores y la marca. Deben desarrollar estrategias para promover la satisfacción laboral y el compromiso organizacional ya que determinan el rendimiento.

A pesar de la relevancia de las pequeñas empresas para las economías de todo el mundo y la importancia de las relaciones de marca en los vendedores, no se ha desarrollado ningún estudio para demostrar los impactos de tales relaciones en el rendimiento de los vendedores en el comercio minorista. Además, aparte del papel central del compromiso organizacional en la investigación en ventas, este es el primer estudio que explora cómo media la relación entre el apego a la marca y el resultado de las ventas.

Maintaining food safety techniques in the supply chain management require special food safety labelling techniques during distribution in the retail food industry. The food products have to be of good quality and labelling inbound, manufacturing, and outbound in the supply chain contributes to this aim. The purpose of this study is to evaluate how food safety labelling is managed in Vietnam’s retail food industry with a special focus on food in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photography was used in an observational study conducted among five separate retail market chains all located in this city. In which ways are the applications of the developed food safety labelling techniques among three separate retail food markets similar and dissimilar being accounted for? The results show that the packaging and labelling in Big C, Aeon Citimart, and Giant using the symbols of food safety build trust for their customers. The Big C indicates guidelines for VietGAP and green labelling. Aeon Citimart indicates the name of the good, expiration date and instructions for use as well as guidelines for the government factor (VietGAP) to the food safety practices in the Vietnamese food retail sector.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how market factors (pertaining to institutions, competition and resources) shape the international strategies of an online retailer.

A single qualitative case study research design is employed to conduct in-depth analyses of a Swedish internationalising small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) in the retail business.

The findings show that online retailers can use partnerships to tackle industry dynamics and break into foreign markets. This type of “piggy-back internationalisation” can be an effective strategy of handling foreign market dynamics in the entry phase: that is to say, the short term. Reliance upon relationships, however, may paradoxically inhibit retailers’ abilities to stay competitive in the post-entry phase (i.e. the long term) since they become cut-off from the first-hand market learning.

The authors provide propositions based upon the findings to support further research in the international marketing and international retailing literature.

The findings enhance the understanding of how electronic commerce affects SME internationalisation. They also generate new insights into the use of possible international expansion strategies for managers in retail SMEs.

This study introduces a new theoretical perspective to build upon international retail research and contributes to the international retail literature with relevant insights into both advantages and disadvantages of using partnerships to overcome challenges related to international online retailing.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the emerging spirituality debate with the aim of generating and sustaining tolerance for spirituality in the workplace, with a specific focus upon the impact this can have upon work-based learners. “Spirituality” is gaining impetus worldwide as a growing number of organisations are proactively accommodating their multi-ethnic and multi-faith workforce by adapting their policies to meet employees’ spiritual needs. As yet in the UK, the majority of organisations fail to recognise neither the basic spiritual well-being of their employees nor the impact this can have upon work-based learning processes.

This study adopts a quantitative approach with questionnaires distributed to a multi-national retail UK-based organisation with an ethnically diverse national workforce. The study was tested by collecting data from managers and employees of this large, multi-million pound retail chain organisation in the UK, consisting of 55 stores and 1,249 employees, in order to gather employees’ perceptions on spirituality within their place of work regarding policies, communication and perceived source of conflict.

The results revealed that the majority of employees deemed spirituality was not something they felt comfortable discussing or appropriate to practice within the workplace and there were no clear policies and procedures in place to support either management or employees.

This paper highlights areas for further research in the broad professional areas of spirituality in relation to organisational approaches to work-based learning. The research is from one organisation and utilising one method – qualitative research would add depth to the knowledge.

This paper highlights areas for further research in the broad professional areas of spirituality in relation to organisational approaches to work-based learning.

Employee spiritual well-being is under-researched and overlooked by organisations. Changing the current spiritual intransigence is long overdue as employees’ spiritual fulfilment leads to high-trust relationships in the workplace and can further support those engaged in work-based learning.

Despite retail digitisation and research efforts focussed on online and omnichannel shopping, there is insufficient knowledge regarding retail patronage formation in the grocery category, where in-store sales dominate. This study analyses the retail patronage formation in grocery in-store fill-in shopping.

The authors designed a questionnaire to measure retail patronage behaviour, consumer satisfaction (CS), store attributes evaluation and e-retail usage. Then, the authors analysed the path structure for retail patronage behaviour formation using structural equation modelling. Additionally, they performed a mediation analysis using the bootstrap method and a moderation analysis based on a chi-square difference test.

This study provides three main findings. First, the authors' model has two ways to increase Share-of-Wallet (SOW). One is to increase Share-of-Visits (SOV) and another is to increase CS amongst non-users of e-retailing. Second, the results of the moderation analysis suggest the influence of customers' use or non-use of e-retailing on SOW formation. Third, service evaluation plays an interesting role in the overall model: the lower the assessment of service, the higher the SOV; the higher the evaluation of service, the greater the CS; the greater the CS, the higher the SOV.

The authors proposed the framework for the relative retail patronage formation in grocery fill-in shopping to examine the relationship between two relative patronage indicators (SOW and SOV) in the path structure and the mediating effect of CS and the moderating effect of e-retailing usage on retail patronage formation.