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As consumer debt can substantially impair subjective well-being, it is crucial for research to gain insights into how consumers can be motivated to improve financial planning. This paper aims to investigate how frontline employees in financial services can help consumers regulate their financial planning behaviors and how financial service providers can effectively support their frontline employees in this effort through leadership and organizational climate.

We incorporate regulatory focus theory and conservation of resource theory to develop a conceptual model that we test in a triadic study with a unique dataset collected from consumers, frontline employees, and managers in the banking sector.

We find that frontline employees must pay attention to the details of consumers’ needs and customize the service to those needs to trigger consumer promotion focus and stimulate consumers’ financial planning behaviors. Moreover, our results emphasize that the organization must act as an integrated entity. Thus, a manager’s servant leadership and an organizational climate of customer stewardship are crucial for frontline employees to transform consumers’ financial planning behaviors.

The study highlights frontline employees’ key role in motivating consumer financial planning behavior, offering a new perspective in transformative service research on enhancing financial well-being.

The findings provide financial service providers with actionable implications for enhancing consumers’ financial planning. This benefits both consumers and financial institutions, as customers with greater spending power can buy more financial products.

This study advances transformative service research on consumer financial planning behavior, which has largely focused on consumer-related or society-level variables, by exploring the role of frontline employees and organizational support in terms of leadership and climate.

This research addressed online customer-to-customer (C2C) incivility during digital service recovery.

To examine the effectiveness of managerial responses to online C2C incivility post a restaurant service failure, a 2 (Managerial response: general vs specific) x 2 (Failure severity: high vs low) quasi-experimental design was employed. A pretest was conducted with 123 restaurant consumers via Amazon Mechanical Turk, followed by a main study with 174 restaurant consumers. Taking a mixed-method approach, this research first asked open-ended questions to explore how participants perceived the restaurant’s motivation for providing a generic versus a specific response. Hayes’ (2013) PROCESS procedure was then performed for hypotheses testing.

The results revealed significant interaction effects of managerial responses and failure severity on perceived online service climate and revisit intention, mediated by trust with managerial responses.

This research yielded unique insight into C2C incivility management literature and industry practices in the context of digital customer service recovery.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the adoption of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and its implication on improving the farming household food security status, their resilience and livelihood risk management of farmers.

This systematic review has followed procedures to accomplish the review, including literature searches, screening studies, data extraction, synthesis and presentation of the data.

Based on the result of the review, the determinants of CSA adoption can be categorized into five categories, including demographic factors (age, sex, family size, dependency ratio, education), economic factors (land size, household income, livestock ownership), institutional factors (extension services, training access, credit services, farm input, market distance), environmental factors (agroecology, change in precipitation, slope of land) and social factors (cooperatives membership, farmers perception). The result also shows that applying CSA practices has an indispensable role on increasing productivity, food security, income, building resilient livelihoods, minimizing production risk and alleviating poverty. This concluded CSA practice has a multidimensional role in the livelihood of agrarian population like Ethiopia, yet its adoption was constrained by several factors.

This review mainly emphasizes on the most commonly practiced CSA strategies that are examined by different scholars.

Climate change poses risks to society and the demand for carbon literacy within small and medium-sized enterprises is increasing. Skills and knowledge are required for organizational greenhouse gas accounting and science-based decisions to help businesses reduce transitional risks. At the University of Copenhagen and the University of Northern British Columbia, two carbon management courses have been developed to respond to this growing need. Using an action-based co-learning model, students and business are paired to quantify and report emissions and develop climate plans and communication strategies.

This paper draws on surveys of businesses that have partnered with the co-learning model, designed to provide insight on carbon reductions and the impacts of co-learning. Data collected from 12 respondents in Denmark and 19 respondents in Canada allow for cross-institutional and international comparison in a Global North context.

Results show that while co-learning for carbon literacy is welcomed, companies identify limitations: time and resources; solution feasibility; governance and reporting structures; and communication methods. Findings reveal a need for extension, both forwards and backwards in time, indicating that the collaborations need to be lengthened and/or intensified. Balancing academic requirements detracts from usability for businesses, and while municipal and national policy and emission targets help generate a general societal understanding of the issue, there is no concrete guidance on how businesses can implement operational changes based on inventory results.

The research brings new knowledge to the field of transitional climate risks and does so with a focus on both small businesses and universities as important co-learning actors in low-carbon transitions. The comparison across geographies and institutions contributes an international solution perspective to climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.

This study aims to examine the relation between error management culture and restaurant employee promotive and prohibitive voices. Drawing on socially desirable responding theory, the authors also propose a dual-mediation mechanism underlying the impact of error management culture on employee voice: psychological empowerment, as the agentic motive, and psychological safety, as the communal motive.

The authors recruited 223 participants working in 37 restaurants in China for the two-wave surveys with a one-week interval. The authors use a multilevel modeling paradigm to test the study hypotheses.

This research examines a multilevel model suggesting that error management culture can boost employee promotive voice and prohibitive voice via the mechanisms of psychological safety and empowerment. In addition, the results suggest that psychological empowerment (vs psychological safety) has a strong mediation effect between error management culture and promotive voice, but the authors find no difference in mediating effects between error management culture and prohibitive voice.

Restaurants can encourage employee voice by developing and maintaining an error management culture. Organizations can also consider motivating employees from both agentic and communal perspectives. Moreover, managers should focus more on empowering employees in areas characterized by Confucianism or collectivism.

The current research adds to the voice literature by identifying an organizational cultural antecedent of employee voice–error management culture. Agentic and communal motives are two motivational paths of employee voice. It also extends the social desirability theory by highlighting the role of the agentic motive in the Chinese restaurant context.

This study aims to investigate the mediating roles of servant leadership and employee vitality in the relationship between psychological ownership and employee creativity among healthcare workers in Ghana.

A sample of 736 public and private healthcare respondents was selected using a convenience sampling technique. Data collected using a self-reported questionnaire was analyzed via partial least square structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that psychological ownership directly improves employee creativity, while servant leadership and employee vitality mediate the relationship between psychological ownership and employee creativity separately and complementarily.

The research used self-reported data, increasing the potential for common method variance. However, sufficient care was taken to minimize these limitations.

This research makes valuable contributions to the field of healthcare practice literature. The findings suggest that management of health care entities should focus on creating a workplace culture that cultivates psychological ownership among employees and policies that enhance employee vitality and promote servant behavior to foster employee creativity.

This study represents one of the earliest attempts to examine a theoretical framework that connects servant leadership, employee vitality, employee creativity and psychological ownership within the context of the health service industry.

This study evaluated the bundled impact of high performance work practices (HPWPs) on Generation Y (Gen Y) employee engagement (EE) while considering empowering leadership (EL) as a mediator.

The data for the study are received from 404 Gen Y frontline service employees from three to five star Indian hotels and examined using structural equation modeling.

Gen Y employees' perception of HPWPs directly explains their engagement, and EL partially mediates the link between HPWPs and Gen Y EE.

This study suggests managers to gain from implementing HPWPs and their impact on Gen Y engagement to boost their organizational performance.

This study suggests managers to gain from implementing HPWPs and their impact on Gen Y EE to boost their employee and hotel's performance.

The present research is one of the few attempts to study how HPWPs can engage the Gen Y cohort in the workplace, especially in developing countries (i.e. India).

Customer–provider relationships unfold through multiple touchpoints across different channels. However, some touchpoints are more important than others. Such important touchpoints are viewed as “moments of truth” (MOTs). This study examines the impact of a series of touchpoints on an MOT, and the role MOTs play in determining future profitability and other behavioral outcomes (e.g. customer retention and customer cross-buy) in a business-to-business (B2B) context.

Building upon social exchange theory, a conceptual model is proposed and tested that examines the impact of human, digital, and physical touchpoints and past MOTs on customer evaluation of a current MOT and on future customer outcomes. This research employs a longitudinal methodology based on a unique panel dataset of 2,970 B2B customers.

Study results show that all touchpoints significantly contribute to MOTs, while human and physical touchpoints maintain their primacy during MOTs. The impact of MOTs on future customer outcomes is also demonstrated.

This study highlights the need for prioritizing human and physical touchpoints in managing MOTs, and for carefully managing MOTs across time.

Given its B2B outlook and longitudinal approach, this research contributes to the multichannel and interactive marketing literature by determining relevant touchpoints for B2B customers.

An AI concierge is a technologically advanced, intelligent and personalized assistant that is designated to an individual customer, proactively taking care of that customer’s needs throughout the service journey. This article envisions the idea of AI concierges and discusses how to leverage AI concierges in the customer journey.

This article takes a conceptual approach and draws insights from literature in service management, marketing, psychology, human-computer interaction and ethics.

This article delineates the fundamental forms of AI concierges: dialog interface (no embodiment), virtual avatar (embodiment in the virtual world), holographic projection (projection in the physical world) and tangible service robot (embodiment in the physical world). Key attributes of AI concierges are the ability to exhibit semantic understanding of auditory and visual inputs, maintain an emotional connection with the customer, demonstrate proactivity in refining the customer’s experience and ensure omnipresence through continuous availability in various forms to attend to service throughout the customer journey. Furthermore, the article explores the multifaceted roles that AI concierges can play across the pre-encounter, encounter and post-encounter stages of the customer journey and explores the opportunities and challenges associated with AI concierges.

This paper provides insights for professionals in hospitality, retail, travel, and healthcare on leveraging AI concierges to enhance the customer experience. By broadening AI concierge services, organizations can deliver personalized assistance and refined services across the entire customer journey.

This article is the first to introduce the concept of the AI concierge. It offers a novel perspective by defining AI concierges’ fundamental forms, key attributes and exploring their diverse roles in the customer journey. Additionally, it lays out a research agenda aimed at further advancing this domain.

Drawing on person–environment fit theory, this study aims to investigate how the relationships between service task types (i.e. utilitarian and hedonic service tasks) and perceived authenticity (i.e. service and brand authenticity) differ under different conditions of service providers (human employee vs service robot). This study further examines whether customers’ stereotypes toward service robots (competence vs warmth) moderate the relationship between service types and perceived authenticity.

Using a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design, Study 1 examines a casual restaurant, whereas Study 2 assesses a theme park restaurant. Analysis of covariance and PROCESS are used to analyze the data.

Both studies reveal that human service providers in hedonic services positively affect service and brand authenticity more than robotic employees. Additionally, the robot competence stereotype moderates the relationship between hedonic services, service and brand authenticity, whereas the robot warmth stereotype moderates the relationship between hedonic services and brand authenticity in Study 2.

Restaurant managers need to understand which functions and types of service outlets are best suited for service robots in different service contexts. Robot–environment fit should be considered when developers design and managers select robots for their restaurants.

This study blazes a new theoretical trail of service robot research to systematically propose customer experiences with different service types by drawing upon person–environment fit theory and examining the moderating role of customers’ stereotypes toward service robots.