Search results

This research attempts to understand why – or why not – customers resist switching service providers when a critical incident occurs. The paper examines how service relationship perceptions, such as perceived equity, trust (perceived reliability and benevolence) and relationship commitment (affective and calculative), enhance relationship maintenance and CSR in many critical situations.

A survey was conducted in the financial service industry on a sample of 1,999 consumers (retail banking) and then conceptualized and measured CSR in several critical situations.

The paper demonstrates that perceived equity, perceived reliability, perceived benevolence, affective commitment, and calculative commitment do not influence CSR the same way. CSR mainly depends on the type of critical incident which occurs. For instance, calculative commitment, which is an evaluation of the costs associated with leaving the service provider, enhances CSR in three critical situations (service encounter failures, employee responses to service failures, pricing problems), whereas it leads to relationship disengagement in two other critical situations (inconvenience, changes in the consumer or service provider situation).

This research highlights the need to better take into account the different types of critical incident discussed in the relationship marketing literature and to better consider the complementary roles of perceived equity, trust and relationship commitment in the service switching literature.

This research implies that service companies have to anticipate the critical incidents and to develop specific “shock absorbers” to continue doing business with their current customers.

Recent discussions of the service‐dominant logic (S‐D logic) and the creation of a multidisciplinary service science highlight the need for a paradigmatic discussion that provides directions for ongoing service research. This article aims to examine different epistemological foundations and proposes a framework to describe and better understand the development and future of service research.

Using the proposed framework, an assessment of 60 selected award‐winning and most cited articles is categorized using the paradigmatic framework.

Four paradigms are found to be prominent in service research: positivistic, hermeneutic, dialogic, and monologic. The positivistic option has been the dominant paradigm employed by service scholars, suggesting service scholars need to apply the three alternative paradigms more as a means to enrich and extend the service research discipline.

There is a need to discuss the fundamental beliefs and worldviews (ontological and epistemological positions) guiding service research. Paradigms are critical determinants and drivers of good research.

A new framework for analyzing paradigmatic foundations in service research and directions for the future design of service research studies is proposed. The suggested framework could inspire scholars to reflect on their ontological and epistemological foundations and provide paradigmatic guidance within service research. This provides a basis for continuous expansion of the service research field.

Literature is relatively sparse on describing how companies should align their determinants for service innovations with their different types of service strategies. This study seeks to explore the alignment between three types of service strategies and determinants for service innovations.

A qualitative, multi‐case research design on 12 Western European capital goods manufacturers including 24 service innovation projects was employed. The study is based on multiple sources of evidence: internal documentation of service innovation and development projects and, most importantly, interview data and participation in internal innovation workshops. Traditional inductive research methods were used to analyze the case studies.

These indicate that aligning service strategies with determinants for service innovations is very complex. The configurations of the determinants are associated with the innovation success. Alternative configurations of determinants can create counterproductive effects and can limit the success of service innovation projects as well as implementation of service strategies.

The study is based on interviews and case studies, but the external validity (generalizability) of the alignments could not be assessed accurately. Future research would benefit from insights obtained from quantitative data. The findings supplement existing research on success factors for the service business in manufacturing companies.

The findings imply that managers contemplating a specific service strategy have to consider the service innovation and reframe the determinant for service innovations accordingly. Companies trying to implement an after‐sales service strategy should focus on a narrow range of determinants for service innovations. The resulting configurations guide managers to set up an efficient and effective service innovation management that helps them to implement their service strategy through successful service innovation project.

This empirical study shows that the configuration of determinants for service innovation differs for each service strategy. Whereas, the few similarities in determinants on service innovation are mainly other applications of existing theories on service innovation, the differences modify the existing theories.

Organizational pride of service employees presents a vital, but mostly unexplored, factor for business success. In detail, two kinds of organizational pride exist. First, service employees can experience short, persistent affective emotions of pride based on the perception of a successful event related to the organization. Second, employees can have a cognitive and durable attitude of pride resulting from the general perception of the organization. Prior research neglects not only to analyze empirically the relationship between emotional organizational pride and attitudinal organizational pride, but also to examine positive effects from them. The objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship and the effects of the two kinds of organizational pride with commitment to customer service, creativity and turnover intention.

The first study is an exploratory pre‐study and deals with spontaneous impressions of 53 customer consultants regarding their emotional and attitudinal organizational pride. Data used for the main study were collected through an online panel provider. A sample of 733 service employees was generated and structural equation modeling was applied to test the hypotheses.

Results from the main study suggest that there is a strong relationship between emotional organizational pride and attitudinal organizational pride. Whereas the former has a direct, positive effect on commitment to customer service and creativity, the latter directly influences commitment to customer service and turnover intention. An indirect effect on creativity was also found.

To reduce the complexity of the model, no moderating variables were integrated. In a subsequent step, it is important to analyze empirically the drivers and conduct a longitudinal analysis to test the relationship between the two kinds of organizational pride and their effects over time.

The measurement and management of organizational pride are vital sources for improving service behaviors; they represent new challenges for service‐oriented human resource management.

The paper is novel for three reasons. First, the affective events theory (AET) is advanced by additional substantial relationships. Second, links between the two kinds of organizational pride are analyzed for the first time. Finally, the paper suggests empirical evidence for the positive effects of the two kinds of organizational pride.

The objective of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners with an understanding of the implications and consequences of changes in customer roles and involvement on human resource management (HRM) within a service context.

This paper is conceptual and the approach adopted is analytical. Extant research and concepts have been used to analyse customer roles and customer involvement and their effects on employees. Based on these insights, managerial and research implications are discussed.

The insights from this study provide conceptual support for including customers as a relevant reference and/or extension of HRM beyond the organisational boundaries. Customers can actually significantly influence the success of a company's HRM.

Analysis of the interrelatedness of customer involvement and HRM is limited to services than encompass emotional and communicative aspects. It is argued that an extension of HRM concepts by considering customers' influence provides great potential for future research opportunities.

The paper discusses the contribution of central HRM functions in increasing the customer orientation of employees and companies, reducing role conflicts and role ambiguity, and creating added value for customers. The aspects described here have the potential to contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of HRM and to increase the added value of the HRM function to the organisation.

To date, HRM and customer roles generally have been investigated separately. The analysis of the interrelatedness of these two worlds is likely to trigger and encourage innovative research designs and alternative methodological approaches to new research problems, leading to the added potential of novel research findings with important implications for practice.

The purpose is to investigate, the difference between SERVQUAL and SERVPERF's predictive validity of service quality.

Data from 17 studies containing 42 effect sizes of the relationships between SERVQUAL or SERVPERF with overall service quality (OSQ) are meta‐analyzed.

Overall, SERVQUAL and SERVPERF are equally valid predictors of OSQ. Adapting the SERVQUAL scale to the measurement context improves its predictive validity; conversely, the predictive validity of SERVPERF is not improved by context adjustments. In addition, measures of services quality gain predictive validity when used in: less individualistic cultures, non‐English speaking countries, and industries with an intermediate level of customization (hotels, rental cars, or banks).

No study, that were using non‐adapted scales were conducted outside of the USA making it impossible to disentangle the impact of scale adaptation vs contextual differences on the moderating effect of language and culture. More comparative studies on the usage of adapted vs non‐adapted scales outside the USA are needed before settling this issue meta‐analytically.

SERVQUAL scales require to be adapted to the study context more so than SERVPERF. Owing to their equivalent predictive validity the choice between SERVQUAL or SERVPERF should be dictated by diagnostic purpose (SERVQUAL) vs a shorter instrument (SERVPERF).

Because of the high statistical power of meta‐analysis, these findings could be considered as a major step toward ending the debate whether SERVPERF is superior to SERVQUAL as an indicator of OSQ.