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This paper empirically examines the direct and indirect effects of perceived termination severity on customers' behavioral reactions via betrayal and justice. It also examines the moderating effects of attitude toward complaining (ATC).

This paper employs a quantitative method approach using a scenario-based experiment in a banking setting.

The results show that a more severe termination approach results in higher customer negative reactions. Betrayal is shown to be a key driver of customers' behavioral reactions, and ATC moderates these effects.

Future studies should examine the effects of different termination strategies in markedly different cultures and should also examine other boundary conditions such as prior warning, relationship quality and service importance in influencing customers' negative behavioral responses.

This paper contributes to the service termination literature by shedding light on the impact of termination severity on customers' reactions. It also unveils the mechanism that explains customers' reactions to service termination. Further, it reveals that ATC moderates customers' public (but not private) complaining behaviors.

Profitability considerations lead service providers to terminate service contracts with low-value customers. However, customers targeted by service contract terminations often take revenge through negative word-of-mouth (NWOM). Presently, it is unclear how service contract termination initiatives prevent this harmful side effect. The purpose of this study is to compare the effectiveness of common service contract termination initiatives for reducing NWOM of customers whose service contracts are being cancelled. The study results provide guidance for minimizing the downside of service contract termination.

This study distinguishes between service contract termination initiatives common in practice (preannouncement, explanation, financial compensation, apology and support in finding an alternative provider). Drawing on a multi-industry survey of 245 customers who have experienced service contract terminations in real life, the authors estimate regression models to link perceived service contract termination initiatives to NWOM.

All else equal, only preannouncement and support in finding an alternative are effective to reduce NWOM. This study also shows that the right choice of service contract termination initiatives depends on the context of the termination. Making a preannouncement, offering an explanation and providing support in finding an alternative are more effective in reducing NWOM when these actions are aligned with the contextual factors of relationship duration and competitive intensity.

This study shows that service contract termination needs to address several aspects of the service termination experience. The key implication for future research is that it matters in terms of NWOM how service contract terminations are performed.

This research identifies the service contract termination initiatives that are most effective to reduce NWOM after service contract termination in general and under consideration of the moderating roles of relationship duration and competitive intensity.

While most related studies have considered customer responses to the cancellation of other customers’ contracts, this study contributes to the scarce literature on the undesirable customer responses (such as NWOM) to the termination of their own contract. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first study in this emerging stream of research that accounts for the effects of process- and outcome-oriented contract termination initiatives on NWOM. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first study to account for moderators of the effect of contract termination initiatives on NWOM, namely, relationship duration and competitive intensity.

This study aims to investigate the effect of brand transgression severity on different behavioral responses (BRs). In addition, the role of perceived brand betrayal (BB) is examined as a mediator between brand transgression severity and BRs.

A total number of 331 customers of Tehran travel agencies were recruited as the statistical sample. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLS 4 software was used to analyze the collected data.

The results showed that the severity of brand transgression significantly affects perceived BB and customer BR, including avoidance and retaliatory behaviors. Moreover, the results showed that perceived BB has a mediating role in the relationship between brand transgression severity and reparatory and retaliatory behaviors.

This study adds to the understanding of consumer behavior by demonstrating how customers react to brand transgression severity through perceived BB.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

This paper aims to provide a review of the extant literature on value creation and destruction in social marketing services for social change, for the purposes of developing a research agenda for future research in this area. Creating value in social marketing services is now identified as a key focus for social marketing (Russell-Bennett et al., 2009; Domegan et al., 2013), yet work in this area is nascent and conceptual, methodological, and empirical work is needed to advance the research agenda (Zainuddin et al., 2013; 2016).

To help shape the future of research on value in social marketing services, this paper appraises the contributions of the current research literature, and identifies gaps in the current knowledge. A systematic literature review was conducted, following the PRISMA protocol for conducting and reporting systematic reviews (Moher et al., 2009). The review covers the areas of value creation in social marketing, value destruction in social marketing, dimensions of value in social marketing, and from value-in-exchange, to value-in-use, to value-in-behaviour in social change.

A research agenda for further work in this area is provided within the themes of 1. conceptual development, 2. broadening ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations, 3. research contexts, and 4. measuring and evaluating value in social marketing services. Within each of these themes, a series of research questions are provided to guide further work in the four identified themes.

This paper is the first to offer a review of the extant literature on value creation and destruction in social marketing and social marketing services, and offer a research agenda for future work in this area. This paper contributes to services marketing and the development of service thinking as key component of social marketing, and the role that value creation plays in this (Russell-Bennett et al., 2013).

At present, nearly the whole globe is facing a severe threat of COVID-19. This study aims to examine the COVID-19 complications and entrepreneurial intention among the entrepreneurs of Pakistan.

The study used a deductive approach. An online survey is conducted to collect cross-sectional data from entrepreneurs of Pakistan. Convenience sampling is applied to target the respondents. In total, 278 usable answers proceed for final analysis. The structural equation model (SEM) is used to infer the results.

The findings of the study highlight a significant negative effect of fear of COVID-19 (FO19), perceived susceptibility (PSU) and perceived severity (PSE) on entrepreneurial intention (EI) among the entrepreneurs.

The study would provide the guidelines for policymakers and planners to combat the barriers of fear, PSU and PSE during a pandemic. The findings of the second wave of COVID-19 may provide a warning to the government to take preventive measures to face the severe effect of the pandemic. Finally, the outcomes of the study may enrich the depth of COVID-19 literature globally.

This study is the first study highlighting factors such as fear, PSU and PSE toward EI in COVID-19 second wave.

Setbacks and failures are part of organizational life. While a recent body of literature pointed to the importance of recovery, resilience, and learning from failure in responding to and dealing with setback events, the setback itself and its underlying dimensions remain underexplored. However, how severe employees perceive a setback to be plays an integral role in how successfully they handle these events. Taking an event-oriented perspective on work-related setbacks, this study defines setback severity as the setback event’s novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality. Based on the current literature and prior operationalizations, the authors introduce and validate a three-dimensional measure of setback severity. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses provide support for the proposed three-dimensional model. Further analyses show that disruptiveness and criticality are significantly related to identity threat, emotional exhaustion, trauma, turnover intention, and thriving, while novelty is only related to turnover intention and thriving. The implications of the setback severity measure are discussed along with recommendations for future research.

This study aims to examine the effects of organizational tactics (e.g. explanation and monetary compensation) on customers’ reactions to service termination. The mediating role of anger and the moderating role of termination strategy on the effectiveness of organizational tactics are examined to enhance the understanding of customers’ reactions to service termination.

Three experimental studies are conducted with different contexts (telecom and banking) and samples (students and consumers).

Study 1 results show that explanation and high monetary compensation reduce negative word-of-mouth and enhance corporate image and anger mediates these effects. Study 2a results show that high monetary compensation becomes ineffective when firms use a soft termination approach. Study 2b results show that an explanation is equally effective in soft and hard termination approaches. Importantly, unlike high monetary compensation, the explanation can fully eliminate the negative consequences of service termination.

Managers can mitigate negative customers’ reactions to service termination by offering a truthful explanation. Further, they should provide high monetary compensation only if they do not help dismissed customers find an alternative provider.

This paper contributes to the service termination literature by shedding more light on the effectiveness of different organizational tactics following different termination strategies. The findings challenge existing wisdom on the overrated role of monetary compensation showing that in service termination, the explanation is the most effective remedy. Further, unlike justice, anger better explains customers’ reactions to service termination.

This study empirically examined the antecedents of verbal and physical assaults on managers perpetrated by subordinate employees. A model was presented and hypotheses developed that were tested with data obtained through the content analysis of published arbitration decisions. The findings indicated that such assaults were more likely to be verbal than physical, preceded by aversive treatment, and targeted at managers directly involved in the negative outcomes. Additionally, the severity of the incident varied across the different types of triggering events. Individuals who had been aggressive in the past but had not been disciplined were more likely to subsequently engage in physical than verbal assaults. The implications of these findings for future research and organizational practices were also discussed.

Although supplier-initiated punishment is widely used to manage distributors’ opportunism, its spillover effect on unpunished distributors (i.e. observers) within the same distribution network remains under-researched. Specifically, this paper aims to investigate the curvilinear effect of punishment severity on an observer’s opportunism, and how such an effect is contingent on the observer’s network position.

This paper uses regression analysis with survey data gathered from 218 distributors in China’s automobile industry.

Punishment severity has an inverted U-shaped effect on the observers’ opportunism, and such effect is weakened by both the observers’ network centrality and their degree of dependence on the supplier.

The findings should encourage suppliers to focus more on the spillover effects of punishment on observers. To this end, the supplier must deliberately initiate the appropriate level of punishment severity against its distributors because an inappropriate level of punishment severity (e.g. too lenient) may unexpectedly raise the unpunished observers’ level of opportunism. Moreover, the supplier should be fully aware that observers’ specific network positions may produce varying spillover effects of the punishment.

This study enriches the literature on channel governance by revealing the curvilinear mechanism through which punishment severity influences observers’ opportunism. By applying social learning theory to channel punishment research, this study unveils both the inhibitive learning and the imitative learning forces inherent in a single punishment event, and it delineates their joint effect on an observer’s opportunism. In addition, this study outlines the observer’s vertical and horizontal relationships within the distribution network and explores their contingent roles in determining the spillover effects of punishment.