Search results

The purpose of this paper is to test the influence of managerial coaching on frontline employee customer orientation, sales orientation and performance in a Chinese context. Further to this first goal, the authors also aim to compare these results with those obtained with a sample of Canadian bank employees in order to understand to what extent differences between Eastern and Western cultures affect business practices and employee responses in both environments.

This paper replicates a study from 2014 that used a sample of Canadian financial advisors to test the impact of managerial coaching on customer orientation, sales orientation and performance. In this new study, 185 frontline employees from a large insurance company in Chongqing (China) answered a paper-and-pencil questionnaire in Mandarin providing information about the coaching received from their managers, their own customer and sales orientation, as well as performance. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in AMOS as well as multigroup confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate cross-cultural differences.

The authors found that for the Chinese respondents managerial coaching is positively related to employee performance both directly and through the mediation effect of customer orientation. The authors found no support for the mediation of sales orientation between coaching and performance. These results suggest that managerial coaching might be a good strategy to promote relational behaviors in frontline employees, but not to reduce manipulative behaviors. The authors also found that these results are statistically equivalent for Chinese and Canadian respondents, suggesting that cultural differences are less prevalent than expected in this business sector.

The study makes several contributions to research. First, it suggests that managerial coaching can help employees develop their customer orientation–a central construct for commercial organizations working under a relational marketing approach. Second, it presents one of the first studies that evaluate the efficiency of managerial coaching in an Eastern country. And finally, results underline the equivalence of results for Eastern (China) and Western (Canada) respondents suggesting that in a global environment (like the financial industry) the business logic guiding the development of good customer relationships and employee customer-oriented behaviors prevails over potential cultural differences and makes leader and employee behaviors more similar and comparable across different regions in the world.

First, the use of managerial coaching seems to increase frontline employee relational behaviors, like customer orientation. Accordingly, managerial coaching seems to be a link that can help financial institutions bridge the formulation of a marketing relational strategy in the boardroom and the implementation of such a strategy at the customer interface between frontline employees and customers. Second, given the equivalence of results between the Canadian and the Chinese sample, it seems that the similarities between business models and business logics within the financial services sector are more important—and supersede—the potential cross-cultural differences between Eastern and Western countries.

The study makes a contribution to the limited literature on the use of managerial coaching in financial institutions to increase frontline employee relational behaviors. At the same time, it presents one of the few cross-cultural studies comparing results obtained from Chinese and Canadian respondents.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a scientometric analysis of the body of literature contained in 11 major knowledge management and intellectual capital (KM/IC) peer‐reviewed journals.

A total of 2,175 articles published in 11 major KM/IC peer‐reviewed journals were carefully reviewed and subjected to scientometric data analysis techniques.

A number of research questions pertaining to country, institutional and individual productivity, co‐operation patterns, publication frequency, and favourite inquiry methods were proposed and answered. Based on the findings, many implications emerged that improve one's understanding of the identity of KM/IC as a distinct scientific field.

The pool of KM/IC journals examined did not represent all available publication outlets, given that at least 20 peer‐reviewed journals exist in the KM/IC field. There are also KM/IC papers published in other non‐KM/IC specific journals. However, the 11 journals that were selected for the study have been evaluated by Bontis and Serenko as the top publications in the KM/IC area.

Practitioners have played a significant role in developing the KM/IC field. However, their contributions have been decreasing. There is still very much a need for qualitative descriptions and case studies. It is critically important that practitioners consider collaborating with academics for richer research projects.

This is the most comprehensive scientometric analysis of the KM/IC field ever conducted.

This paper seeks to present a theory clarifying the negative relationship between organizational unit size and knowledge flows referred to as Gita's Rule.

This paper draws from the literature and develops a grounded theory. Various applications and propositions are suggested through this theoretical lens.

It is suggested that, as the size of an organizational unit increases, the effectiveness of internal knowledge flows dramatically diminishes and the degree of intra‐organizational knowledge sharing decreases.

It is proposed that 150 employees represents a general breaking point, after which knowledge sharing reduces due largely to increased complexity in the formal structure, weaker interpersonal relationships and lower trust, decreased connective efficacy, and less effective communication.

The research points to the key dimension of organizational size that must be considered when developing models and reviewing case studies.

The research reported in this paper is among the first to explicitly tackle the issue of how knowledge flows are affected by organizational size. A theory is developed and several research propositions are introduced for future studies.

Food choices profoundly affect one's dietary, nutritional and health outcomes. Using alcoholic beverages as a case study, the authors assess the potential of genetic data in predicting consumers' food choices combined with conventional socio-demographic data.

A discrete choice experiment was conducted to elicit the underlying preferences of 484 participants from seven provinces in China. By linking three types of data (—data from the choice experiment, socio-demographic information and individual genotyping data) of the participants, the authors employed four machine learning-based classification (MLC) models to assess the performance of genetic information in predicting individuals' food choices.

The authors found that the XGBoost algorithm incorporating both genetic and socio-demographic data achieves the highest prediction accuracy (77.36%), significantly outperforming those using only socio-demographic data (permutation test p-value = 0.033). Polygenic scores of several behavioral traits (e.g. depression and height) and genetic variants associated with bitter taste perceptions (e.g. TAS2R5 rs2227264 and TAS2R38 rs713598) offer contributions comparable to that of standard socio-demographic factors (e.g. gender, age and income).

This study is among the first in the economic literature to empirically demonstrate genetic factors' important role in predicting consumer behavior. The findings contribute fresh insights to the realm of random utility theory and warrant further consumer behavior studies integrating genetic data to facilitate developments in precision nutrition and precision marketing.

A family media enterprise with very strong family culture and values is in the third and fourth generations of ownership and governance. They face a crisis when a large number of family shareholders want to cash out their shares. What led to this situation? How could it have been avoided? How should it be resolved?

Lack of succession and liquidity planning can harm the business through generations when it becomes a crisis.

There is general agreement among researchers and practitioners that satisfaction is relative to competitive alternatives. Nonetheless, researchers and managers have not treated satisfaction as a relative construct. The result has been weak relationships between satisfaction and share of wallet in the literature, and challenges by managers as to whether satisfaction is a useful predictor of customer behavior and business outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to explore the best approach for linking satisfaction to share of wallet.

Using data from 79,543 consumers who provided 258,743 observations regarding the brands that they use (over 650 brands) covering 20 industries from 15 countries, various models such as the Wallet Allocation Rule (WAR), Zipf-AE, and Zipf-PM, truncated geometric model, generalization of the WAR and hierarchical regression models are compared to each other.

The results indicate that the relationship between satisfaction and share of wallet is primarily driven by the relative fulfillment customers perceive from the various brands that they use (as gauged by their relative ranked satisfaction level), and not the absolute level of satisfaction.

The findings provide practical insight into several easy-to-use approaches that researchers and managers can apply to improve the strength of the relationship between satisfaction and share of wallet.

This research provides support to the small number of studies that point to the superiority of using relative metrics, and encourages the adoption of relative satisfaction metrics by the academic community.

OUR various accounts of the Portsmouth Conference, and the official record of it which is now in the hands of readers shows that it may be regarded as a successful one. It was specially notable for the absence of those bickerings and differences which must inevitably come to the surface at times. There may be something in the suggestion of one of our writers that the weather was a main factor. However that may be, there was uniform good temper, and we came away with the belief that a good week's work for librarianship had been done.

In a general way it is obvious that the developmental cycles of libraries reflect those of their parent institutions, the universities. Thus, libraries, like universities, have experienced a period of intense growth and diversification in the past four or five decades. This has been followed by a period of increasingly severe resource constraint relative to need while high expectations have continued almost unabated. It is now widely acknowledged that basic changes in the way information services are provided are inevitable, even though there is not yet complete consensus about what the nature of those changes can or should be. Clearly there is a powerful connection between the new Fiscal realities of universities and our capacity to resolve the information management requirements of this new era.