Search results

While theories of complex service systems have advanced important insights about integrated care, less attention has been paid to social dynamics in systems with finite resources. This paper aims to uncover a paradoxical social dynamic undermining the objective of integrated care within an HIV care service system.

Grounded in a hermeneutic analysis of depth interviews with 26 people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and drawing on Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of capital consumption to unpack dynamics of power, struggle and contestation, the authors introduce the concept of the service labyrinth.

To competently navigate the service labyrinth of HIV care, consumers adopt capital consumption practices. Paradoxically, these practices enhance empowerment at the individual level but contribute to the fragmentation of the HIV care labyrinth at the system level, ultimately undermining integrated care.

This study enhances understanding of integrated care in three ways. First, the metaphor of the service labyrinth can be used to better understand complex care-related service systems. Second, as consumers of care enact capital consumption practices, the authors demonstrate how they do not merely experience but actively shape the care system. Third, fragmentation is expectedly part of the human dynamics in complex service systems. Thus, the authors discuss its implications. Further research should investigate whether a similar paradox undermines integrated care in better resourced systems, acute care systems and systems embedded in other cultural contexts.

Contrasted to provider-centric views of service systems, this study explicates a customer-centric view from the perspective of heterosexual PLWHA.

Service robots are gradually becoming more anthropomorphic and intelligent. This research aims to investigate how anthropomorphic service robots with different levels of intelligence affect their human counterparts.

Two between-subject experimental studies were used to test whether different levels of service robot anthropomorphism with different levels of intelligence influence employees' morale and resistance to service robots.

Study 1 shows that the effect of service robot anthropomorphism (low vs. high) on employees' resistance and morale is mediated by perceived job-security threat. Study 2 validates this mediating effect and shows that it is moderated by the type of AI (mechanical vs. analytical). Specifically, when exposed to mechanical AI-powered service robots, employees exhibit a higher perceived job-security threat toward robots with a high (vs. low) degree of anthropomorphism. This moderating effect is not observed when employees are exposed to analytical AI-powered service robots. This moderated mediation effect is also found for the signing of a petition as the behavioral outcome.

Service firms considering the adoption of mechanical AI-powered service robots should choose a low (vs. high) anthropomorphic robot to reduce the sense of job-security threat felt by human employees, which subsequently increases their acceptance. However, if analytical AI-powered service robots with are to replace their human employees, the degree of anthropomorphism becomes irrelevant.

This is the first empirical study to explore how anthropomorphic service robots can influence human employees' evaluations and behaviors.

Informed by the broaden-and-build theory of emotions, this study aims to investigate the relationships between consumers’ motives and personal and social outcomes in access-based services (ABS). Further, drawing on territorial behaviour literature, the second goal of this research is to test the moderating effects of psychological ownership on the relationships between personal outcomes and consumer territorial behaviour.

This research comprises a quantitative online survey complemented by a qualitative interview study. The quantitative study employed an online consumer panel survey of 317 samples. Later, the qualitative study sought additional insights into the economic benefit motives and manifestation of territorial behaviour of bicycle-sharing users to enrich the results of quantitative study. The quantitative data were analysed using structural equation modelling, and the interviews were transcribed and analysed using an inductive and deductive thematic analysis.

The results indicated that specific motives significantly affected certain personal outcomes. Namely, economic benefit, enjoyment and reputation motives drove life satisfaction, while enjoyment, sustainability and social relationships promoted feelings of gratitude. Furthermore, life satisfaction positively affected consumer cooperation, helping other consumers and territorial behaviour. In contrast, feelings of gratitude had a positive relationship with cooperation and helping other consumers, but a negative one with territorial behaviour. Additional examination revealed that consumers’ psychological ownership of the shared bicycle in an ABS model moderated the effect of gratitude on consumer territorial behaviour.

This study offers and tests a model on ABS in the context of bicycle-sharing services. Thus, it presents avenues to test the model on other ABS, e.g. clothing or home sharing.

Managers in ABS can foster positive emotional states of gratitude and life satisfaction that will inevitably promote consumer cooperation and helping behaviour.

This study is among the first to propose and examine a model that tests the relationships between consumers’ motives and personal and social outcomes in ABS.

Corporate scandals involving senior executives plague many businesses. Although customers and noncustomers may be exposed to news of the same scandal, they may appraise dimensions of the transgression differently, thereby affecting post-scandal patronage intentions. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how consumer-firm affiliation affects future patronage intentions by examining nuances in customers’ vs noncustomers’ reactions toward the transgressor’s professional performance and immoral behavior.

Four between-subjects experimental studies were used to test whether performance-relevant and/or immorality-relevant pathways drive customers’ vs noncustomers’ post-scandal patronage intentions. The results were analyzed using analysis of variance, parallel mediation and serial mediation.

The results demonstrate that performance judgment, and not immorality judgment, drive the relationship between consumer-firm affiliation and post-scandal patronage intentions (Study 1a), regardless of the order of information presented (Study 1b). Customers form more positive performance judgments because they give more weight to performance-related information (Study 2), demonstrating a sequential effect of consumer-firm affiliation on post-scandal patronage intentions only through the performance-relevant, and not immorality-relevant, pathway (Study 3).

This research contributes to the literature on social distance and moral judgments. Future research should examine other deleterious outcomes such as brand sabotage and negative word-of-mouth, as well as potential moderators including repeated transgressions and prevalence of the infraction in other firms.

This research offers important nuances for understanding how performance and immorality judgments differentially operate and affect post-scandal patronage intentions. The findings highlight the strategic value of communicating the leader’s performance (e.g. professional contributions) as a buffer against potential declining patronage.

Offering new insights into the extant literature and lay beliefs which contend that harsh moral judgment reduces patronage intentions, this research uncovers why and how exposure to the same scandal can result in varying moral judgments that subsequently influence patronage intentions. Importantly, this research shows that the performance-relevant pathway can explain why customers have higher post-scandal patronage intentions compared to noncustomers.

Service industries increasingly have a need for frontline employees (FLEs) who are both adept and versatile at providing excellent customer services whilst exploring cross-/up-selling opportunities, known as service-sales ambidexterity (SSA). However, engaging in SSA poses various challenges. The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, the authors argue that the resilience of FLEs is a critical factor of their SSA and its effect is mediated by cognitive flexibility. Second, the authors propose a boundary condition – leadership humility – that affects this indirect relationship.

Survey data was drawn from two independent studies (N = 547). Study 1 was conducted via an online survey of FLEs involved in both service and sales roles in the insurance industry in North America. Data for Study 2 was collected from FLEs working in several branches of a commercial bank operating in Southeast Asia. The data was analysed using Hayes’ PROCESS Macro and SPSS.

Results from these studies reveal that resilience fosters cognitive flexibility, which, in turn, drives SSA. Additionally, leadership humility was found to moderate the indirect effect of resilience on SSA through cognitive flexibility.

The sample for this study is cross-sectional. Further research could replicate this study using longitudinal data to extract more in-depth information on developmental changes in FLEs. Additionally, the scope of this research is limited to an analysis of employees. However, the phenomenon of SSA is essentially a multi-level subject. Future research could extend the findings of this research by testing other organisational factors that would present a more inclusive framework to explain the SSA phenomenon.

The findings offer managers a new perspective of achieving the alignment between the service and sales goals of their operations.

This study contributes to the growing stream of literature on FLE’s resilience and SSA in particular and shows the role resilience plays in FLEs’ dealing with and navigating a constantly changing workplace where SSA has become a norm rather than an exception.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the factors driving and mitigating the experienced vulnerabilities of women undergoing the transformative service of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), and how this influences women’s evaluations and intentions.

The conceptual framework was tested using quantitative data collected via an online survey of Australian women who have undergone IVF treatment. Hayes’ PROCESS macro was used to analyse the data.

The results indicate that women’s persistent goal-striving alongside their perceived personal sacrifices influence the association between their need for parenthood and their experienced vulnerability. Institutional factors such as IVF clinic technical and interpersonal quality influence these consumers’ IVF experience evaluations and word-of-mouth (WoM) intentions.

This study’s results are limited to women who are undergoing IVF treatment. Further empirical work is needed to deepen the understanding of the role played by partners and other family members in women’s IVF experiences.

IVF clinics can reduce women’s experienced vulnerability by encouraging women who have a good probability of succeeding to persist in the pursuit of the goal of conceiving a child via IVF. This can be achieved by enabling and empowering them so that they give themselves the best chance during treatment, thus facilitating their control. Managing the expectations of those women with a lower probability of success is also recommended. The importance of the technical and interpersonal quality delivered by IVF clinics in influencing the positive evaluations and behavioural intentions of women experiencing vulnerabilities is further highlighted.

This study contributes to the transformative service research literature by: examining the IVF transformative experience, which has been largely overlooked; focussing on the intersection of transformative services and consumers experiencing vulnerability, which is an emerging research area; and testing a framework quantitatively that intermingles individual and institutional factors as antecedents and consequences of consumers’ experienced vulnerabilities, advancing the existing conceptual and qualitative work.

The concept of forgiveness has received significant attention in the fields of philosophy and psychology. However, little is known about the application of this concept in the business domain. To address this deficiency, this paper aims to conceptualise forgiveness as a customer coping strategy in the context of service failure incidents. Specifically, deriving from both theories of emotion and coping, this article proposes a conceptual framework of consumer forgiveness in service encounters.

A critical synthesis of the literature on forgiveness, service failure, and service recovery was conducted to generate a conceptual exploration of the role of forgiveness in the business domain.

While previous consumer behaviour studies have explored the emotional and behavioural states of consumers after service incidents, they overlooked one critical intrinsic psychological aspect which has a long‐lasting effect on service outcomes: consumer forgiveness. Thus, the main focus of this study is to devise a conceptual framework of consumer forgiveness which highlights several stages through which consumers progress in their forgiveness process. A range of situational and contingent factors that may facilitate the consumer forgiveness process are also identified and rationalised in the model.

Researchers of consumer behaviour will benefit from understanding the roots of forgiveness and how this complex process determines and influences the psychological state of consumers after service incidents. The proposed transactional model of forgiveness serves as a starting point to explore this virtually ignored concept in the services marketing domain. Empirical studies employing various research methodologies are needed to support this model.

This paper is one of the first attempts to integrate the concept of forgiveness from the field of psychology into consumer behaviour research by highlighting the role of forgiveness as a coping strategy in the business domain.

This paper aims to examine and compare the strength of personality and values in predicting brand preferences. It seeks to accomplish three main objectives. First, it will evaluate the strength of personality and values in predicting consumers' brand preferences. Second, it will examine whether values exercise a mediating role between personality and brand preferences. Finally, it will examine the mediating role of prestige sensitivity in influencing brand preferences.

The study opted to use a quantitative approach involving 251 undergraduate students as the study participants. The constructs used in the study are taken from existing scales as well as self‐developed branding scales. Structural equation modeling technique is utilised for data analysis.

The paper provides empirical insights about how personality and values together affect brand preferences. It suggests that values are indeed better predictors of brand preferences and exercise both direct and indirect effects on brand preferences through the mediating role of prestige sensitivity.

Because of the self‐report method used for personality assessment, there may be bias in terms of the nature of respondents' personality as expressed in the questionnaire.

The paper suggests implications for the development of a strong brand personality which can appeal to both consumer personality and values.

This paper poses interesting insights and empirical evidence with regard to the predictive power of personality and values on brand preferences within a fashion context.

This paper aims to develop a customer typology based on consumer attitude towards information privacy and examine the driving factors of privacy concern.

A sample of 456 Australian consumers who have applied for a credit card or mortgage is used in this study. Consumer concern with privacy statements, the privacy legislation at the federal level, trust and the willingness to disclose personal information for some form of compensation are used as drivers of consumer privacy in regression analysis. These variables are used in cluster analysis in order to segment financial consumers.

The results indicate that that the level of privacy concern is primarily driven by trust that far outweighs any concerns with privacy statements and the provision of nationally legislated safeguards. Furthermore, a cluster analysis reveals three distinctive customer segments in the domain of financial services: the pragmatist, indifferent, and competent.

This study is undertaken to advance our knowledge on consumer privacy concerns in the context of financial services and to segment financial services customers in relation to the disclosure of personal information. The study contributes to the literature and enhances our understanding not only on drivers of consumer privacy but also on specific areas of privacy concern among various customer segments.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between perceived benefits and church participation among regular and irregular church goers (ICG).

The research incorporates a descriptive research design. In total, 564 questionnaires were completed by active and relapsed members of churches in Australia. Hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between constructs.

This study provides empirical evidence that perceived spiritual and social benefits have a positive and significant relationship with church participation in both regular and ICG sample group. Perceived purpose-in-life (PIL) benefits are not related to church participation in both sample groups.

The findings may guide leaders of religious organisations to understand the importance of spiritual and social benefits in attracting prospective church members. The marketing message of religious organisation should therefore focus on spiritual and social appeals.

Past researchers have not looked into the dynamic relationships between perceived benefits and church participation among regular and irregular church members, particularly in Australia, hence research is to be called for in this area. The study provides a further empirical support for the importance of social benefits within the church settings.