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This paper aims to examine a core member-customer threat in co-operatives (co-ops) by drawing from ostracism research, assessing co-op ostracism’s impact on critical membership and relational exchange outcomes and discussing why relationship marketing research needs to pay more attention to the overlooked role of implicit mistreatment forms in customer harm-doing.

Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, ostracism in co-ops was explored, and a measurement scale for co-op ostracism was developed. In Study 2, the core conceptual model was empirically tested with data from members of three different co-ops. In Study 3, a coping strategy was integrated into an extended model and empirically tested with a new sample of co-op members.

Ostracism is present in co-ops and “poisons” crucial relational (and membership) outcomes, despite the presence of other relationship-building or relationship-destroying accounts. Coupling entitativity with cognitive capital attenuates ostracism’s impact.

Inspired by co-ops’ membership model and inherent relational advantage, this research is the first to adopt a co-op member-customer perspective and shed light on an implicit relationship-destroying factor.

Co-op decision makers might use the diagnostic tool developed in the paper to detect ostracism and fight it. Moreover, a novel coping strategy for how co-ops (or other firms) might fend off ostracism threats is offered in the article.

The present study illuminates a dark side of a relationally profuse customer context, painting a more complete picture of relationship marketing determinants. Little attention has been given to ostracism as a distinct and important social behaviour in marketing research and to co-ops as a research context.

The purpose of this paper is to address the following question: Can a bank capitalize on its well-established self-service technologies (SSTs) in order to entice customers to adopt a newly introduced SST, namely, mobile banking? More specifically, it proposes an integrative model that simultaneously investigates the transference effects of attitudes, trust and the contagious influences of social pressures on mobile banking adoption intentions.

Structural equation modeling is applied to data collected from banks’ clients who are actually non-users of mobile banking.

The results indicate that attitude toward and trust in mobile banking along with coercive, normative and mimetic pressures are key antecedents to mobile banking adoption intentions. In addition, attitudes toward automated teller machines (ATMs) and online banking significantly predict attitude toward mobile banking. The results also support the effects of trust in ATMs as well as trust in online banking on trust in mobile banking. Moreover, predicted differences in the relative effects of attitude and trust are supported. Particularly, attitude toward online banking has a stronger impact on attitude toward mobile banking compared to the impact of attitude toward ATMs. In the same vein, the effect of trust in online banking on mobile banking is significantly stronger than the effect of trust in ATMs.

The study’s results hint at some practical and worthwhile guidelines for banks that can be leveraged in communication campaigns aiming at boosting the adoption rates of mobile banking. Banks can take advantage of the transference effects of the established attitudes toward and trusting beliefs in their mature SSTs as well as the contagious social influences in inducing the adoption of a newly introduced SST.

The present study represents a first step toward generating new insights into the role of the joint effects of attitudes, trust and social influences in the adoption of a new SST.

This study aims to draw on cue utilization and irradiation theories to: determine the extent to which country-of-origin image and its sub-dimensions exert an aggregate and relative influence on consumer brand evaluations; and identify the contextual and methodological factors that account for between-study variance in the focal relationship.

A random-effects model was used to examine 166 empirical articles encompassing 499,563 observations, and 282 effect sizes from 1984 to 2020 using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software.

Results show that country-of-origin image has a positive, moderate effect on consumer brand evaluations. Moreover, findings reveal that each dimension of country-of-origin image – general country image, general product country image, specific product country image and partitioned country image – significantly influences consumer brand evaluation, but the effect of general product country image is the largest. What’s more, the aggregate impacts of country-of-origin image on consumer brand evaluation – brand commitment, brand-specific associations and general brand impressions – show that the effect on brand commitment is the largest. Finally, findings show that contextual factors (brand source, product sector, culture [individualism vs collectivism], brand origin continents and respondents’ continent) and methodological factors (cues, sampling unit, publication year and sample size) significantly account for between-study variance.

This study provides the first meta-analytic review of the relationship between country-of-origin image and consumer brand evaluation to help clarify mixed findings and balance out the literature, which has only seen quantitative reviews on product evaluation and purchase decisions.

Most studies on workplace meetings have examined them as physical gatherings but have not linked them to interactions before and after meetings. Drawing upon coordination theory, this study aims to examine the impact of interactions before, during and after meetings on meeting effectiveness.

A survey design was used, and regular workplace meeting attendees were recruited. A mediation model was developed to test the effect of interactions on perceived meeting effectiveness.

Interactions before meetings positively influenced attendee involvement during the meeting, and attendee involvement mediated the positive relationship between attendee interactions during the meeting and perceived meeting effectiveness. A novel finding of this study is that incorporating meeting outcomes in subsequent work positively influenced perceived meeting effectiveness because it fostered common understanding of the meeting agenda.

The present results link prior empirical findings on interactions before and during meetings to new predictions regarding the effect of interactions after meetings. Coordination theory expands current conceptualizations of workplace meetings by broadening the notion of meetings to cover a more extended period of interdependent interactions.