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This study aims to investigate the psychological mediating mechanisms through which omnichannel integration affects customer word-of-mouth (WOM) behaviors in omnichannel retailing.

Guided by prior omnichannel retailing studies, the authors identify taxonomy of customer WOM behaviors with three archetypes, namely, face-to-face WOM, online store WOM, and social media WOM. Then, the authors draw on social exchange theory (SET) to explain how omnichannel integration influences customer WOM behaviors through the mediating roles of perceived personal preference fit and perceived social relatedness. The authors empirically tested the model using structural equation modeling and multiple mediation analysis with a field survey of 335 omnichannel customers.

Perceived personal preference fit positively influences face-to-face WOM and social media WOM, whereas perceived social relatedness is positively associated with face-to-face WOM, online store WOM, and social media WOM. Furthermore, transactional integration and relational integration positively affect perceived personal preference fit, whereas relational integration has a positive effect on perceived social relatedness. Finally, perceived personal preference fit mediates the effects of transactional integration and relational integration on face-to-face WOM and social media WOM. Perceived social relatedness mediates the effects of relational integration on face-to-face WOM, online store WOM, and social media WOM.

The authors' study advances the omnichannel retailing literature by proposing a taxonomy of customer WOM behaviors in omnichannel retailing and identifying the mediating mechanisms through which omnichannel integration influences customer WOM behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to pursue the following two objectives. First, this study examines how social capital indicators (reciprocal norm and social network) cause ethical consumption behavior by conceptualizing it as value co-creation specific to socially responsible firms. Second, it aims to verify whether corporate trust, which is another core indicator of social capital, mediates between social capital indicators and ethical consumption behavior.

For study subjects, the author selected general public located in the city of Seoul. A total of 307 respondents were used for statistical analysis after discarding unusable questionnaires. For the purpose of judgment sampling, the author selected those respondents who had prior purchase experience of the products or services provided by socially responsible firms.

This study tested core elements of social capital (reciprocal norm, social network and corporate trust) as predictors of ethical consumption behavior. In particular, the study newly conceptualized and validated ethical consumption behavior as one encompassing the civic engagement behavior whose premise is well encapsulated by value co-creation principle. The results demonstrate that the social network and reciprocal norm significantly influence ethical consumption behavior directly as well as indirectly through corporate trust.

The significance of this study may be that it adds to current literature on ethical consumption behavior by validating an empirical model of ethical consumption behavior from the perspective of consumer engagement paradigm. No previous studies of ethical consumption behavior empirically tested this model previously, only offering conceptual similarity between ethical consumption and consumer engagement. The study’s result may provide some insights as to the utility of value co-creation strategy for socially responsible firms as a useful way to promote ethical consumption behavior.

This study’s result may provide some useful insights as to how socially responsible firms can improve their performance by understanding what makes their customers voluntarily engage in favor of the firms to create shared values. In particular, the finding on the corporate trust mediating between bonding network and ethical consumption behavior sheds useful insights for the firms on how they should garner customer trust to trigger ethical consumption behavior. In this sense, socially responsible firms need to focus their resources on publicity or endorsements by highly respected celebrities designed to stress the firms’ trustworthiness and create favorable corporate image.

The finding that reciprocal norm has a significant impact on ethical consumption behavior also provides strategic implications on how to enhance the effectiveness of corporate messages. That is, the socially responsible firms should implement some corporate strategies designed to raise authentic corporate image of the firms by hiring the socially disadvantaged and returning some portion of profit back to society. By doing this, the socially responsible firms can expect to instill some sense of reciprocity into their current as well as potential customers.

Despite this conceived linkage, no previous research has empirically approached ethical consumption from the perspective of civic engagement to examine whether ethical consumers voluntarily engage in firm-specific engagement behavior that fulfills their civic responsibility. Therefore, the present research embarks on a new approach to conceptualize ethical consumption as a construct that embodies civic engagement that is conceptually encapsulated by the principle of value co-creation.

This paper aims to, building on the concept of relational benefits, relationship marketing investments, gratitude, satisfaction and favorable reciprocal behaviors, examine the mechanism of cultivating relationships with valued customers at an upscale restaurant.

To capture the traits of the population (upscale restaurant customers who perceive relationship marketing investments by experiencing relational benefits), upscale restaurant customers with membership cards were contacted in the survey. Structural equation modeling was used to test measurement and structural models.

Empirical findings indicated that confidence and social benefits positively contributed to relationship marketing investments, whereas special treatment benefits were not significantly related to relationship marketing investments. In turn, relationship marketing investments positively affected both gratitude and satisfaction; relationship marketing investments were also more associated with gratitude than satisfaction. Gratitude positively evoked favorable reciprocal behaviors; however, satisfaction did not trigger favorable reciprocal behaviors.

The integration of relationship marketing investments and gratitude into the conceptual model would allow the current findings to generate rich theoretical and practical implications that the extant hospitality literature has not elucidated.

This paper suggests to combine different kind of “other-regarding” preferences as an approach to fair behavior which is observed in controlled experiments. We assert that participants in two-person experiments have a good will capital which may be described by altruistic preferences. These preferences guide a large fraction of participants when they have to make distributional choices in one-stage games. We further show that in games with more than one stage the previous action of the other person may cause reciprocal feelings in addition to the altruistic preferences. A friendly (unfriedly) act of the other person may increase (decrease) the good will capital of the participants. Upon these findings, we conclude that a combination of altruism and reciprocity is able to describe the variety of behavior in several experiments despite their differing strategic context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the negative consequences of employee perceptions of supervisor self-interested behavior (SIB). Using social exchange theory, the authors argue that perceived supervisor SIB reduces affective commitment to the supervisor (ACS), which in turn fosters employees’ negative reciprocal behavior in the form of counterproductive work behavior – interpersonal (CWBI) and counterproductive work behavior – organizational (CWBO). In addition, the authors identify employee power distance orientation (PDO) as an important contingent factor that influences the indirect effects.

Using a final sample of 441 employees from 146 workgroups across 6 firms in China, the hypotheses are tested using multilevel path analysis to account for the nesting effects.

Perceived supervisor SIB is negatively related to ACS, which in turn is related to employee CWBI and CWBO. Furthermore, employee PDO moderates the indirect effects of perceived supervisor SIB on employee CWBI and CWBO through decreased ACS. Specifically, when employee PDO is low, the indirect effects on employee CWBI and CWBO are stronger.

This is one of the first studies to investigate the influence of employee perceptions of supervisor SIB on negative employee behavior in the workplace. Furthermore, it furthers our understanding of how negative exchange can stimulate negative reciprocal behavior, which is a relatively underexplored area. Another strength of this paper is the multi-time survey design and the adoption of multilevel path analysis.

The effective transfer of knowledge within an organization is critical for its sustainable competitive advantage. Based on the norm of reciprocity, it can be concluded that individuals’ primary motivation to transfer their treasured knowledge can be summarized as “trust,” that is, the individuals trust their selfless transfer behavior can be reciprocated by the recipients in the future.

In this study, a simulation model based on knowledge transfer behavior and reciprocal trust between individuals is built through agent-based modeling and simulation to investigate the factors that influence the efficiency of knowledge transfer within an organization.

Experiments are performed to test the impact of reciprocal trust and organizational structure on the efficiency of knowledge transfer.

The results indicate a significant role of key elements of reciprocal trust and organizational structure, which provides relevant practical guidance for both individuals and organization managers in the context of knowledge transfer.

This chapter applies social exchange theory to corruption. If two parties exhibit corrupt behaviors, secrecy becomes a new joint good, making the two parties more dependent on each other (an increase in total power). Since no external enforcement mechanisms are available in illicit exchanges, the initial reciprocal exchange pattern shifts toward negotiated or productive forms of exchange. Such forms of exchange, however, tend to leave traces, either because the amount of traded resources increases or the contingencies between the behaviors become more visible to the outside. Using the larger network structure, in which corrupt exchanges are embedded, to deal with the problem of detection also is Janus-faced. Adding more ties to the exchange increases either the competition between several potential exchanges partners (exclusively connected network) or the risk of nonreciprocity and whistle blowing (positively connected network). By showing that illicit relations are inherently unstable, we specify some of the scope conditions of social exchange theory.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of two types of reciprocity (restricted reciprocity and generalized reciprocity) on customers’ trust in social commerce (s-commerce) and trust performance (purchase intention and word-of-mouth intention). Furthermore, this study examines how individual and contextual moderators (personal shopping experience and community shared language) could impact the trust development process.

This study adopted a survey method and obtained data from 287 users in a customer-to-customer (C2C) s-commerce platform. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the research hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that two types of reciprocity positively affect trust in s-commerce. Customers’ trust performance is significantly affected by trust in s-commerce. Additionally, shopping experience in s-commerce is found to positively moderate the relationship between restricted reciprocity and trust in s-commerce.

The findings help to understand the nature and role of reciprocity in influencing trust and trust-related behaviors in the context of C2C s-commerce. The research also helps to explore the individual and contextual moderators that impact the effect of reciprocity on trust development.

The results offer a comprehensive view of trust building strategies for s-commerce practitioners, including shoppers, vendors and managers of s-commerce platforms.

This study is among the first few research studies that offers a theory-based conceptualization of reciprocity in C2C s-commerce and provides empirical support for the impact of reciprocity on customers’ trust in C2C s-commerce. In addition, this study devises a broader view of reciprocity based on restricted and generalized exchange principle to represent the interaction of vendor–shopper and shopper–shopper, respectively.

This study focused on unpacking the instructional coaching process, addressing key questions about what happens during a coaching session and what coaching elements predict teacher outcomes.

Using coaching observational data, the research examined critical coaching processes described in the literature: coaching practices (observation, feedback, reflective discussion and planning), the coach–teacher relationship, coaching strategies and coaching duration. The study also developed a path model documenting how coaching behaviors predicted teacher instruction.

Results showed that the coach talked more than the teacher and that most coaching time was spent in reflective discussion. The coach–teacher relationship was promoted by building rapport and reciprocal trust, with use of “we” language demonstrating that coach and teacher were working as a partnership. Most common coaching strategies were clarifying and the coach prompting the teacher to attend to teacher or student behaviors. Path model analysis showed that (a) the coach–teacher relationship quality predicted the level of teacher engagement in coaching and their instructional reflection and (b) the quality of coaching strategies predicted the overall quality of the classroom instruction.

The study provides empirical evidence about the active ingredients of coaching – those underlying processes that impact and improve teacher practice.

Numerous studies highlight the importance of knowledge transfer between projects, but the influence factors are still debated. As a contribution to the identified gap, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of organizational context, project characteristics and social relations in the inter-project knowledge transfer within the project-based organizations (PBOs).

This paper collects the data through 268 sample questionnaires from Chinese construction sectors and applies the structure equation modeling to analyze knowledge transfer between projects in PBOs.

The results indicate the organizational context (meeting system, reward system and shared culture) and project characteristics (similarity and urgency) are antecedents affecting social relations (communication, trust and reciprocity) between project teams, and their social relations further influence the effectiveness of inter-project knowledge transfer.

The study highlights the role of organizational context and effect of social relations for inter-project knowledge transfer in PBOs, and provides valuable suggestions for knowledge and project management in PBOs.