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This study examines the impact of transgressions committed by team members in professional sport on the sports organisation's relationship with its sponsors. In-depth interviews were conducted with sporting administrators to identify potential moderators and responses that may occur as a result of different types of player transgressions. The conceptual model that was developed assimilates our qualitative results with the latest cross-disciplinary transgression literature to frame a model uniquely contextualised for player transgressions.

As crises are largely perceptual, the deeper the understanding is of how stakeholders perceive crisis situations, the more effectively corporations can target their crisis communication messages. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different stakeholder groups process information during transgression-based corporate crises.

This study is based on 17 qualitative interviews with the internal, external and media stakeholders of an organisation that experienced a major transgression-based crisis. A case study approach is adopted to analyse and understand how these stakeholders process and respond to the same crisis event.

Findings suggest that there are considerable differences in the crisis evaluations of different stakeholder groups. This study identifies several elements specific to internal, external and media stakeholders’ crisis information processing.

Although the findings are tied to the specific case, the authors extend the existing theory by shedding light on the specific factors that shape the evaluations of different stakeholder groups during a transgression.

The findings may help managers in building more accurate assumptions and knowledge with respect to crisis effects on an organisation’s stakeholders and thus provide the basis for more effective crisis communication.

Prior crisis information-processing models provide fragmented and generic insights into the specifics of different stakeholder groups and thus lead crisis communication to miss opportunities to attenuate the loss of a corporation’s social approval. This study moves towards an integrated framework of how different stakeholders evaluate a transgression-based corporate crisis.

This study aims to examine how brand transgression (BT) affects brand relationship quality (BRQ). Brand forgiveness (BF) and brand evangelism (BE) are tested as mediators between BT and BRQ. This study advances knowledge in consumer behavior by showing how consumers offer to deal with their relationships with brands through BE and BF. This provides relevant information to managers to seek strategies to obtain forgiveness from consumers in case the unfortunate happens. Not only must they seek to obtain forgiveness but also seek ways to ensure BE of their brands. These act as buffers for the brands in case a transgression happens.

Using a survey approach, this study tests whether forgiveness mediated the relationship between BT and BRQ. Also, whether BE mediated the relationship between BT and BRQ was examined. The test was conducted using PROCESS bootstrapping method (Model 4 of Hayes [2018]).

Consistent with the predictions, this study finds that, following a BT, consumers engage in BE and BF to maintain the relationship they have already established with their brands.

This study extends the existing literature by showing that after a BT, response from consumers may take different forms. The consumer’s response or the relationship with the brand may be affected by whether the consumer forgives the brand or evangelizes about the brand. Based on the cognitive dissonance theory, the results of this study imply that, forgiveness and BE act as important mechanisms in understanding consumer-brand relationships after brands act unacceptably. Further, this study contributes to the social media brand management literature by investigating a real-world BT case of social media.

Despite the harmful impact of supervisor transgressions, they have received little empirical attention. The purpose of this paper is to addresses this important gap, examining the nature of transgressions committed at work by supervisors against subordinates.

A critical incident technique was employed in which employees described a transgression committed by their supervisor. Qualitative responses were then analyzed, resulting in the emergence of supervisor transgression themes.

In total, 11 themes emerged, including: performance criticisms, demeaning insults, false accusations, undue demands, unfair employment decisions, inconsiderate treatment, inequitable behavior, inappropriate contextual selections, disregard of opinions, undersupplied resources, and underprovided recognition.

While this approach is not without limitations, including the potential for participant memory error and researcher analytical bias, it offers a necessary initial exploration into the content of supervisor transgressions. Findings open new areas for continued research exploration into the nature and functioning of supervisor transgressions.

Practitioners also stand to benefit from this work, as this identification of supervisor transgression themes affords organizations knowledge about how to best target supervisory interventions.

Though researchers have just begun to examine the nature of leader transgressions, they have yet to analyze the content of supervisor transgressions. This study offers an original investigation into how supervisors transgress against subordinates at work.

The purpose of this paper is to understand and explore how young children relate to brands. The paper specifically attempts to explore their favourite and everyday brands with which they interact, understand the phenomenon of intergenerational transfer of brands, and study how child consumers experience and cope with brand transgressions.

This is a qualitative study where 20 in-depth interviews were conducted among young Indian children in the age-group of 8–12 years. For data analysis “iterative method” is used. Inspiration was taken from Spiggle’s (1994), Ereaut’s (2002) and Holt and Thompson (2004).

Children’s relationships with brands are mainly characterised by four categories: their favourite brands, everyday brands, intergenerational brands and brand transgressions. Children’s favourite brands can be categorised in fantasy, yummy, identity construction, social bonding, technology and trusted brands. Parents have a big influence on kids’ lives leading to intergenerational brand-transfer. Children consumers also reveal having experience brand transgressions, more importantly, they also show signs of brand forgiveness.

This qualitative study has addressed the pressing need to understand child understands of brands. This is one of the very few empirical studies that have investigated child consumer behaviour regarding their association with brands.

Business organizations should strive to create ethical cultures to win consumer loyalty and thus safeguard long-term performance success. Management bears ultimate responsibility for promoting ethical behavior. By rewarding ethical behaviors and punishing transgressions, management will reinforce morally upright behavior and create a positive company culture. Successful promotion of corporate ethics, in turn, will boost employee morale, increase performance beyond bare minimums and retain employees in the long run. With a well-structured ethics code and strong reward system, management has all the tools necessary to create an ethical company culture.

This viewpoint paper, while advocating for a systematic approach to ethical behavior in a business organization, carefully reviews both well-established literature in this area as well as current best practices. The aim is to provide senior managers with a sense of how the best corporate ethics programs are organized and structured.

A successful corporate ethics program must involve all employees from executives to hourly wage workers, with each taking personal responsibility for his or her own performance and results. While no guarantees of success are offered, one reasonably certain path to failure is for an organization to post an ethics code and then ignore it. Ethics must be discussed, modified from time to time and actively integrated into the life of every organization that hopes to avoid ethical missteps.

This paper offers a fresh viewpoint on both the value and the organization of a potentially successful corporate ethics program. While time-honored ideas serve as the foundation for our discussion, a thorough review of current issues and best practices form the directional heading for the paper’s conclusions.

Despite increasing research interest in the psychological contract, little is known about how employees’ contractual beliefs alter during major organizational changes. Using a sample of air traffic control workers who have been used to stable work roles over long periods, examines employees’ contractual responses to enforced job change. As job change approached, contractual acceptance or violation was engendered by sensemaking appraisals of management decisions, the meaning given to premove uncertainties, and perceptions of victimization. Following job change, sense‐making continued and eventually yielded either a calculative assessment of the employment relationship or feelings of sustained violation. While sustained violation was accompanied by visible expressions of resistance against management, such acts represented a desire to reinstate the established employment relationship. Conversely, workers who accommodated the personal outcomes of management breaches became less committed to a contractual relationship, and resolved to exploit management weaknesses and omissions. These divergencies reflected how the contractual meanings given to single breach events were kept separate from panoptic assessments of management’s entire body of behaviour during the reorganization.

This research aims to examine the buffering effect of a firm's religious association on customer reactions to a service failure.

Two scenario-driven studies containing religious and non-religious reasons for a store closing were conducted.

The results from Study 1 suggest that a religious affiliation safeguards against negative reactions to failures related to store policies (see Hoffman et al., 2003). Customers are more likely to forgive transgressing firms when service failures are associated with religion, regardless of attitudes toward the religious group. A follow up study supports the first, even when no specific religion was identified in the scenario, the service failure involved a firm that closed weekly, and a non-student sample was used.

While the results provide support for the buffering effects of a religious affiliation against a particular type of service failure – temporary service interruptions due to the observance of religious holidays and celebrations, future research should test the robustness of this effect on technology failures and rude treatment by employees.

This paper is the first, to the authors' knowledge, to test the effect of a firm's religious affiliation on customer perceptions of frontline service encounters in general and service failures in particular.