The value of self-stated attribute importance to overall satisfaction

This paper provides insights into techniques used to determine the attributes that influence overall satisfaction. A survey of zoo visitors illustrates several key findings relevant for both managers interpreting survey results and researchers designing studies. First, the assumption of importance-performance analysis (IPA) that self-stated importance measures the influence of attribute performance on overall satisfaction is endorsed. Second, relative importance is shown to be vital as it improves the prediction of overall satisfaction from attribute performance while absolute importance makes it worse. Third, techniques using self-stated relative importance are shown to be superior to statistical techniques such as regression, however new techniques using both self-stated importance and regression are shown to be even better. These findings apply generally to tangible products in marketing and management as well as to tourism services.     

The End of Corporate Social Responsibility: Crisis & Critique,by Peter Fleming and Marc T. Jones

ABSTRACT

Purpose: Given the ever-increasing pressure put on sales organizations to improve performance, behave ethically and establish long-term customer relationships, this study seeks to better comprehend ethical leadership’s part in doing so. It proposes that perceived ethical leadership indirectly influences salesperson performance through trust in manager and ethical ambiguity.

Methodology/Approach: A survey of business-to-business salespeople was taken. Hypotheses are tested using structural equation modeling.

Findings: The results show that perceived ethical leadership influences salesperson performance through the mediating roles of trust in manager and ethical ambiguity. Salespeople’s perceptions of their supervisor’s ethical leadership behaviors positively impact their trust in manager and negatively influences their ethical ambiguity. In turn, trust in manager positively influences sales performance while ethical ambiguity negatively influences sales performance.

Research Implications: The results from testing the hypothesized model support mechanisms by which ethical leadership behavior may affect business-to-business salesperson job performance. It appears that ethical leadership works through ethical ambiguity and trust in manager to impact salesperson behavior performance, rather than directly impacting salesperson performance. Importantly the findings add to the literature an important consequence of ethical leadership, ethical ambiguity. This research likewise adds to the literature on role, and more specifically ethical, ambiguity by finding that reducing salesperson ethical ambiguity has a positive impact on salesperson behavior performance.

Practical Implications: This study finds that one important mechanism for reducing ethical ambiguity is for sales supervisors to practice ethical leadership. By reducing ethical ambiguity, sales managers can improve business-to-business salesperson performance. In addition, use of ethical leadership by sales managers can positively influence the business-to-business salesperson’s trust in manager, which subsequently leads to greater sales performance.

Originality/Value/Contribution: The results of this study add to our knowledge of ethical leadership by further developing its consequences. It also sheds light on a vastly under-researched construct, ethical ambiguity. Finally, it further validates the important role that trust in manager plays in the organization.     

Conference Reports

Governments at all levels have assumed greater responsibility for, and involvement in, tourism destination planning and development. In the post-Brundtland era local governments in particular have been under closer scrutiny for their role in driving the sustainable development agenda in tourism destination contexts. Yet, a notable research gap still exists despite the increased focus on local government, particularly in terms of empirical research investigating the roles and responsibilities of local government in addressing sustainable tourism development. Given this context, this paper explores the role of local government in facilitating, or indeed inhibiting, sustainable development objectives in a tourism destination context. To assess this issue, it uses in-depth interviews with local government representatives and key destination stakeholders from five local government areas in Queensland, Australia. It shows that local government had assumed responsibility for facilitating the sustainable tourism agenda, due to the absence of strong industry leadership and due to top-down directives from state and federal governments. However, power struggles, tokenistic public participation and the strong influence of the local government authority in local governance structures were found to be inhibitors to sustainable tourism development.     

Whose property is it anyway? The social nature of economic actors and egalitarian remuneration ∗

This article formulates an egalitarian theory of property based on an ethic of remuneration for economic contributions. The principle of egalitarian remuneration is developed by revising basic notions of economic contributions. Economic contributions are found to be those activities that contribute to the value of commodities not just those that produce a product. Consumers, and not only producers, contribute to the creation of value, and these economic contributions make consumers eligible for remuneration. However, the concept of consumer contributions needs to be recast, for consumer contributions do not consist of neoclassical, individualistic actors maximizing subjective preferences. Rather, consumers economic contributions flow from their socially self-determined attributes as formed through relation to the system of economic actors. Indirect social contributions spread responsibility throughout the members of the system, affecting calculations of dueness. Other members indirect contributions are relatively equal in degree of responsibility for the social formation of the consumer's economic contributions. The dispersion and equalization of responsibility for the creation of economic contributions entails a correlative equalization of claims to remuneration, on a principle of dueness for economic contributions. This implies a property right to egalitarian remuneration.     

Can OECD Countries Afford Demographic Change?

This article provides new calculations on the effects of demographic change on living standards in all 30 OECD countries using the latest demographic projections up to 2050 from the United Nations, World Population Prospects, 2004 Revision. The calculations include several potential dividends that could offset, at least in part, the costs of a lower working age population share. The effects of demographic change calculated here are mechanical in that there is no explicit optimising behaviour. In the worst case scenario, which assumes zero potential dividends and no increase in labour force participation rates, the negative effect of demographic change on living standards among OECD countries over the whole period from 2006 to 2050 ranges from zero to 28 per cent, with an average over all countries of 15.5 per cent. In the best case scenario the average effect is zero. About half of the difference between the best and worst case scenarios is accounted for by higher labour force participation and about half by the potential dividends from demographic change.