An exploration of the factors that influence employee participation in Europe

The goal of this study was to identify the determinants of direct employee participation in organizations across Europe. Some factors were predicted to be related to levels of participation in general, namely, competition, sector, the pursuit of a differentiation strategy based on either quality or service, and indirect participation. Two additional factors were expected to be differentially related to two forms of direct participation: consultation and delegation. These factors were organizational size and the pursuit of a cost leadership business strategy. The hypothesized relationships were contrasted using data from the EPOC survey, a representative survey of over 5,700 organizations located in 10 European Union countries. The results supported 11 of the 14 predicted relationships.     

The golden mean: Research on the mechanism of customer participation in employee service innovation

Service innovation is of importance in achieving business success. This study aims to understand how customer participation affects employees' service innovation through zhongyong thinking and verify the moderating role of leadership empowerment in the service section. Data were collected through a paired questionnaire survey with 352 valid frontline employees and their superiors in the starred hotel industry. Multiple linear regressions and bootstrap analysis were performed to examine the hypotheses. The results indicate that customer participation is positively related to zhongyong thinking and service innovation, and zhongyong thinking partially mediates the main effect. In addition, service innovation is more substantial when leadership empowerment is high, and customer participation has a weaker impact on zhongyong thinking when leadership empowerment is low. This study contributes to the employee service innovation literature by confirming that customer participation and employees' zhongyong thinking play vital roles in the Chinese service context. This study also helps service managers understand that empowering their subordinates can facilitate employees' service innovation.     

Cognitive and affective constituents of the consumption experience in retail service settings: effects on store loyalty

Based largely on the recently growing experiential marketing stream, this study explores the joint effects of cognitive assessments of and emotional responses to service experiences on store loyalty in a retail service setting. Experience-related cognitions and store-related cognitions based on evaluations of the service experience, as well as the subsequent positive and negative emotional responses on the part of the customers, are modeled and investigated in terms of effects on store loyalty. Empirical data were collected through a survey of 518 consumers in four coffee shops of two major chains. The results suggest that consumer evaluations of the service experience and store environment may influence store loyalty, both directly and indirectly, through both negative and positive emotional arousals. The relative effects of each construct through different mechanisms are the primary research questions investigated in this study. Managerial implications and future research directions are also discussed.     

Cognitive and affective components of Aad in a low motivation processing set

It was hypothesized that for television ads the cognitive and affective components of A_ad would predict brand attitude in a low motivation processing set, and that the relative influence of the components would be a function of ad execution format. These hypotheses were supported, and it was found that the program context had little influence on the relationships. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Customer participation and citizenship behavioral influences on employee performance, satisfaction, commitment, and turnover intention

Despite increasing awareness of the importance of customer behaviors in service delivery, understanding consequences relating to employees receives little attention. Therefore, using data from a large electronic firm relating to customers, employees, and managers, this study examines the effects of customer participation and citizenship behavior on employee performance, satisfaction and commitment, as well as indirect effects on turnover intention. Furthermore, the study examines how similarity and likeability moderate the effects of customer participation and citizenship behavior on employee satisfaction. The study also includes a laboratory experiment and provides further support for causal direction. The article discusses marketing implications of the results.     

When the uncountable counts: An alternative to monitoring employee performance

This article presents an alternative viewpoint to the accepted wisdom that detailed performance measurement of individual employees is necessary to achieve superior performance. As we reveal, managers of a market-leading German energy distribution company do not utilize performance measures to manage the performance of their employees; rather, operational excellence is achieved through mechanisms ultimately based on trust and responsibility. Building on observations at this firm, we put forward a set of proposed characteristics of companies that may not require formalised individual performance measurement systems in order to achieve high performance standards.     

Corporate social responsibility and employee attitudes: The moderating role of employee age

This study examines the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on employee engagement and job satisfaction. Using 322 responses from employees of selected companies in Ghana, and employing hierarchical regression analysis, the study examines the direct impact of economic, legal, ethical and discretionary CSR practices on employee satisfaction and engagement in organisations. The study further explores the moderating role of employee age on the relationship between CSR and employee engagement and satisfaction. The results provide evidence that economic, legal, ethical and discretionary CSR practices influence higher employee engagement and satisfaction levels at work. However, the study finds no evidence of employee age moderating the association between each of the four CSR dimensions and employee job attitudes (engagement and satisfaction). These findings are insightful and provide a response to calls for research on these issues. The study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that ethical CSR practices strongly influence employees' satisfaction and engagement levels; legal and discretionary CSR activities also have an influence, though to a lesser extent; and the economic dimension of CSR activities has the least impact. The managerial, practical and further research implications of these findings are discussed.     

Bringing the brand to life: Structural conditions of brand-consistent employee behavior

Continuous brand success can be realized only if the brand promise that is communicated through mass media campaigns is lived up to by customer contact employees. In fact, discrepancies in brand experience may lead to customer confusion and dissatisfaction. However, what does that mean to brand managers? A survey among marketing managers shows that a reorganization of brand management routines is needed in order to bring the brand to life: informal management techniques and employee empowerment are required instead of formal management activities. In this article, we elaborate first steps for the implementation and maintenance of behavioral branding considering findings of our survey as well as implications from management focus groups and best practice examples.     

Evoking emotion: affective keys to hotel loyalty

The emotions a guest feels during a hotel stay are critical components of satisfaction and loyalty.     

SMS-based surveys: strategies to improve participation

The advertising industry is increasingly using mobile technology to communicate and research. This paper examines the use of the short messaging service (SMS) on mobile phones to recruit samples for probability web and telephone surveys. The influence of topic salience, sponsor identity and repeated contacts on decision to participate in the survey is tested through an experimental design. Results indicated that sponsor identity and repeated contacts have an effect on decision to participate, but topic salience did not. The majority of respondents preferred the web survey alternative over telephone survey mode, and the main advantage of using SMS is the high speed of response. However, the method appears to elicit higher levels of participation from male and younger members of the population.     

Alleviating job stress to improve service employee work affect: the influence of rewarding

Firms strive to identify interventions that promote customer contact employee (CCE) well-being by mitigating job stress to encourage better service experiences for customers. Drawing on equity theory, this research examines the influences of alternative rewarding approaches on CCE job stress and work-related attitudes, by assessing the effects of intrinsic (social recognition) and extrinsic (monetary) rewarding on CCE job stress, commitment to the organization, and customer orientation. Results of a survey of 220 CCEs from multiple service organizations indicate that social recognition reduces CCE job stress but that, contrary to expectations, monetary rewarding increases it. Moreover, satisfaction with pay has a greater influence on CCE customer orientation than social recognition.     

Opportunities to improve skills and to teach and train others: employee outcomes in the United States and Japan

Opportunities to improve skills and opportunities to teach or train others may be associated with job satisfaction, work engagement and organizational commitment. The analysis reported in this paper used a subsample of 823 employees within two Japanese and three American worksites. We tested not only the direct relationships of each type of training opportunity (to improve skills and to teach or train others) with each of three outcomes (job satisfaction, work engagement and organizational commitment) but also the potential moderating roles of performance orientation, job security and age. The relationships were assessed separately for Japanese and American respondents. The results highlight the importance of opportunities to improve skills for all three outcomes and of opportunities to teach and train for job satisfaction and work engagement. Performance orientation, job security and age generally were not significant moderators and, when they were, the effects were typically restricted to one country. The consistently positive coefficients for training opportunities should provide insight for cross‐national organizations seeking to identify human resource policies effective across varying cultural, economic and demographic contexts.     

How to boost frontline employee service recovery performance: the role of cultural intelligence

Service Business - Satisfying complaining customers is challenging, especially when dealing with the increasing number of customers with culturally diverse backgrounds. The purpose of this study is...     

Defining privacy in employee health screening cases: Ethical ramifications concerning the employee/employer relationship

Issues of privacy and employee health screening rank as two of the most important ethical concerns organizations will face in the next five years. Despite the increasing numbers of social scientists researching personal privacy and the current focus on workplace privacy rights as one of the most dynamic areas of employment law, the concept of privacy remains relatively abstract. Understanding how the courts define privacy and use the expectation of privacy standards is paramount given the strategic importance of the law as a legal socializing agent. This article reports on two federal court decisions involving employer drug and HIV testing whose determinations relied on assumptions about the psychological dimensions of privacy. How the courts define privacy, the outcome of this definition and the ethical ramifications as it affects the employee/employer relationship are discussed.Michele Simms, as an adjunct professor of business communication and organizational behavior, has taught at the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Oakland University schools of business in Michigan. In addition to teaching, she consults in the areas of worksite wellness, alternative dispute resolution, transition management and change.     

Buying a sponsor's brand: the role of affective commitment to the sponsored team

Sponsorship is increasingly important in a firm's communication mix. Research to date has focused on the impact of sponsorship on brand awareness and its subsequent consequences for image congruency and consumer attitudes towards sponsors' brands. A lesser studied area is the effect of sponsorship on consumers' purchase intentions and behaviours. We argue that existing models of sponsorship driven purchase behaviour fail to account for affective commitment, which mediates relationship between affiliation with the team and social identification with the team. We propose a modified framework describing the effect of sponsorship on purchase intentions in the context of low and high performing sports teams. The framework is tested using structural equations modelling; employing PLS estimation and data collected via online survey of AFL chat room participants. Results confirm the role of affective commitment in sport sponsorship purchase intentions and indicate that team success has a significant influence on fans' purchase behaviours.     

Value co-creation and employee service behaviours: The moderating role of trust in employee - hotel relationship

Value co-creation (VC) is generally considered as having mutually beneficial implications for all actors involved. Nonetheless, emerging evidence on value co-destruction and its consequences on the wellbeing of co-creating actors implies that narrowing down on specific fallouts of this process is needed for managerial interventions. This paper contributes to the value-co-creation literature by exploring the relationship between customer participation in VC on some difficult to detect employee service behaviors: workaholism and fear-based silence. The extent to which employee trust (TRS) in employee – hotel relationship moderates these relations is assessed. While the findings from 422 frontline employee-customer data within luxury hotels in Ghana support a negative effect of VC on fear-based silence and workaholism, TRS buffered these effects. We recommend that VC in service failure and recovery be approached with tact, compassion, and forgiveness.     

Identifying the employee of the future

Hewlett-Packard evaluated its future marketing needs and compared it to the capabilities of current employees. This case study is an example of how other companies can ensure they have the best people to meet their strategic goals.