Corporate greed: its effect on customer satisfaction,corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation among bank customers

Corporate greed has received increasing attention in recent years with various stories hitting the headlines, particularly after the global financial crisis and the ensuing negative attitudes toward banks. Customer satisfaction and corporate social responsibility are known to have a positive effect on corporate reputation among customers, but perceived corporate greed is likely to impede their effect. Corporate greed, customer satisfaction, corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation are considered, and a research model is proposed. Results indicate that the effect of corporate greed is stronger on corporate social responsibility than on customer satisfaction, implying that corporate social responsibility activities may be futile if the company is perceived to be acting greedily by its customers. Thus, perceptions of corporate greed need to be dealt with swiftly, to enable management to enhance the corporate reputation of the firm.     

Chinese Regions in the Great Divergence: Provincial Gross Domestic Product per Capita, 1873–1918

We construct 1912/18 Chinese provincial gross domestic product per capita from primary sources and project cross‐sections for 1873 and 1893. The results fit the historical record. We hypothesise that regionally specific conflicts have a role to play in explaining differential growth rates, and that geography, governance, and sectoral structures explain relative income‐level rankings. China's richest provinces matched Europe's poorest. A divergence did indeed occur, but our estimates show that at a broader economic level, it was perhaps not as dramatic as some of the literature implies.     

Feeling successful as an entrepreneur: a job demands — resources approach

This cross-sectional study among 277 Dutch entrepreneurs investigates how entrepreneurs’ job demands relate to their work-related strain and work engagement, as well as their feelings of subjective success. As such it contributes to the literature firstly by focusing on psychological rather than business outcomes of entrepreneurship, and secondly by contextualizing demands and resources for entrepreneurs, e.g. capturing the general but also the specific factors that are demands and resources in entrepreneurial work. Results of the study show that work-related strain is related to both less personal and less financial subjective business success. Work engagement is related to higher personal, but not financial subjective business success. As predicted by the JD-R Model, both high job demands and low job resources predicted work-related strain. In contrast to findings of other studies, high job demands are not related to low work engagement, only having low job resources did. The practical implication of these findings is that entrepreneurs can achieve an important competitive advantage over other entrepreneurs if they can learn to deal effectively with job demands and work-related strain. The challenge for policy makers is to get more information about how to assist business owners in eliminating and preventing work-related strain in order to achieve higher subjective financial and personal success.     

Are There Excellent Service Firms,and Do They Perform Well?

While the construct of business excellence, as defined in the very successful hook by Peters and Waterman, had a marked influence on managers in the 1980s, and in all likelihood in the 1990s, it met with some scepticism in academic circles. This was because the construct as conceptualised did not meet the more rigorous requirements of reliability and validity established by critical researchers, and also because many of the so-called excellent firms later showed themselves to be rather ordinary performers at best. Recently, an apparently successful instrument to measure the original Peters and Waterman excellence construct named EXCEL has been developed by Shama et al., in the United States. In this article the authors describe the use of EXCEL in a sample of large UK service firms and comment on its reliability and validity. Links are also established between excellence and overrall business performance in these firms.     

How corporate reputation,quality, and value influence online loyalty

This study considers the role of corporate reputation and its relation to quality, perceived value, and loyalty in an online context. This milieu potentially challenges the relevance of the reported findings from the more traditional retail marketing situations. In this respect, a number of important questions are raised concerning how perceived value and quality impact on online loyalty and the effect corporate reputation has on this process. Research was conducted among customers of two diverse online vendors, one dealing in books and the other in shares. Findings from the two samples suggest that corporate reputation has a direct effect on online loyalty and provides an important mediating effect for perceived value and aspects of quality in terms of their impact on online loyalty.     

Elements of a talent strategy for effective relationship building: A study among bank sales and service providers

This study considers equity sensitivity, emotional labor and organizational commitment as three important variables that play a critical role among sales and service providers at a bank and the effect these variables ultimately have on corporate performance. Using an equity theory perspective, research hypotheses linking the various constructs are formulated. Data are collected from sales and service managers at a community bank and partial aggregation followed by structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses. Results are reported, implications to a bank’s talent strategy are drawn, limitations are noted and directions for future research are indicated.     

Information Gathering and Marketing

Consumers have only partial knowledge before making a purchase decision, but can acquire more‐detailed information. Marketing makes it easier or harder for these consumers to do so. When consumers are ex ante heterogeneous, the firm might choose an intermediate marketing strategy for two quite different reasons. First, as a nonprice means of discrimination—it can make information only partially available, in a way that induces some, but not all, consumers to acquire the information. Second, when the firm cannot commit to a given investment in ensuring quality, the marketing and pricing strategy can act as a commitment device.