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...     

Those Who Know,Do. Those Who Understand,Teach. Disseminative Capability and Knowledge Transfer in the Automotive Industry

Innovations in the automotive industry are increasingly building on contributions from different technological fields. Correspondingly, firms in this industry more than ever tend to form research and development (R&D) alliances that aim at innovating new products through integrating separate fields and transferring knowledge. While, in symmetrical R&D alliances, each partner intends to ultimately maintain their distinctive and specialized knowledge base, overlapping knowledge facilitates cooperation and ultimately alliance success. Thus, the capability for knowledge transfer between partners is crucial in such R&D alliances. The literature provides ample evidence that such knowledge transfer is more likely to succeed if the recipient firm has absorptive capability. However, whereas the characteristics of the knowledge transfer process and the recipient firm are well understood, limited attention has so far been given to the issue of the knowledge source firm's ability to transfer knowledge to R&D alliance partners. This study focuses on the impact of source firm capability on successful knowledge transfer in R&D alliances. The study develops a theoretical framework of disseminative capability consisting of five dimensions and tests it on a sample of 59 projects in R&D alliances in the automotive industry. To ensure content validity and avoid common source bias, data were collected from both alliance partners. To test the hypotheses, multiple regression analyses were performed. The results reveal that the source firm's disseminative capability including the attainment of expert knowledge, assessing the recipient firm's knowledge base, and encoding knowledge are positively related to knowledge transfer success, while, surprisingly, detaching knowledge and support of knowledge application in the recipient firm are negatively related. Intentionally or unintentionally, disseminating knowledge across firm boundaries is widely perceived as detrimental to a firm's competitive advantage. Accordingly, the literature tends to downplay disseminative capability as an important means of exploiting external knowledge in collaborative settings. By demonstrating potential benefits for the source firm to transfer knowledge to the allying R&D partner firm, this paper reinvigorates the collaborative dimension in knowledge transfer. Further, the paper is the first of this kind to theoretically explain and empirically show that dimensions of disseminative capability of collaborators in R&D alliances are important for knowledge transfer, whereas disseminative capability is the complementary inverse of an organization's absorptive capacity.     

WAGE FLOORS,IMPERFECT PERFORMANCE MEASURES,AND OPTIMAL JOB DESIGN

We analyze the effects of wage floors on optimal job design in a moral‐hazard model with asymmetric tasks and imperfect aggregate performance measurement. Due to cost advantages of specialization, assigning the tasks to different agents is efficient. A sufficiently high wage floor, however, induces the principal to dismiss one agent or to even exclude tasks from the production process. Imperfect performance measurement always lowers profit under multitasking, but may increase profit under specialization. We further show that variations in the wage floor and the agents' reservation utility have significantly different effects on welfare and optimal job design.     

The Transformation of a Neutral Lake Landscape into a Meaningful Experience – Interpreting Tourist Photos

The purpose of this article is to present the mental images of the Finnish lakeland held by potential Italian and German tourists. Image analysis was used in order to find the attributes tourists connect to pictures of lake landscape and to their own mental images of the places shown. The attributes found were classified under categories through which the touristic potential of the lake could be approached. The mental images evoked by the pictures emerging in the present study are individual and cultural at the same time. Although the individual nature of the mental images became prominent in the analysis, there were identifiable similarities in them. From the marketing point of view, each picture proved to have a special function in a given country. The respondents approached the pictures both as outside observers and as participating actors. The transformation of a neutral lake landscape into a meaningful experience depended on the mental images evoked by both the aesthetic content of the picture and its internal elements. The neutral lake landscape was turned into a meaningful place through the experiences and sensations the respondents attached to the pictures.