Search results

Researchers have examined the influence of the factors on reducing return rates in retailing over the years. However, the returns experience is often an overlooked way to drive customer engagement and repeat sales in the now ubiquitous omnichannel setting. The focus on returns prevention in existing research overshadows management’s need to understand better the comprehensive mechanics linking the customer in-store return experience with their repurchase actions. Recognizing the need to bridge different stages of the returns management process, this research aims to explore the facilitators and barriers of in-store return activities.

Analysis of customer corporate data from 5,339 returns at the retail level provides insights from the customer return experience. Expanding our theoretical understanding, a deductive research approach then examines how those factors impact customer repurchase intentions both online and at brick-and-mortar stores. Stage two of the study employs a scenario-based role-playing experiment with consumer respondents to test hypotheses derived from signaling theory and justice theory.

Results find that returns policy and loyalty program capabilities are essential in creating a positive customer in-store experience. Moreover, a return experience enhanced by frontline employee service can retain existing shoppers and drive additional store traffic, further stimulating retailer sales.

These findings refine our understanding of returns management in evolving omnichannel retailing and offer practical insights for retailers to manage customer relationships through in-store returns.

This research explores the paradigm of coopetition and the different theories that contribute to its evolution. The variation of cooperation and competition in a relationship depends on the resource flows identified in the literature. However, this research focusses on coopetition behaviours in the business world. Coopetition, simultaneous collaboration, and competition between firms, has emerged as a pivotal factor influencing organisational success in today's dynamic business environment. Based on game theory, the different types of competitive relationships between adversaries will also be presented in this chapter, where the interdependencies between the players and their choices to co-operate or compete are explored. Another perspective presented is how companies use game theory to achieve gains in both zero-sum and non-zero-sum games by changing the players, the perceptions of risk, the associated returns, and the rules and scope of the game. This chapter also will show the prisoner's dilemma applied to business practices. Finally, we present the ‘tit-for-tat’ theory of strategy. The conclusion underscores the need for organisations to navigate a delicate balance between collaboration and competition to thrive in a complex and interconnected tourism global marketplace.

Financial services firms have a significant societal responsibility to prevent issues. The three lines model helps them do that though faces challenges in its effectiveness. This paper aims to offer a behavioural perspective on these challenges and practical solutions to help improve the model and herewith better prevent issues.

The authors detail key behavioural pitfalls and underlying psychological mechanisms that hinder the effectiveness of the model. The authors illustrate these with examples from the corporate practice, alluding to the behavioural patterns and drivers identified in the academic and consultancy work. The authors conclude with offering practical solutions how to enhance the effectiveness of the model.

The authors discuss common ineffective intergroup behaviours between the controllers (here: internal audit) and the controlled (here: the audited business or 2nd line functions): the controllers responding to issues with increased scrutiny; the controlled dismissing the feedback and challenging the issues raised; and the controlled and the controller competing for power. The root causes of these ineffective intergroup behaviours include: psychological defence mechanisms, social categorisation and collective beliefs about intrusiveness. The offered solutions range from actions the controllers can take, actions the controlled can take and actions both can take to improve the effectiveness of the model in practice.

The authors argue that the behavioural perspective on the effectiveness of the model is a blind spot and largely omitted from organisations’ agendas. This paper adds this behavioural perspective to help organisations improve the effectiveness of the model.

This study aims to examine protean career attitude (PCA) and proactive work-behavior (PWB) conceptually and empirically by assessing the mediating role of leader-member exchange (LMX) in the context of 21st-century organizational challenges and transitions. The interaction of three theories underpinned the research framework. The theoretical model is based on LMX theory, career motivation theory (CMT) and self- determination theory (SDT) to investigate the implications of the banking sector.

Research methodology is based on quantitative and deductive research approaches. The quantitative survey was conducted with a sample size of 325 banking sector employees. The SEM technique was used with SmartPLS software to test the direct and indirect effects of the proposed hypothesis.

The empirical analysis revealed that PCA fosters LMX. The results indicate an indirect effect between PCA and PWB. LMX completely mediates the relationship between PCA and PWB. Conceptually, it is proven that in the 21st century, the traditional career management approach is a big challenge for managers and organizations.

This study holds implications for HR managers, CEOs, institutional employers and HRD practitioners in the context of 21st-century organizational challenges and transitions to understand the phenomenon of PCA instead of a traditional career approach. This study will help managers link their retention strategy with consequence factors, i.e. LMX and PWB.

This study will help to bridge the gap between the literature on PCA, PWB and LMX. It provides managers with a conceptual understanding of the phenomenon of the LMX construct with empirical evidence. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this would be the first study conducted in the context of the banking industry in Pakistan and an empirical and theoretical attempt to correlate PCA and PWB with LMX to get a high banking employee retention rate. More interestingly, the study is theoretically underpinned by CMT, LMX theory and SDT.

Working conditions, pay rates and the rights of workers to collectively negotiate have become important points of discussions in recent years, with support for unions and union applications rising to levels long unseen in America. In many instances, though, companies have responded aggressively. This is not the first time such a dynamic has played out in American business. This study aims to take a fresh look at one of America’s most prominent historical disputes between labor and ownership – the Homestead Massacre of 1892 – to glean lessons from that conflict that remain relevant to today’s business environment.

This study adopts game theory and the principles of repeated interaction to assess how differing discount factors led to differences in time orientations between the workers and the Carnegie company. These differing time orientations affected both the strategy each side deployed in the negotiations and the payoffs received by the parties. Letters, contemporary news reports and histories of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1892 Homestead Massacre are qualitatively analyzed with a genealogical pragmatic approach.

Differences in temporal orientation between management and workers exacerbated the conflict, with the workers adopting a more cooperative stance and distal time orientation, while the Carnegie company negotiated with a proximal time orientation and played to “win” a game that, in fact, could not be fully won or lost given its infinitely repeating nature. The result was a short-term victory for the Carnegie company but with long-term negative consequences that highlight the suboptimal outcome the company achieved by playing a proximal strategy in an infinite game.

Although the incident at Homestead is a well-studied labor dispute, many of the themes that preceded the incident have resurfaced in the modern work context. This work, by adopting game theory as an analytical framework, provides new insights into management mistakes that led to the labor conflict and lessons for what present-day managers can do to avoid exacerbating labor strife.

Sustainability features in the national and local policies of many countries, but there is often a lack of clarity about what it means in practice. Interpretations of sustainable development (or sustainable cities and places) vary widely between different countries and social, economic, political, and environmental actors and interest groups influenced by underlying values and specific contexts. Considering the already-felt impacts of rapid climate change and ecological breakdown, continuing with business as usual will add more pollution, resource depletion, and lead to economic and societal turmoil under a massive shift or collapse in ecological and climate systems. A significant factor in past and current policy failures is that “weak” rather than “strong” sustainability models have been adopted laced with a voter-enticing rhetoric yet delaying painful (to the current status quo), but essential, changes in production and consumption and a shift in focus away from profit toward human and ecological well-being. This requires clear and ambitious legal, regulatory, and policy frameworks, yet also flexible approaches and “agency” of citizens, employees, employers, and politicians for transformation across different geographical and institutional levels, moving away from competition and greed, making room for experimentation and creativity and old and new forms of collaboration and sharing. Relevant concepts, principles, examples and critiques can be gleaned from the ecological economic, social–ecological transformation, and planning literature, offering direction for the kinds of shifts in placemaking to achieve social and environmental justice and well-being.

This study aims to investigate the influence of network power on exploratory and exploitative innovation and examines the moderating effects of power distance and procedural justice on these untested relationships.

This study uses survey data collected from firms in China and explores the influential mechanisms of network power, power distance and procedural justice in firm innovation.

This study empirically shows that network power has an inverted U-shaped effect on exploratory and exploitative innovation. Power distance weakens the effect of network power on exploratory and exploitative innovation, and procedural justice enhances the effect of network power on exploratory and exploitative innovation.

This study extends resource dependence theory and contributes to the literature on innovation management. Future studies should use different collection channels or research methods to provide more evidence for model promotion. In addition, the dynamic power game among network members and the roles of other mediators or moderators warrant further consideration.

Managers should exercise power strategies properly and ensure that their innovation income exceeds expenditures. Managers need to pay serious attention to power distance and procedural justice in the network and formulate suitable cooperation strategies based on actual conditions.

This study applies the resource dependence theory to investigate the influence of network power on exploratory and exploitative innovation. In addition, the moderating roles of power distance and procedural justice in the above relationships, which have rarely been discussed in previous studies, were tested.