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This paper aims to present a methodology for the prioritization of innovations and improvements in services and products that integrates penalty–reward contrast analysis (PRCA) and improvement gap analysis (IGA).

The presented method is theoretically developed and simulated. It uses a case study with 290 clients of supermarkets, evaluating 16 attributes of this service, to demonstrate the advantages of integrating PRCA and IGA.

The integration of PRCA and IGA provides benefits that outweigh the use of each method individually. The joint use of these methods allows the identification of possible nonlinear impact of attributes on customers’ overall satisfaction, allowing managerial recommendations to be made with greater discriminatory power, in addition to qualifying the identification of innovative attributes.

Managers must be aware of the effect of the interaction of innovative attributes with attributes already used by the company. At the same time, it is appropriate to verify whether there is potential to improve the existing attributes. The literature shows that PRCA identifies the nonlinear influence of customers’ satisfaction with individual attributes on overall satisfaction, but it fails to identify the possible impact of innovative attributes. In turn, IGA identifies innovative attributes but does not identify how the attributes influence overall satisfaction. Thus, the benefits of integrating PRCA and IGA outweigh the individual limitations of each method, thereby increasing the quality of managerial recommendations. Moreover, a limitation of PRCA makes this method useful for identifying innovative attributes in relation to attractive attributes identified by the IGA method.

The purpose of this paper is to present a practical instrument for self-evaluation of maturity in the processes of procurement and supply management, applicable to small and medium-size companies, as well as to show how the use of this evaluation tool may help companies to decide what to improve in these processes.

Based on an empirical and theoretical framework, the instrument developed measures the maturity of procurement and supply management activities in four macro-processes: materials management, purchase process, supplier evaluation process and process of procurement planning. For testing the self-evaluation instrument, the authors evaluated the maturity of 48 hospitals and 37 metal-mechanic manufacturing companies located in the southern region of Brazil. To show how to use this tool to decide what to improve in procurement and supply processes, the authors conducted a comparative analysis of a hospital and a metal-mechanic company, in relation to the sample of the same segment.

The results show that the instrument is reliable for practical application. Metal-mechanic industries have a greater maturity in the purchase process than in the other three macro-processes. The management of materials is the most mature macro-process in hospitals. Comparing hospitals to metal-mechanic companies, the present research shows that, between 20 and 99 employees, hospitals tend to have a higher level of maturity in the purchase process than metal-mechanic companies. With 100 employees or more, metal-mechanic companies are more mature than hospitals in procurement planning and in selection/evaluation of suppliers.

Presenting a useful self-evaluation instrument, this work demonstrates that the measurement of the maturity level, and benchmarking it with other companies, may help a firm to decide what to improve in its processes of procurement and materials management, showing how an economic sector can understand itself better. Few scientific studies have practical application to the assessment of the degree of maturity of procurement and supply management processes. Besides that the authors did not find other papers presenting a comparison of different segments.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how to use customer spontaneous comments to identify which aspects influence the overall customer satisfaction with restaurant services from a nonlinear perspective.

The authors collected data from 399 spontaneous comments about a chain of fast-food restaurants in Brazil. The comments are freely available on the TripAdvisor portal and were extracted and classified according to seven dimensions related to the quality of services: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, quality of the food and price. Next, the authors combine the critical incident technique (CIT) and the penalty-reward contrast analysis (PRCA) to investigate the nonlinear relationship between service quality assessment and overall customer satisfaction.

The method of integrating CIT with PRCA explains 64.7% of the variation in the customer's assessment of the services provided (RAdj2 = 0.647). This shows that spontaneous comments from customers are related to their overall satisfaction with the service provided. Besides, the findings suggest that consumers tend to comment more about positive than negative experiences regarding aspects related to food, attendants' empathy and service assurance, and more negative comments about aspects related to responsiveness and price. However, it was found that negative comments have a stronger influence on overall satisfaction than positive comments.

Using comments available for free on the Internet and evaluating how positive and negative comments can jointly influence customer satisfaction, the proposed methodology demonstrates how restaurants can use their customers' spontaneous comments to identify critical aspects to be managed and improved. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study presenting how restaurants can use customer spontaneous comments, freely available on the internet, to identify the relevance of different aspects of the services provided from a nonlinear perspective. In addition, the present study shows that although customers spontaneously tend to share more positive than negative comments about restaurant services, events related to negative experiences have a stronger influence on overall satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the nonlinear impact of users’ memories on their general evaluation of outpatient healthcare services by the integration of two methodologies: critical incidents technique (CIT) and penalty-reward contrast analysis (PRCA).

The authors carried out a survey with 356 respondents, users of seven outpatient clinics located in the city of Blumenau/SC, Brazil, during 2016. The participants were asked about their perceptions of positive and negative aspects of the service; and, using CIT, the answers were categorized according to the following dimensions: empathy, communication, facilities, access, promptness, medicines availability, complementary services, safety/confidentiality and service performance. Then, the authors evaluated the nonlinear impact of critical incidents on users’ general evaluation of the service using the identified incidents as input variables in a PRCA.

The findings show that users of healthcare services tend to remember emotion and health aspects positively, while technical and formal aspects tend to be more negatively than positively remembered. On the other hand, PRCA identifies that incidents of three dimensions positively influence the overall perception of the service (empathy, complementary services and privacy) and five negatively (empathy, facilities, speed, drugs/pharmacy and health performance), explaining 26.3 percent of the variation in clients’ general satisfaction.

The present paper explores the integration of two methodologies, showing how we can use open listening to healthcare service users to identify the nonlinear impact of different incidents on their general evaluation of the service. The results show that what customers remember does not necessarily influence overall customer satisfaction. The present approach allows companies to improve the process of listening to customers. There are no other papers exploring this approach, particularly in relation to healthcare services.

This paper aims to identify the influence of dimensions of movie theater service on customer behavior intention, comparing linear and nonlinear methods.

With a sample of 345 cinema customers, the analysis compares penalty–reward contrast analysis (PRCA) and multiple linear regression analysis (MLR).

This research demonstrates that PRCA brings a better identification of the antecedents of customer behavior intention than MLR, showing that a nonlinear analysis can bring superior decision information to movie theater managers. Also, this study shows that superior performance of aspects related to the client's feelings leads the consumer to a tendency to return and recommend the cinema (behavior intention). This study also confirms that successful recovery actions can compensate for failures.

Although the nonlinear antecedents of customer satisfaction have been studied in the scientific literature, there is a gap of studies applying methods to identify nonlinear antecedents of customer behavior intention (tendency to return and recommend), particularly in the industry of movie theater services. The findings of this research may allow movie theaters to improve the service provided, confronting the great challenges of online movie-watching alternatives.

Based on the principles of positive psychology, this study aims to investigate the mediating role of job characteristics (task, knowledge, social and work context) in the connection between lean manufacturing (LM) practices and employee well-being.

Employee well-being, encompassing job satisfaction, organizational affective commitment and work involvement, is conceptualized as a second-order construct. Using a proposed model, an online survey was administered to 520 participants across 23 operational sectors categories of the Brazilian manufacturing industry. The data is processed using structural equation analysis.

The research shows that the relationship between LM practices and employee well-being is partially mediated through three out of the four work characteristics (task, knowledge and social). In addition, LM exerts a direct and significant influence on employee well-being.

This study contributes to practical insights by encouraging industrial managers to refine their managerial work design. It highlights the importance of appropriately dimensioning tasks, nurturing social skills to enhance interactions and task execution and optimizing physical facilities to counteract potential initial-stage work intensification during LM implementation.

Previous research about organizational behavior extensively examines happiness at work, focusing on constructs such as well-being, satisfaction, commitment, engagement and motivation, but there is a lack of studies assessing employee well-being in the lean context, particularly from a positive perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to study the nonlinear impact of quality dimensions of third-party logistics (3PL) services on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

By interviewing 167 small-size companies, and using penalty and reward contrast analysis, the paper explores the nonlinear impact of seven dimensions of 3PL services (safety, fault’s recovery, reliability, speed, flexibility, communication, and friendliness) on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The results confirm the existence of the dimensions’ nonlinear impact on customer satisfaction. It also shows that some quality dimensions have a direct and nonlinear impact on loyalty. The dimension “friendliness” has a direct impact on loyalty if the company has a below market average performance, which may lead customers to switch service providers. “Flexibility on collection and delivery” has a direct impact if the company has a higher performance, contributing to customers’ intention to continue using the service. Another finding is that, if the company delivers good service recovery after the customer found faults in the service, and if customers trust the company service, they say they intend to continue to work with the company.

The present research focused only on small companies in one country (Brazil). Further studies should be carried out to explore different countries, with different realities, and different size of companies.

3PL companies should not only deal with customers’ satisfaction, but also with other quality aspects that directly affect customer intention to continue doing business with the 3PL service provider. These are friendliness, flexibility regarding time and frequency of collection and delivery and faults’ recovery.

The present research confirms that the personal relationship is a crucial aspect to be managed in order to keep customers in the long term. In addition, as opposed to most research looking for the antecedents of satisfaction and loyalty of 3PL customers, the present research shows that there is a direct nonlinear impact of the dimensions’ performance on customers’ loyalty, what should be taken in consideration by 3PL managers. It also shows how penalty-reward contrast analysis may reveal nonlinear antecedents that could be used for better understandings companies’ success in the long term.

This research aims to investigate the role of transformational leadership and organizational culture – encompassing Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchical and Market Cultures – in the context of work–life balance for healthcare workers. It aims to present a comparison of observations made pre and mid-pandemic.

A structured questionnaire was utilized to collect data from a varied sample of 355 employees (258 before and 97 during the pandemic) representing multiple sectors and positions within a hospital. The interpretation of the data was accomplished using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM).

Findings reveal that prior to the pandemic, transformational leadership significantly influenced all forms of organizational culture perceptions, with a strong influence on Clan Culture. Clan Culture displayed a consistent positive correlation with WLB both before and during the pandemic. During the pandemic, Market Culture exhibited a negative effect on WLB and Adhocracy Culture demonstrated a positive effect, impacts which were absent before the pandemic. Transformational leadership had a positive impact on WLB before the pandemic, but no discernible effect during the pandemic was observed.

The results indicate that the dynamics between transformational leadership, organizational culture and work–life balance are susceptible to alterations in the face of external crisis events. This study offers a unique exploration of these dynamics in the healthcare sector during the ongoing global pandemic.

This paper analyses the relationship between subjective well-being (SWB) and perceived organisational culture (POC) with the individual propensity to innovation (IPI).

To empirically test the hypotheses, the sample and data were collected through a cross-sectional survey with 614 professionals who work in Technological Knowledge-Intensive Business Service (T-Kibs) in Brazil. For data analysis, the authors applied the partial least squares path modelling (PLS-PM) algorithm.

The results identify that employees' perception of the organisational culture has a direct and indirect impact on the IPI. The perception of employees about the dimensions of clan and adhocracy of organisational culture influences the SWB of employees, which has a significant relationship with the individual propensity to innovation. Also, the perception of a market culture has a direct impact on the individual propensity to innovate. The results showed that the adhocracy culture has a more significant influence on the SWB of the female gender.

This work contributes to the expansion of scientific studies in the area of innovation, in addition to managerial contributions due to the identification of the factors that influence the IPI.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model to measure maturity in value co-creation practices and to evaluate its relationship with the market performance of textile companies.

The data were obtained through quantitative research with 100 companies of the Brazilian textile sector. A structural equation modeling was performed to verify the relationship between the constructs of the proposed model.

The results confirm the proposed model and show that, in addition to a direct impact, the relationship between the maturity of value co-creation practices and market performance also occurs indirectly, by meeting customer expectations. Value co-creation processes can meet customer expectations, leading the company to better market performance.

A model for assessing the maturity of value co-creation practices enables companies to diagnose their current situation, thereby supporting them in managing these practices and leading to better market performance.