David E. Fleming and Jon M. Hawes
Given the ever-increasing complexity of business-to-business exchange, success is contingent on being able to adapt to any given situation. However, there is little in the way of…
Abstract
Purpose
Given the ever-increasing complexity of business-to-business exchange, success is contingent on being able to adapt to any given situation. However, there is little in the way of guidance for how to adapt when it comes to negotiations. This paper aims to help business and industrial marketing professionals “get it right” by introducing a new tool which can be used to determine the appropriateness of using a distributive or an integrative approach for a given negotiation interaction.
Design/methodology/approach
To develop this tool, the authors identify key situational factors in the negotiating context that serve as indicators of the appropriate orientation (integrative or distributive) that should be applied based on the extant negotiation literature. From this, they develop a framework to guide negotiators in their selection of an orientation for a particular interaction to achieve the best possible outcome.
Findings
The tool developed from the literature review and termed the “Negotiation Scorecard” enables business-to-business marketers to better gauge the negotiation context and develop an interaction style consistent with that situation. This can lead to better deals and/or enhanced long-term relationships within business and industrial marketing channels.
Originality/value
This tool is the first of its kind to provide negotiators with a structured and quantifiable metric to guide their planning for future negotiation interactions and offers proscriptive guidance as to the types of strategies and tactics they should plan to use and that they should expect to encounter.
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Omer Topaloglu and David E. Fleming
The paper aims to provide a theoretical and empirical examination of the relationship between service expectation management, expectation inducing agent and customer satisfaction.
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to provide a theoretical and empirical examination of the relationship between service expectation management, expectation inducing agent and customer satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the disconfirmation paradigm in services and the promise-keeping premise in psychology, the hypotheses are developed and empirically tested using three experiments that manipulated expectations, expectation inducing agent and service outcome.
Findings
The findings provide reconciliation to the previous studies in services and show that effectiveness of expectation management strategy depends on the individual expectation thresholds and the expectation inducing agent. If customers patronize a firm expecting more, then over-delivering on the service promise results in a significant benefit. However, for those customers whose mental expectation threshold is exceeded, keeping promises is as effective as exceeding promises.
Practical implications
The practical implication of this paper is that services managers should be cognizant of the mental expectation threshold of customers and be wise in utilizing the under-promise, over-deliver strategy.
Originality/value
Using a threshold approach, this paper introduces a new perspective to service practitioners who are trying to manage expectations in a highly variable business environment. It also benefits service researchers who are trying to enhance the understanding of service expectation management.
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Eric G. Harris and David E. Fleming
The purpose of this study is to more closely examine the trait antecedents and outcomes of frontline employee productivity propensity. The study is the first to use a job…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to more closely examine the trait antecedents and outcomes of frontline employee productivity propensity. The study is the first to use a job demands-resources perspective on productivity propensity and it reveals that the inclusion of the construct into service worker personality studies significantly improves the explanatory ability of hypothesized models.
Design/methodology/approach
The study follows a job demands-resources perspective and uses an empirical study that included two subsamples: banking and health care. Path analyses were performed using two-group modeling to test the hypotheses. Mediation and hierarchical regressions were also used.
Findings
The findings indicate that the conscientiousness trait has a consistent effect on productivity propensity. More importantly, the findings reveal that productivity propensity influences role ambiguity, job satisfaction and self-rated service performance and that the addition of the construct into personality studies significantly improves the explanatory ability of personality models.
Research limitations/implications
This study presents further evidence that productivity propensity is an important construct in services research. Beyond previously established influences on bottom-line service productivity and manager-rated work performance, the current work indicates that it also influences FLE stress, engagement and work outcomes.
Practical implications
Managers work under pressures to ensure service productivity and are well aware of the importance of selecting job applicants who will fit the service role. This study provides additional evidence that the productivity propensity work resource should be considered when selecting employees. The work also suggests that customer workload and the standardization of the service environment impacts the influence of productivity propensity on service outcomes.
Social implications
Given the importance of transformative service experiences that uplift the experiences of consumers and employees, the productivity propensity of frontline service employees not only impacts the ability of the employee to satisfy customer needs, but also leads the employee to experience increased job satisfaction.
Originality/value
This work is the first work to consider the effects of productivity propensity from a job demands-resources perspective and, as such, the first to examine the influence of the construct on job satisfaction and service delivery.
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David E. Fleming, Andrew B. Artis and Jon M. Hawes
Service firms can improve their adaptability in turbulent environments with knowledgeable employees. Self-directed learning (SDL) is one way that employees can improve knowledge…
Abstract
Purpose
Service firms can improve their adaptability in turbulent environments with knowledgeable employees. Self-directed learning (SDL) is one way that employees can improve knowledge, but this research area has not examined the role of technology in employee learning. This paper aims to discuss these points.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses nested regression to test hypotheses about the relationships between employee affinity for technology (AFT) and perceived corporate affinity for technology (PCAFT) on SDL project use in financial services employees, and extends Artis and Harris' conceptual SDL model.
Findings
The relationship between the antecedents and SDL project use depends on the type of project: induced, synergistic, voluntary or scanning. The main effect of AFT impacts all except induced projects. The main effect of PCAFT only influences synergistic projects. The interaction term influences induced and scanning projects.
Research limitations/implications
This paper provides the first empirical test of antecedents of SDL project use in the marketing literature. Limitations include that only employees from financial services were used; future research is needed to determine generalizability.
Practical implications
These findings show that what motivates employees to engage in SDL project can be a selection or an internal communication issue depending on project type. This should help managers to determine what steps can be taken to encourage employee use of SDL projects.
Originality/value
Academically, this is the first paper in marketing to empirically test antecedents of SDL projects use and provides empirical support of Clardy's SDLP typology. Managerially, this is the first empirical guidance on how firms can increase employee SDL project use to enhance knowledge.
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Eric G. Harris and David E. Fleming
This purpose of this paper is to explore the role of service personality in services marketing and service marketing communications. Central to the study is the influence of…
Abstract
Purpose
This purpose of this paper is to explore the role of service personality in services marketing and service marketing communications. Central to the study is the influence of perceived customer‐service personality congruency on service outcomes. The causal ordering of perceived customer‐service personality congruency, service perceptions, and service outcomes, is considered. The study also explores the ability of the Five Factor Model traits to explain additional variance in perceived personality congruency beyond the Brand Personality Scale.
Design/methodology/approach
Empirical data were gathered via survey administration from 200 customers and 132 employees of a major banking institution. Hierarchical regression analysis and t‐tests were performed to analyze the data.
Research limitations/implications
The findings suggest that service personality assessments should include measures of the human personality and that perspectives from both employees and customers should be included in service personality assessment.
Practical implications
Managers gain much by considering the service personality construct and its influence on service perceptions. Employees directly influence customer perceptions of the firm, and managers should therefore be aware of the types of messages that employees send regarding the service. Human resource departments therefore play central roles in the management of service personality, and employee selection devices are especially important when considering which employees may best fit within the desired service personality.
Originality/value
The value of this paper lies in its ability to delineate more clearly the effects of perceived customer‐service personality congruency and the role that the Five Factor Model traits play in perceived service performance.
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In this chapter we investigate the response of bond markets to macroeconomic news announcements in the euro area. Specifically, we analyze the impact of (un)expected changes in…
Abstract
In this chapter we investigate the response of bond markets to macroeconomic news announcements in the euro area. Specifically, we analyze the impact of (un)expected changes in the interest rate, unemployment rate, consumer confidence index and industrial production index on the returns, volatility and correlations of European government bond markets. Overall, our results suggest that, bond return volatility strongly reacts to news announcements and that the response is asymmetric. However, the influence of macroeconomic news announcements appears insignificant for bond returns. Finally, our results paint a complex picture of the effect of macroeconomic news releases on correlations.
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THE centenary celebration is that of the apparently prosaic public library acts ; it is not the centenary of libraries which are as old as civilization. That is a circumstance…
Abstract
THE centenary celebration is that of the apparently prosaic public library acts ; it is not the centenary of libraries which are as old as civilization. That is a circumstance which some may have overlooked in their pride and enthusiasm for the public library. But no real librarian of any type will fail to rejoice in the progress to which the celebration is witness. For that has been immense. We are to have a centenary history of the Public Library Movement—that is not its title—from the Library Association. We do not know if it will be available in London this month; we fear it will not. We do know its author, Mr. W. A. Munford, has spent many months in research for it and that he is a writer with a lucid and individual Style. We contemplate his task with a certain nervousness. Could anyone less than a Carlyle impart into the dry bones of municipal library history that Strew these hundred years, the bones by the wayside that mark out the way, the breath of the spirit that will make them live ? For even Edward Edwards, whose name should be much in the minds and perhaps on the lips of library lovers this month, could scarcely have foreseen the contemporary position ; nor perhaps could Carlyle who asked before our genesis why there should not be in every county town a county library as well as a county gaol. How remote the days when such a question was cogent seem to be now! It behoves us, indeed it honours us, to recall the work of Edwards, of Ewart, Brotherton, Thomas Greenwood, Nicholson, Peter Cowell, Crestadoro, Francis Barrett, Thomas Lyster, J. Y. M. MacAlister, James Duff Brown and, in a later day without mentioning the living, John Ballinger, Ernest A. Baker, L. Stanley Jast, and Potter Briscoe—the list is long. All served the movement we celebrate and all faced a community which had to be convinced. It still has, of course, but our people do now allow libraries a place, more or less respected, in the life of the people. Librarians no longer face the corpse‐cold incredulity of the so‐called educated classes, the indifference of the masses and the actively vicious hostility of local legislators. Except the illuminated few that existed. These were the men who had the faith that an informed people was a happier, more efficient one and that books in widest commonalty spread were the best means of producing such a people. These, with a succession of believing, enduring librarians, persisted in their Struggle with cynic and opponent and brought about the system and the technique we use, modified of course and extended to meet a changing world, but essentially the same. Three names we may especially honour this September, Edward Edwards, who was the sower of the seed; MacAlister, who gained us our Royal Charter ; and John Ballinger, who was the person who most influenced the introduction of the liberating Libraries Act of 1919.
With three credited scriptwriters and five credited directors, the 1967 release of Casino Royale saw a gang of multifaceted James Bond 007s facing off against an army of…
Abstract
With three credited scriptwriters and five credited directors, the 1967 release of Casino Royale saw a gang of multifaceted James Bond 007s facing off against an army of beautiful, hypersexualised, personality-less female spies, headed by the real James Bond’s neurotic, insecure, American nephew Jimmy. Perhaps this wasn’t Fleming’s intended storyline for Bond’s first outing at Casino Royale, but the resulting parodic outing absorbed and commented upon some of the inherent gendered archetypes of Fleming’s work. What the 1967 Casino Royale accomplishes is a narrative which contrasts varieties of masculinity which are segmented forms of the masculinity defined by Fleming’s Bond. This chapter compares the masculinity of Bond developed in Fleming’s novel, before examining the representations of masculinity inherent within the four key male characters: Sir James Bond (David Niven), Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers), Cooper (Terence Cooper) and Dr Noah/Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen). By showing the depictions of masculine elements each of these characters embodies, along with the metanarrative elements of each performer’s persona, this chapter aims to identify how the 1967 Casino Royale both faithfully depicts the masculine elements of Bond while at the same time satirizing Bond’s particular brand of masculinity. This examination ultimately argues that this segmentation of Bondian masculinity is the core point of cohesion in a deeply incoherent, parodic film adaptation of Fleming’s novel.
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THE new library building has been open for six months now. It is pleasantly situated in an area of new buildings, and occupies a prominent island site just on the edge of the…
Abstract
THE new library building has been open for six months now. It is pleasantly situated in an area of new buildings, and occupies a prominent island site just on the edge of the shopping centre. The old library was in the middle of a shopping area, and it has been interesting to note that our removal from that site has had a more considerable effect on the traffic pattern than one would have thought.
Annika Beelitz and Doris M. Merkl-Davies
The purpose of this paper is to examine a case of companies cooperating with the State to prevent a public controversy over nuclear power following the Fukushima disaster and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine a case of companies cooperating with the State to prevent a public controversy over nuclear power following the Fukushima disaster and achieve mutually beneficial policy outcomes. It analyses the private and public communication of pro-nuclear corporate, political and regulatory actors.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on the political economy theory, the study examines how actors mobilised power by accessing an existing social network to agree a joint public communication strategy in order to ensure public support for the continuation of nuclear power generation in the UK. It traces discursive frames from their inception in private communication to their reproduction in public communication and their dissemination via the media.
Findings
The study provides evidence of pro-nuclear actors cooperating behind the scenes to achieve consistent public pro-nuclear messaging. It finds evidence of four discursive frames: avoiding knee-jerk reactions, lessons learned, safety and nuclear renaissance. In combination, they guide audiences’ evaluation of the consequences of the Fukushima disaster for the UK in favour of continuing the commercial use of nuclear energy.
Originality/value
The private e-mail exchange between pro-nuclear actors presents a unique opportunity to examine the mobilisation of less visible forms of power in the form of agenda setting (manipulation) and discursive framing (domination) in order to influence policy outcomes and shape public opinion on nuclear energy. This is problematic because it constitutes a lack of transparency and accountability on part of the State with respect to policy outcomes and restricts the civic space by curtailing the articulation of alternative interests and voices.