Search results

Recent financial pressures in the hospital industry have led to an extreme cost‐consciousness for both hospitals and patients. Growing competition and consumerism have forced hospitals to renovate their organisational structures and cultures, devise strategic plans, and implement marketing plans. Hospitals now walk a tight‐rope between cost containment and health care quality. Two fundamental areas that hospitals should consider in order to build and maintain a loyal customer base are a customer‐oriented philosophy and a better utilisation of the workforce.

Literacy has been one of the most publicized societal problems of the past decade, and it is likely to continue as such for some time to come. Like many problems of modern society, it involves a variety of educational, social, and economic factors, and will therefore not be easily solved.

Complaint handling has the great influence on customer retention and provides a chance for businesses to improve service quality. This study intended to reveal the complaint actions of adolescent customers and perceptions of failure recovery in buffet restaurants with a linkage of family communication patterns.

A consumer survey was administered in the metropolitan area of Taipei. Quota sampling procedure was applied following the age and gender distribution of the population between the ages of 13 and 19. Consent from parents was obtained prior to the survey.

Based on the results of the study, adolescent customers with high concept‐ and high socio‐orientation were prone to complain for dissatisfaction. Private actions were preferred by adolescent customers to express dissatisfaction, followed by using the internet or through actions of parents. For service recovery, adolescents preferred to have discounts, followed by free desserts. The results indicated that adolescents were more straightforward and they wanted to have compensations immediately. Furthermore, service recovery satisfaction showed a positive relationship with repeat purchases. Adolescent customers who were satisfied with service or food compensations would be likely to have repeat purchases. Nevertheless, adolescents who were unsatisfied with the service or food recovery did not totally cease purchasing.

Buffet managers should give inducements to encourage adolescents to complain spontaneously. Buffet managers may offer discounts for the current consumption rather than coupons for next patronage. Adolescent customers with concept‐ and socio‐orientation will provide useful information for buffet managers to improve their service quality.

This study provides new insights into the area that has not been studied exclusively, complaint behavior of adolescent customers in buffet restaurants.

This article focuses on psychosocial barriers to sexual health and their implications on the design and delivery of mass media‐based public health campaigns. A family planning campaign that attempted to address barriers to seeking sexual health information and services by promoting positive attitudes toward couple's communication about sexual health care is presented. Specifically, this article reports how the campaign conducted formative research to develop audience‐centered, culturally sensitive messages, particularly with young adults, aged 18‐24 as well as Hispanic young adults (aged 18‐24); and utilized mixed‐media to effectively reach at‐risk populations.

Purpose – There are a number of ongoing debates in the organizational literature about conflict in groups and teams. We investigate two “conflicts about conflict” (i.e., two meta-conflicts) in the literature: we examine whether and under what conditions conflict in workgroups might be beneficial and we also explore the idea that group members may not always perceive the same levels of conflict.

Design/approach – We bring together the research and theorizing of the past 15 years to inform the current state of literature and move forward research on these conflicts about conflict. We examine and develop the two meta-conflicts to illustrate the importance of studying these ideas and to provide guidance for future research.

Findings – These two meta-conflicts in the conflict literature are important to investigate as conflict is a multifaceted construct that contains many dimensions that may influence group outcomes. We explore these two issues by briefly reviewing the literature on conflict and then highlighting some of the recent research on the conflict debate (i.e., is conflict constructive or destructive?) and conflict asymmetry in workgroups.

Originality/value – We identify interesting areas that future researchers could explore with respect to team conflict and conflict asymmetry.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and test a model of group processes (e.g. conflict), emergent states (e.g. trust), and group context (e.g. connectedness) to better understand the mechanisms that underlie the traditionally negative effects of conflict.

A total of 27 workgroups of a Dutch telecommunications company participated in a survey. To assess trust as a mediator between conflict and performance bootstrapping analysis was used. In addition, the moderating role of the three connectedness types was investigated with hierarchical regressions.

The results suggest that trust partially mediates the effect of task conflict and fully mediates the effect of relationship conflict on performance. Furthermore, trust is less affected by task conflict when group members are highly cognitively connected and less affected by relationship conflict when group members are highly task connected.

This research implies that task and cognitive connectedness decrease the negative effect of conflict on trust, and hence, performance. Shortcomings include discussing the causality between conflict and trust, and the possibility of different perceptions among group members regarding group phenomena.

The findings suggest that managers can help to provide circumstances in which conflict is not necessarily destructive for intragroup trust and performance.

Provides one of the first empirical examinations of the mediating role of trust in the relationship between task and relationship conflict and perceived group performance. Additionally, examines if connectedness (the level of active involvement of group members with each other) buffers the negative effects of conflict on trust.