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Although the literature has established the effect of online reviews on customer purchase intentions, the influence of psychological factors on online ratings is overlooked. This paper aims to examine these factors under the perspective of construal level theory (CLT).

Using review data from TripAdvisor and Booking.com, the authors study three dimensions of psychological distances (temporal, spatial and social) and their direct and interaction effects on review valence, using regression analysis. The authors examine the effect of these distances on the information content of online reviews using a novel bag-of-words model to assess its concreteness.

Temporal distance and spatial distance have positive direct effects on review valence. Social distance, on the other hand, has a negative direct effect. However, its interaction with the other two distances has a positive effect, suggesting that consumers tend to “zoom-out” to less concrete things in their ratings.

The findings provide implications for the interpretation of review ratings by the service providers and their information content.

This study extends the CLT and electronic word-of-mouth literature by jointly exploring the effect of all three psychological distances that are applicable in post-purchase evaluations. Methodologically, it provides a novel application of the bag-of-words model in evaluating the concreteness of online reviews.

Scholars studying servitization argue that manufacturers moving into services need to develop new job roles or modify existing ones, which must be enacted by employees with the right mentality, skill sets, attitudes and capabilities. However, there is a paucity of empirical research on how such changes affect employee-level outcomes.

The authors theorize that job enrichment and role stress act as countervailing forces during the manufacturer's service transition, with implications for employee satisfaction. The authors test the hypotheses using a sample of 21,869 employees from 201 American manufacturers that declared revenues from services over a 10-year period.

The authors find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the firm's level of service infusion and individual employee satisfaction, which is flatter for front-end staff. This relationship differs in shape and/or magnitude between firms, highlighting the role of unobserved firm-level idiosyncratic factors.

Servitized manufacturers, especially those in the later stage of their transition (i.e. when services start to account for more than 50% of annual revenues), should try to ameliorate their employees' role-induced stress to counter a drop in satisfaction.

This is one of the first studies to examine systematically the relationship between servitization and individual employee satisfaction. It shows that back-end employees in manufacturing firms are considerably affected by an increasing emphasis on services, while past literature has almost exclusively been concerned with front-end staff.