The purpose of this paper is to investigate how frontline employee self-disclosure influences consumers’ reciprocal behavior. To investigate the effects of frontline employee self-disclosure, two experiments were conducted with a total sample of 475 participants. The results show that when frontline employees disclose personal information in one-time encounters, they are perceived as less competent and more superficial. The results also show that self-disclosure negatively affects reciprocal behavior, but that this is mediated through liking, competence, superficiality, and satisfaction. These findings suggest that it is not always beneficial for employees to use self-disclosure as a strategy for garnering a consumer's trust or satisfaction, which counters previous research that suggest that disclosure of personal information is a good way to positively influence consumers in the retail environment.

This study concerns the effect that music has on consumer behavior in two different retail contexts during regular opening hours. Two studies were conducted in a field setting with consumers (N=550). Consumers were recruited to answer questions regarding behavioral measures, attitudes, and mood during days when background music was played. The conclusions from the two studies are that music affects consumer behavior, but also that the type of retail store and gender influences both the strength and direction of the effect

Purpose – The research concerns the effect of frontline employees’ averted or direct gaze on consumers’ evaluation of the encounter. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that in normal interactions, a direct or averted gaze affects people’s evaluation of others. The question was whether this finding would hold true in commercial interactions.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted three experiments using a written scenario with a photograph among a total sample of 612 participants.

Findings – This research showed that consumers’ social impression of the frontline employees mediated the effect of the employees’ gazing behaviour on consumers’ emotions and satisfaction with the encounters. The findings also showed that averting gaze had a negative effect on consumers’ first impression of the frontline employee, which affected consumers’ satisfaction with the encounter. The findings also showed that a direct gaze had a negative effect on encounter satisfaction when consumers sought to purchase embarrassing products.

Originality/value – The research demonstrated that the effect of gaze on encounter satisfaction was mediated by the social impression and moderated by consumers’ approach/avoidance motivation.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for understanding service design and how service design relates to central concepts within service marketing. Design/methodology/approach - For companies, service design is growing in importance and has become a crucial capability to survive in the service-dominant economy. Service design increases the capacity to improve not only service experiences but also organizational design. On this premise, the authors propose a conceptual framework. Findings - By relating service design to research efforts within service marketing, dual value creation can be enhanced. As such, the conceptual framework portrays service design as an enhancer of customer experience and organizational performance. Originality/value - To the authors knowledge, service design has not been discussed in the service marketing literature. Thus, this is the first attempt to see service design in light of well-established service marketing models such as SERVQUAL and an updated version of the Service-profit-chain.

Motorization in urban areas contributes several problems such as congestion, accidents, gas emissions, noises, and infrastructure breakage. Meanwhile, most of the developing countries cannot overcome such growth activities, as well as in Jakarta. By December 2013, Vice Governor of Jakarta proposes fuel subsidy removal policy as one of sustainable transport policy. This study is intended to understand and investigate how fuel subsidy removal policy scenarios (25%, 50%, and 100%) in Jakarta affects travelers’ behavior and analyze such policy to support sustainable transport by using qualitative research methodology. Interviews and questionnaires survey is conducted to workers in Jakarta, which includes ranking scale question for traveler response options. The result shows that half of the respondents are not affected and will only respond to fuel price increasing at IDR 31,400 for gasoline price and IDR 26,300 for ADO (Auto Diesel Oil). Moreover, there is a tendency of respondent's to the response by changing their travel mode choices into more fuel efficient private vehicle.

Despite the widespread adoption of the justice framework in service recovery literature, research findings vary as to what dimension - distributive, interactional, procedural - is most important. This paper contributes to this debate by considering how an easily accessible variable like relationship activity (i.e., the frequency of visiting and purchasing from a company) moderates the impact of the justice dimensions on post-recovery customer outcomes. Findings show that distributive justice is the only dimension impacting word-of-mouth (WOM) and repurchase behavior for low- and medium-relationship-activity customer segments. For a high-relationship-activity segment, all justice dimensions have a positive and balanced impact on WOM and/or repurchase behavior. This research demonstrates the potential of a segmented approach for recovery, while also providing managers with valuable insights into how they can use readily available information to adapt their service recovery efforts.

The aim is to propose a theoretical grounding of soft transport policy measures that aim at promoting voluntary reduction of car use. A general conceptual framework is first presented to clarify how hard and soft transport policy measures impact on car-use reduction. Two different behavioural theories that have been used to account for car use and car-use reduction are then integrated in a self-regulation theory that identifies four stages of the process of voluntarily changing car use: setting a car-use reduction goal, forming a plan for achieving the goal, initiating and executing the plan, and evaluating the outcome of the plan execution. A number of techniques are described that facilitate the different stages of the process of voluntary car-use reduction and which should be used in personalized travel planning programs.

This article presents the results of empirical studies of critical incidents in airline services in Sweden and the United States. The main aim is to describe and analyze service break downs from the customer's point of view and thus create a basis for crisis management. The aim is also to compare Sweden, a monopoly market, with the United States, a market with keen competition in airline services. The discussion is based on personal interviews with 320 customers and 80 airline employees in Sweden and 241 customers and 100 employees in the United States. The study focuses on negative critical incidents in the relations between the service provider and business passengers

This study seeks to define and conceptualize the role of social platforms in transforming service ecosystems. The study explores how prime social movers use social platforms to enable transformation. The empirical context is Tunisia, a-service ecosystem in transformation from repression to democracy. The study builds on ecosystems within management research and service ecosystem frameworks in service-dominant logic (SDL) and describe and analyze the process of institutionalization of social change. Using narratives from interviews, the research focuses on how people, especially social movers during the Arab Spring in Tunisia come together and integrate disruptive social resources to make a social revolution a reality. This study contributes with: (1) a comprehensive conceptualization of the role of social platforms in the institutionalization of a social change, (2) clarifying the change of social transformation that starts with people, evolves to meso and macro levels, and transforms society, and (3) identifying a new service transformation framework for service ecosystems. 

Tre av detta nummers artiklar berör organisation på ett eller annat sätt.Det handlar om varför poliser väljer att frivilligt säga upp sig och lämnayrket; sexuella trakasserier och hur sådana hanteras i mansdomineradeorganisationer samt erfarenheter av delat ledarskap i skolväsendet. Den sistaartikeln utgörs av en essä om hur arbete har framställts i bildkonst, musik ochlitteratur. Detta nummer av Arbetsmarknad & Arbetsliv avslutas med att JanCh Karlsson recenserar boken Job Quality in an Era of Flexibility. Experiences ina European Context.

Finding Customer or Consumer wants and needs and converting these into products was early identified by Shewhart as a key issue for the manufacturing of products. A systematic technique supporting this process is Quality Function Deployment (QFD). In this paper we shall study the relations between QFD and the Quality Movement as initiated by Shewhart in the twenties, continued via the teachings of Deming and others and now widespread in industry and in society at large. We will also discuss in this paper the current use of QFD, especially the environments in which it has been used so far. Some comments concerning its future will also be given

In contemporary innovation management literature there is limitedcomprehensive understanding regarding how different domains andfactors affect and bias early assessment of new product/service ideas.This paper aims at reviewing domains that previous research hasidentified affecting the evaluation of an idea and compiles them into aconceptual framework, and to test this framework among leading expertsand practitioners in the field of idea management. Empirical findings fromtwo workshops indicate that the identified domains in the framework areindeed relevant, but that additional aspect are highlighted and recognized by practitioners. We note that a proactive and deliberate approach to idea assessment needs to be carefully designed, attending to all factors in the presented framework in a comprehensive manner, while taking the organization's specific innovation needs and demands into account.

Focuses on customer expectations on service guarantees. Theoretically, the basis consists of previous guidelines for service guarantee design. The empirical context is public transport, where customers that have invoked a service guarantee participate in focus groups. The results expand on prior research, which has argued that negative industry reputation is a hotbed for service guarantees and that the most preferred guarantee is unconditional; the paper’s results imply that customers prefer detailed regulations for when the guarantee is applicable, and that their general disbelief in a company with negative reputation makes the unconditional guarantee seem like a rip off. The results also indicate that the customers of a public service want the guarantee to be fair, that is, fairness in the possibility for all customers to invoke the guarantee, that all customers are familiar with the guarantee and that it cannot be misused by cheating customers. One of the contributions of the article is therefore to add “fairness” as a dimension to the previous guidelines suggested by Hart.

Service guarantees have been attributed the benefit of improving the overall service of a service provider. However, little research has been carried out within the area. This article focus on one aspect of the service guarantee, the effects that service guarantees may have on service recovery. Critical incident data were collected using the critical incident interview technique with customers of RadissonSAS, a worldwide hotel chain using a service guarantee. One contribution of this article is that the interviews convey that the implicit guarantee may serve as a risk reducer, which contradicts and adds to previous research. Previous research states that only the explicit guarantee has these benefits. In this case, the guarantee does not reduce risk in the purchase or consumption stage, but after the consumption when the service has failed, as the customer finds out about the guarantee in the recovery situation. Another contribution of this article is that service guarantees are found to influence the outcome of service recovery as it affects how employees behave to recover the customer.



Keywords: Service guarantee, Service Recovery, RadissonSAS

In their paper they use a non-geometric design to generate the concepts. Non-geometric designs represents a class of orthogonal designs that when the assumption of effect sparsity is valid, i.e. that only a few of the attributes actually influence the respondents' preferences, provide an opportunity to analyze interactions between attributes as well as the attributes themselves. In this article the use of non-geometric Plackett-Burman designs for conjoint analysis is advocated. Also, a procedure based on restricted all subsets regression for taking advantage of the special characteristics of the non-geometric designs is proposed and demonstrated using data from a conjoint study performed on cellular phone antennas in Sweden. Blomkvist, Ekdahl and Gustafsson also conducted a Monte Carlo simulation to further illustrate the properties of the proposed procedure and the use of non-geometric Plackett-Burman designs for conjoint analysis

In the present study a survey was performed in order to investigate if the use of heuristics in decision-making has an influence on the impulse buying tendency. Another aim of the study was to see if there were any age differences with regard to the use of heuristics and the impulse buying tendency. The study was conducted with students from Göteborg University and Karlstad University in Sweden (n = 69), with different educational backgrounds. Participants filled out a booklet of questions divided in two parts. One part measured impulse buying tendencies, and the second part measured the use of heuristics in decision-making. One hypothesis was that impulse buyers would use heuristics to a higher degree than planned buyers. It was also hypothesized that young participants would be more impulsive buyers because they use heuristics more than older participants. The results gave no support to the hypothesis that impulse buyers would use heuristics to a higher degree than planned buyers. Support for the second hypothesis was received as 20-24 year old high achievers on the heuristics test were found to be significantly more impulsive buyers than low achievers in the same age group.

Abstract

The theory of contracts indicates that formal contracts has to be complemented some sort of relationship management. At least this is the ideal situation, expected to exist on a business-to-business market, where there exists no formal regulations preventing exchanges of actors. In other contexts, there could be a conflict between the role played by formal contracts and the parties freedom to exercise the relationship management needed in order to create long-term viable relationships. The focus in this paper is therefore to investigate how relationships evolve and are managed in a context where a formal contract is the governing factor, controlling the service delivered. As empirical context, we have used the public transport area, were it exist long-term dyadic contractual relationships resulting from public tendering processes. The results of the paper indicate that the contract to a high extent governs the relationship, and very little space is left over to the parties to handle the relationship freely. This stresses the importance of how the contract is formulated, since the way the contract is written affect the outcome for a long period of time

The purpose of this study is to deepen the understanding of what are the underlying reasons for the increasing cost of public transport in general and bus services in particular in a Swedish context. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with managers at the bus operators as well as the authority organizations. This paper contributes by identifying nine categories that can be the dominating factors behind the increasing costs of public bus services in Sweden. The identified categories of cost drivers are; of traffic appearance (peak times), greening of buses, age requirements, the contract period, the accessibility customization, special requirements on buses, collective agreements (working time regulation), tendering and contracting process, and finally, counterproductive political governance. It can be concluded that many of the cost drivers originate from the circumstances of the process of public procurement, such as different demands for different regions in Sweden as well as the trade-off between the bus operators' wishes for higher flexibility in the contracts and the traffic authorities' fear of more risks and thereby higher bids in the end. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.