Search

Leaders are expected to enhance the work meaningfulness of followers, but little insight exists on the role of leaders' own experience of meaningfulness in that process. We propose a leader–follower transfer model of work meaningfulness through visionary leadership, grounded in self-concept-based theory, in which leader–follower dyadic tenure shapes the effects of visionary leadership on followers. Moreover, we suggest that work meaningfulness can enhance followers' goal achievement and reduce turnover intentions. We tested and confirmed our moderated-mediation model in two independent, multisource, multilevel field data sets of 79 mid-level leaders and 871 employees in Study 1 and 68 CEOs and 596 mid-level leaders in Study 2. We also empirically ruled out a series of alternative transfer mechanisms, including transformational and transactional leadership, leader–member exchange, and all subdimensions of transformational leadership. This research contributes to the scholarly discussions on work meaningfulness and visionary leadership and offers novel insights for practitioners to enhance work meaningfulness in their organizations.

The proliferating gig economy relies on online freelance marketplaces, which support relativelyanonymous interactions by text-based messages. Informational asymmetries thus arise that canlead to exchange uncertainties between buyers and freelancers. Conventional marketing thoughtrecommends reducing such uncertainty. However, uncertainty reduction and uncertaintymanagement theories indicate that buyers and freelancers might benefit more from balancing,rather than reducing, uncertainty, such as by strategically adhering to or deviating from commoncommunication principles. With dyadic analyses of calls for bids and bids from a leading onlinefreelance marketplace, this study reveals that buyers attract more bids from freelancers whenthey provide moderate degrees of task information and concreteness, avoid sharing personalinformation, and limit the affective intensity of their communication. Freelancers’ bid successand price premiums increase when they mimic the degree of task information and affectiveintensity exhibited by buyers. However, mimicking a lack of personal information andconcreteness reduces freelancers’ success, so freelancers should always be more concrete andoffer more personal information than buyers do. These contingent perspectives offer insights intobuyer–seller communication in two-sided online marketplaces; they clarify that despite, orsometimes due to, communication uncertainty, both sides can achieve success in the online gigeconomy.

To date, the literature offers multiple suggestions for how to recover from service failures, albeit without explicitly addressing customers’ negative, high-arousal states evoked by the failure. The few studies that do address ways to improve negative emotions after failures focus on face-to-face interactions only. Because many customers today prefer to complain on social media, firms must learn how to effectively de-escalate negative, high-arousal emotions through text-based exchanges to achieve successful service recoveries. With three field studies using natural language processing tools and three preregistered controlled experiments, the current research identifies ways to mitigate negative arousal in text-based social media complaining, specifically, active listening and empathy. In detail, increasing active listening and empathy in the firm response evokes gratitude among customers in high-arousal states, even if the actual failure is not (yet) recovered. These findings provide a new theoretical perspective on the role of customer arousal in service failures and recoveries as well as managerially relevant implications for dealing with public social media complaints.

Big data technologies and analytics enable new digital services and are often associated with superior performance. However, firms investing in big data often fail to attain those advantages. To answer the questions of how and when big data pay off, marketing scholars need new theoretical approaches and empirical tools that account for the digitized world. Building on affordance theory, the authors develop a novel, conceptually rigorous, and practice-oriented framework of the impact of big data investments on service innovation and performance. Affordances represent action possibilities, namely what individuals or organizations with certain goals and capabilities can do with a technology. The authors conceptualize and operationalize three important big data marketing affordances: customer behavior pattern spotting, real-time market responsiveness, and data-driven market ambidexterity. The empirical analysis establishes construct validity and offers a preliminary nomological test of direct, indirect, and conditional effects of big data marketing affordances on perceived big data performance.

Confronted with increasing digitalization, service firms are challenged to sustain customer loyalty. A promising means to do so is to leverage the digital presence of service employees on their website. A large-scale field study and several experimental studies show that the digital presence of service employees on the firm website increases current website service quality perceptions and positively shapes memories related to employee service quality perceptions from past service encounters. Both effects indirectly increase customer loyalty and, in turn, financial performance, and are amplified by employee accessibility and a service firm’s customer orientation. The authors examine further boundary conditions for the memory process: only service employees evoke the beneficial spillover effect to employee service quality perceptions, and the spillover effect does not generalize to evaluations of product quality. Remarkably, an employee’s digital presence, although factually unrelated, augments customer perceptions of service employees’ competence and commitment and thus strengthens rather than erodes service employees’ role in customer–firm relationships. Theoretical and managerial implications deepen the understanding of how to add a human touch to digital channels.

Research suggests that firms with family CEOs differ from other types of businesses, yet surprisingly little is known about how employees in these firms feel and behave compared to those working in other firms. We draw from family science and management research to suggest that family CEOs, because of their emotion-evoking double role as family members and business leaders, are, on average, more likely to infuse employees with positive emotions, such as enthusiasm and excitement, than hired professional CEOs. We suggest that these emotions spread through firms by way of emotional contagion during interactions with employees, thereby setting the organizational affective tone. In turn, we hypothesize that in firms with family CEOs the voluntary turnover rate is lower. In considering structural features as boundary conditions, we propose that family CEOs have stronger effects in smaller and centralized firms, and weaker effects in formalized firms. Multilevel data from 41,200 employees and 2,246 direct reports of CEOs from 497 firms with and without family CEOs provide support for our model. This research suggests that firms managed by family CEOs, despite often being criticized as nepotistic relics of the past, tend to offer pleasant work environments.

Two important areas in the key account management (KAM) literature deal with different KAM frameworks and KAM performance drivers. In particular, scholars have derived taxonomies of KAM configurations and identified organizational determinants of KAM effectiveness and performance in the market. The present paper contributes to the KAM literature with a quasi-replication and extension of two seminal papers providing an update of different KAM configurations along with the determinants of KAM effectiveness and performance in the market. Using recently collected survey data from a sample of 411 managers, and considering KAM capabilities and KAM communication, we find evidence of five unique KAM configurations that differ from the findings of Homburg et al. (2002), thereby doubtless reflecting a professionalization of the KAM domain. Furthermore, updating Workman et al. (2003), we find that KAM capabilities are important determinants of KAM effectiveness and performance in the market, and that social media communication increases KAM effectiveness. These insights contribute to building a cumulative up-to-date body of knowledge about KAM and provide guidance for managers to improve their KAM.

The proliferation of new touchpoints empowers today's customers to design their own journey from search to purchase. To address this new complexity, we segment customers by their use of specific touchpoints in the customer journey, investigate the association of several covariates with segment membership, consider the rise of mobile devices as potential "game changers" of existing segments, and explore how the relationships among product satisfaction, journey satisfaction, customer inspiration, and customer loyalty differ across segments. Based on anticipated utility theory and using latent class analyses on large-scale data from two samples of 2,443 and 2,649 journeys, we identify five time-consistent segments-store-focused shoppers, pragmatic online shoppers, extensive online shoppers, multiple touchpoint shoppers, and online-to-offline shoppers-that differ considerably in their touchpoint and mobile device usage, their segment-specific covariates, and their search and purchase patterns. The five segments remain unchanged in the two data sets even though the usage of mobile devices has increased substantially. Furthermore, we find that the relationships between various loyalty antecedents and customer loyalty differ between the segments. The insights from this paper help retailers develop segment-specific customer journey strategies. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of New York University.

Big data technologies and analytics enable new digital services and are often associated with superior performance. However, firms investing in big data often fail to attain those advantages. To answer the questions of how and when big data pay off, marketing scholars need new theoretical approaches and empirical tools that account for the digitized world. Building on affordance theory, the authors develop a novel, conceptually rigorous, and practice-oriented framework of the impact of big data investments on service innovation and performance. Affordances representaction possibilities, namely what individuals or organizations with certain goals and capabilities can do with a technology. The authors conceptualize and operationalize three important big data marketing affordances: customer behavior pattern spotting, real-time market responsiveness, and data-driven market ambidexterity. The empirical analysis establishes construct validity and offers a preliminary nomological test of direct, indirect, and conditional effects of big data marketing affordances on perceived big data performance.

This paper identifies and explains a potential tension between a firm's emphasis on customer orientation (CO) and the extent to which employees value CO as a success factor for individual performance. Based on self‐determination theory and CO implementation research, the authors propose that firm CO may represent both autonomous and controlled motivations for CO, but that employees’ CO is more strongly linked to individual performance when employees experience solely autonomous motivation. Hence, the authors expect a substitution effect whereby the link between employees’ CO and their performance is weaker when firm CO is high. Furthermore, the authors examine a boundary condition for the previous hypothesis and propose that performance‐contingent rewards have a positive effect on the internalization of the extrinsic motivation stemming from firm CO. Two multilevel studies with 979 employees and 201 top management team members from 132 firms support these hypotheses. Against previous research, these findings offer a new perspective on the effectiveness of CO initiatives, propose employees’ motivational states as the theoretical explanation for the heterogeneity in the link between employee CO and performance, and reappraise the role of performance‐contingent rewards in CO research. Managerial implications for the effective implementation of customer‐oriented initiatives within firms are provided.

Over the past two decades, digitalization has revolutionized not only consumer marketing but also industrial marketing. Both industrial marketing scholars and industrial marketers seek insights to understand how our knowledge and practice of digital marketing has been structured and configured. To address this gap, we adopt the resource-based perspective as an organizing framework and systematically review 129 articles spanning two decades of research to identify different digital marketing capabilities in industrial firms. From this analysis, we identify four themes: channels, social media, digital relationships, and digital technologies. We then stress-test this knowledge with managerial practices by conducting an online survey of 169 managers, designed to establish the repertoire of current and future marketing capability needs of industrial firms. Herein, we identify two marketing capabilities gaps: the practice gap—which identifies the deficit between managers' ‘current’ practices and their ‘ideal’ digital marketing capabilities; and, the knowledge gap—which demonstrates a significant divide between the digital marketing transformations in industrial firms and the extant scholarly knowledge that underpins this. Based on these results, we build an agenda for future research on digital marketing capabilities.

While increasing the organizational identification of employees has been described as the ultimate goal of internal marketing and internal branding, one of its most common practices is to communicate organizational values both internally and externally. However, very little is known about the relative effectiveness of different types of organizational brand communication. Drawing from construal level theory, this research investigates whether the degree of construal fit, defined as the extent to which the construal of communication matches an employee’s construal of headquarters, determines the relative impact of organizational brand communication. A series of studies consisting of two cross-industrial multilevel field studies and a lab experiment provide evidence that organizational brand communication with low-level (high-level) construal is more effective to target employees with low (high) social distance to headquarters. These findings suggest that construal fit qualifies the effectiveness of organizational communication. JEL CLASSIFICATION: M3 Marketing and Advertising

While increasing the organizational identification of employees has been describedas the ultimate goal of internal marketing and internal branding, one of its most common prac-tices is to communicate organizational values both internally and externally. However, very littleis known about the relative effectiveness of different types of organizational brand commu-nication. Drawing from construal level theory, the current research investigates whether thedegree of construal fit, defined as the extent to which the construal of communication matchesan employee’s construal of headquarters, determines the relative impact of organizationalbrand communication. A series of studies consisting of two cross-industrial multilevel fieldstudies and a lab experiment provide evidence that organizational brand communication withlow-level (high-level) construal is more effective to target employees with low (high) socialdistance to headquarters. These findings suggest that construal fit qualifies the effectivenessof organizational communication.

This article investigates how and when a firm’s level of customer contact influences the collective organizational energy. For this purpose, we bridge the literature on collective human energy at work with the job impact framework and organizational sensemaking processes and argue that a firm’s level of customer contact is positively linked to the collective organizational energy because a high level of customer contact might make the experience of prosocial impact across the firm more likely. However, as prior research at the individual level has indicated that customers could also deplete employees’ energy, we introduce transformational leadership climate as a novel contingency factor for this linkage at the organizational level. We propose that a medium to high transformational leadership climate is necessary to derive positive meaning from customer contact, whereas firms with a low transformational leadership climate do not get energized by customer contact. We tested the proposed moderated mediation model with multilevel modeling and a multisource data set comprising 9,094 employees and 75 key informants in 75 firms. The results support our hypotheses and offer important theoretical contributions for research on collective human energy in organizations and its interplay with customers.

Online firestorms pose severe threats to online brand communities. Any negative electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has the potential to become an online firestorm, yet not every post does, so finding ways to detect and respond to negative eWOM constitutes a critical managerial priority. The authors develop a comprehensive framework that integrates different drivers of negative eWOM and the response approaches that firms use to engage in and disengage from online conversations with complaining customers. A text-mining study of negative eWOM demonstrates distinct impacts of high- and low-arousal emotions, structural tie strength, and linguistic style match (between sender and brand community) on firestorm potential. The firm’s response must be tailored to the intensity of arousal in the negative eWOM to limit the virality of potential online firestorms. The impact of initiated firestorms can be mitigated by distinct firm responses over time, and the effectiveness of different disengagement approaches also varies with their timing. For managers, these insights provide guidance on how to detect and reduce the virality of online firestorms.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how and when customers influence organizational climate and organizational health through their feedback. Based on affective events theory, the authors classify both positive and negative customer feedback (PCF and NCF) as affective work events. The authors expect that these events influence the positive affective climate of an organization and ultimately organizational health, and that the relationships are moderated by empowerment climate. Design/methodology/approach – Structural equation modeling was utilized to analyze survey data obtained from a sample of 178 board members, 80 HR representatives, and 10,953 employees from 80 independent organizations. Findings – The findings support the expected indirect effects. Furthermore, empowerment climate strengthened the impact of PCF on organizational health but does not affect the relationship between NCF and organizational health. Research limitations/implications – The cross-sectional design is a potential limitation of the study. Practical implications – Managers should be aware that customer feedback influences an organization’s emotional climate and organizational health. Based on the results organizations might actively disseminate PCF and establish an empowerment climate. With regard to NCF, managers might consider the potential affective and health-related consequences for employees and organizations. Social implications – Customers are able to contribute to an organization’s positive affective climate and to organizational health if they provide positive feedback to organizations. Originality/value – By providing first insights into the consequences of both PCF and NCF on organizational health, this study opens a new avenue for scientific inquiry of customer influences on employees at the organizational level.

Multichannel retailers aim at steering customers to physical stores to increase cross-selling, benefit from higher margins, and offer multisensory experiences. The question is how retailers can steer customers to strategically important channels. We propose that retailers may induce customers to switch to physical stores by communicating information about channel integration on their websites but that this explicit communication of channel integration is additionally influenced by the implicit communication of shopping benefits, which customers and retailers may not be aware of. Using a multilevel and multisource approach with field data of 1,479 customers from 104 firms, we find that informational online-to-physical channel integration on a retailer’s website influences customers’ online-to-physical store switching and that the density of shopping benefits concurrently communicated moderates this effect. Our results extend literature on channel choice and provide implications for retailers on how to design their websites as information hubs to steer customers to physical stores.

While complaint management has received much attention, customer compliments and their systematic handling have been largely ignored. Based on two empirical studies, this article suggests that customer compliments bear great potential for benefiting firms, and gives recommendations on how managers can enable, stimulate, and amplify positive customer feedback.

The service literature highlights the importance of organizational leaders in creating an organization-wide customer orientation (CO). Yet, some open questions remain regarding this relationship: Are organizational leaders from different hierarchical levels equally effective in creating a CO? Does the functional role of employees affect the importance of certain leaders? More generally, when does customer-oriented leadership really pay off? To address these questions, we investigate how senior managers’ and direct supervisors’ CO affects the CO climate and effectiveness of both frontstage and backstage service teams. Analyzing multisource data from 575 employees and their supervisors from 110 teams in a retail bank, we find that the effect of perceived senior manager CO on team CO climate and team effectiveness is stronger in backstage teams while perceived direct supervisor CO has a greater influence on frontstage teams. Moreover, team CO climate consensus moderates the effect of team CO climate on team effectiveness. These results suggest that, contrary to past theorizing, customer-oriented leadership does not per se increase team CO climate and team effectiveness; rather, the correct coupling of leadership source and degree of customer contact needs to be achieved. Service managers should use these findings and appoint the correct leader to implement CO to make the organization-wide CO diffusion more efficient and effective.

Given the complexity of making marketing strategies work, a reliable tool for the determination of implementation success seems essential. Implementation success is multidimensional since it results from both successful implementation efforts and favorable environmental conditions (Bonoma 1985). Thus, determining implementation success via traditional quantitative and financial performance indicators is problematic for at least two reasons: First, implementation success does not affect quantitative figures directly (e.g., market shares or turnovers). Rather, the outcomes of implementation quality have an impact on quantitative figures with a temporal delay. Further, there is often no direct link between implementation efforts and quantitative performance indicators, given that factors other than strategy implementation (e.g., market environment) influence quantitative performance indicators. Put simply, traditional performance instruments do not suffice to determine whether strategic performance shortfalls stem from an inappropriate strategy, poor implementation efforts, or both (Mankins/Steele 2005). Similar problems are associated with performance frameworks developed for strategy implementation (e.g., the Balanced Scorecard; the 7S-framework). While these tools help to manage certain aspects of strategy implementation, they are based on a narrow understanding of strategy implementation success and have substantial deficiencies regarding a reliable analysis of the multidimensional nature of implementation outcomes. Thus, our study yields four overall categories of dimensions reflecting marketing implementation success: (1) implementation effectiveness, (2) implementation efficiency, (3) performance outcomes, and (4) strategic embeddedness. All categories consist of sub-dimensions reflecting marketing strategy implementation success. A list of implementation dimensions and the descriptions are listed in figure 2. Open image in new window “Implementing a marketing strategy is far more than just putting paperwork into action.” Given the multidimensional nature of implementation outcomes, a properly conducted marketing audit builds the backbone of a reliable implementation success determination. In general, marketing audits uncover marketing problems systematically and facilitate the formulation of plans to improve marketing performance (see Kotler/Keller 2012 for an introduction into marketing strategy audits). In contrast to conventional marketing controls that focus on retrospective target-performance comparisons, marketing audits allow for future-oriented, feed-forward strategy implications (Tomczak et al. 2009). The statement of one marketing manager indicates what most participants added by way of explanation: “Although it is difficult, you should try to assess implementation efforts apart from your strategy’s quality evaluation. The fact that it is difficult is not an excuse not to do it.” Based on our literature review, we have developed a marketing strategy implementation success audit that consists of two steps, performance measurement and performance diagnostic (Kotler/Keller, 2012). Open image in new window

Investigating the ambidextrous effects of its proactive and responsive dimension offers a fresh perspective on market orientation. Drawing upon the ambidexterity literature, the author derives hypotheses on the joint effects of combining and balancing proactive and responsive market orientation. He examines his hypotheses with two-wave panel survey data from 167 strategic business units. Using time-lagged performance data and polynomial regression with response surface analysis to overcome limitations of previous studies of ambidexterity, the author finds that the balance between proactive and responsive market orientation has an incremental positive effect on performance beyond their combined effect; that performance will decline less sharply when proactive is higher than responsive market orientation; and that as the level of balance increases, performance will first decrease and then increase. Given resource scarcity, an important and counterintuitive implication of the present study is that balancing proactive and responsive market orientation is as important as their combination.

Understanding the consequences of customer steering is a key challenge of multichannel customer management. Although many firms are faced with the question whether customers should be steered to the online channel to realize the potential benefits of this channel, little is known about the circumstances under which customers will be unreceptive to the online channel and displeased if they are steered. This research addresses this critical gap and examines the impact of customer steering with assortment modifications on customers' online migration decisions and overall satisfaction in three experimental studies. The results highlight the importance of three contingency factors: personal relationships in the current channel, learning investments into the online channel and attitude toward the steering firm.

Kundenbedurfnisse verandern sich unabhangig von technologischen Entwicklungen. Diese Veranderungen mussen moglichst fruhzeitig identifiziert und fur das eigene Unternehmen genutzt werden. Doch den meisten Unternehmen gelingt es nicht, sich von den derzeitigen Bedurfnissen ihrer Kunden zu losen: Sie sind „Customer-Driven“. Dieses Verhalten fuhrt zwar zu marginalen Verbesserungen der eigenen Leistungen, kann aber nicht zu wirklichen Innovationen beitragen. Beispiele fur Unternehmen, die trotz hoher Kundenorientierung Veranderungen in den Kundenbedurfnissen versaumt haben, sind der Automobilbauer Ford mit dem „Ford Edsel“, der trotz umfangreicher Kundenbefragungen zum Zeitpunkt seiner Einfuhrung schon veraltet war, oder der Videogigant Blockbuster, der trotz regelmasiger Kundenzufriedenheitsstudien den Trend zum Onlineverleih verpasst hat und in Konkurs gegangen ist. Um langfristigen Erfolg zu haben, sollten Unternehmen neue Ideen nicht mithilfe von bestehenden Kundenbedurfnissen entwickeln, sondern sich an latenten und zukunftigen Kundenbedurfnissen ausrichten –, in anderen Worten, sie sollten neue Bedurfnisse bei den Kunden wecken. Unser Beitrag zeigt funf Prozessschritte auf, wie Unternehmen sich dieser Herausforderung des „Customer-Driving“ stellen konnen. Daruber hinaus werden im Umgang mit neuen Bedurfnissen verschiedene Typen von Unternehmen beschrieben und typengerechte Empfehlungen gegeben.

This research examines the impact of online–offline channel integration (OI), defined as integrating access to and knowledge about the offline channel into an online channel. Although channel integration has been acknowledged as a promising strategy for retailers, its effects on customer reactions toward retailers and across different channels remain unclear. Drawing on technology adoption research and diffusion theory, the authors conceptualize a theoretical model where perceived service quality and perceived risk of the Internet store mediate the impact of OI while the Internet shopping experience of customers moderates the impact of OI. The authors then test for the indirect, conditional effects of OI on search intentions, purchase intentions and willingness to pay. Importantly, they differentiate between retailer-level and channel-level effects, thereby controlling for interdependencies between different channels. The results of three studies provide converging evidence and show that OI leads to a competitive advantage and channel synergies rather than channel cannibalization. These findings have direct implications for marketers and retailers interested in understanding whether and how integrating different channels affects customer outcomes.

Non-family employees are an important resource in family firms; therefore, understanding their well-being is of utmost relevance for management theory. Integrating leadership theory into family business research, we draw from the emotional contagion and person-organization fit theories and argue that employee well-being in terms of organizational-level affective climate and individual-level job satisfaction is higher in firms managed by a family CEO. Moreover, we hypothesize that this relationship becomes stronger with higher levels of CEO transformational leadership and weaker with increasing CEO tenure. We test our hypotheses using a large-scale, multilevel dataset comprising 2,246 direct reports of the respective CEO and 41,531 employees from 497 family- and non-family-managed firms. By applying multilevel modeling, we found support for our proposed hypotheses. Post-hoc tests reveal that the positive effect of family management is particularly strong in first generation family firms. This article contributes to research on leadership and on family firms and advances the evidence-based debate about employees in those firms.

In reifen Branchen gleichen sich die Angebote zusehends an. Der Customer Centricity-Ansatz bietet entscheidende Differenzierungschancen und Wettbewerbsvorteile. Doch wie schaffen es Unternehmen‚ eine Kultur zu entwickeln, in der eine kundenorientierte Arbeitsweise der Mitarbeiter zum Leitmotiv wird? Das Beispiel der Graubundner Kantonalbank zeigt, wie es gelingt, durch einen langfristigen und ganzheitlichen Veranderungsprozess das gesamte Unternehmen auf die Kundenschnittstelle auszurichten, Kunden zu begeistern und die Wertschopfung nachhaltig zu erhohen.

Social Media erleichtern den direkten Kundenkontakt und eröffnen von der aktiven Beteiligung an Innovationsprozessen über die Stärkung von Kundenbeziehungen bis hin zur digitalen Distribution vielfältige Optionen für das Marketing. Gerade für das Dienstleistungsmanagement bietet der Einsatz einen grossen Mehrwert, da Social Media die Kundenintegration über die eigentliche Leistungserstellung hinaus ermöglichen (Bruhn/Meffert 2012). Auch die hohe Popularität von Kommunikationsplattformen wie Facebook oder Twitter bei Onlinenutzern (Busemann/Gscheidle 2012) und niedrige Einstiegsbarrieren haben zur Verbreitung im Dienstleistungsmanagement beigetragen, so dass der Einsatz von Social Media immer mehr zum Standard gehört.

This study addresses the important but yet unresolved question of how firms can create competitive advantage from their multichannel marketing strategy. More specifically, the authors investigate the antecedents of channel extension strategies and their performance implications. Results from an empirical study including top managers from 308 firms indicate that in addition to environmental factors, a firm's channel expansion is directly related to its strategic channel management capability, and that this capability is more important in turbulent environments. Furthermore the study reveals that firms need an appropriate customer lock-in strategy to benefit from addition of novel channel types or traditional channel expansion.

Healthcare is at a crossroads. There is enormous pressure on governments to reduce costs; hospitals and clinicians are looking to improve quality; and an increasing population is striving to get access to medical care. Current healthcare models are in many ways not fit to meet these challenges. The " healthymagination" strategy of GE is designed to meet the growing demands of the market. This initiative that emphasizes customer-driven innovation, stakeholder orientation and multiple communication channels significantly helps reduce costs, improve quality and increase patient access.

In the previous chapters, insights about climate and processes that lead to proactive customer orientation, the performance implications resulting from proactive customer orientation, organizational antecedents that support a proactive customer orientation and organizational characteristics that determine the relative importance of proactive customer-oriented climate and proactive customer-oriented processes have been achieved. However still little is known of how firms may systematically achieve a high level of proactive customer orientation, and about typical patterns of market-based innovations that firms may follow. Thus the first part of this chapter develops a systematic change process to increase proactive customer orientation, based on the qualitative as well as quantitative inquiries of this work. The obtained insights suggest four-steps to develop and benefit from proactive customer orientation. The second part consists of a cluster analysis resulting in different patterns of market-based innovations. The third part introduces typical firms for each pattern and provides situation-specific recommendations of how firms should optimize their proactive customer orientation.

This chapter discusses the design and the results of the empirical study that was conducted to test the hypothesized relationships. A cross-sectional study of business units was considered to be the ideal way of inquiry in the current context. Firstly, the quantitative survey complement and co-operate with the explorative research from the previous chapters and the qualitative methods employed in the next chapter to gain richer insights (see Chapter 1.3). Secondly, it is necessary to examine business units from distinct firms and industries to gain insights about different organizational characteristics (e.g., business unit age, business unit size, type of culture). Thirdly, the theories and research traditions from which the hypotheses are derived (e.g., market orientation and innovation management research) are usually based on cross-sectional methods to increase the validity and generalizability of the results. To overcome potential limitations of this research approach, key informant bias and common method bias are addressed with various control mechanisms.

Nachhaltigkeit hat sich zu einer Art Mantra fur das 21. Jahrhundert entwickelt. Damit steigt fur Unternehmen der Erklarungsbedarf gegenuber der Offentlichkeit: Wie nachhaltig ist ihr eigenes wirtschaftliches Handeln? Verantwortungsbewusster Umgang mit naturlichen Ressourcen wird zunehmend zu einer Herausforderung von existenzieller Bedeutung. Unternehmen sollten die eigene Positionierung an diese Entwicklungen anpassen. Ein Beispiel fur eine erfolgreiche Nachhaltigkeitspositionierung ist das Umweltengagement von General Electric.

Experiencing work as meaningful benefits both individuals and organizations. While prior research has indicated that leaders may shape followers’ work meaningfulness, little is known about the role...

This research examines the interplay of internal versus external communication and employees’ distance to headquarters on employees’ organizational identification. Drawing from construal-level theo...

It is axiomatic that strategic flexibility is a key success factor in generating competitive advantage. Despite this maxim, often peddled in the normative literature, empirical studies have produced inconsistent results for the strength and direction of this relationship. We synthesize these results and provide empirical support for a general, moderate, and positive effect of strategic flexibility on firm performance. Moreover, we find that strategic flexibility indirectly affects financial performance through its positive effects on innovation capability and superior market position, and that strategic flexibility has a negative direct effect on financial performance. Importantly, the meta-analytic evidence also indicates that the strategic flexibility-performance relationship depends on measurement methods, the research context, and certain environmental characteristics. Exploratory analyses regarding the antecedents of strategic flexibility reveal many meaningful differences to the predominant expectations in prior research. Overall, our results provide the necessary nuance to discerning the specific antecedent and consequential effects of strategic flexibility, thereby providing valuable implications for managers, and outlining a research agenda for future inquiries.

This study explores how and when customer feedback influences organizational health, conceptualized as a combination of employee health and organizational performance. Based on affective events theory, we classify both positive and negative customer feedback as affective work events. We expect that these events influence organizational health through their impact on positive affective climate, and that the relationships are moderated by empowerment climate. We tested the model in a dataset consisting of 80 independent organizations with 178 board members, 80 HR representatives, and 10'953 employees. The findings support the expected indirect effects. Furthermore, empowerment climate strengthened the impact of positive customer feedback on organizational health but does not affect the relationship between negative customer feedback and organizational health. By providing first insights into the consequences of both positive and negative customer feedback on organizational health, this study opens a new avenue for scientific inquiry of customer influences on employees at the organizational level.

Well-formulated and appropriate strategies only result in superior returns for an organization when they are implemented successfully. Although a notable volume of literature has been published on the strategy implementation process, past research has neglected the role of relationship quality (leader-member exchange and team-member exchange) at the individual level of strategy implementation. We propose a contingent model based on social learning theory and examine the strategy implementation process within a retail bank. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we find that social exchange relationships embedded in a work team setting influence individual employee's strategy implementation support. Namely, the higher an employee's leader-member exchange, the stronger is the positive relationship between supervisor modeling behavior and team member strategy support. Additionally, the higher an employee's team-member exchange, the stronger the positive relationship between work team strategy support and individual strategy support.