Academic literature on the topic 'Customer oriented deviance'

This study aspires to examine how customers respond to two forms of frontline employee deviance (i. e., customer-oriented deviance, COD, and customeroriented misbehaviour, COM) during a specific service exchange. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, COD and COM are viewed as resources and demands of customer performance during their exchanges with employees. Five customer responses are examined, namely encounter satisfaction, and employee-oriented citizenship behaviour, customer dysfunctional intentions, customer citizenship behaviour towards the organisation, and brand advocacy. To gain insights into these issues, an experimental design is adopted, which manipulates the two forms of deviance along with two boundary conditions: the extent to which the problem the customer faces is severe (i. e., problem severity); and whether the outcome of the exchange with the employee is successful (i. e., exchange outcome). This study contributes to deviant employee literature by illustrating how different forms of deviance shape exchange-specific responses and reciprocal customer intentions directed at the organisation and the employee.

Purpose Occasionally, retail employees “break the rules” in order to help customers. Currently, there is little research on the mechanisms by which a sales assistants’ positive deviance intentions help them attain specific personal and organisational goals. The purpose of this paper is to examine one mechanism, hope, which develops employees’ deviance intentions to provide benefits to the customer, themselves and the organisation. Design/methodology/approach A survey captured responses from 270 frontline employees from the retail and services sector. AMOS 23 was used to conduct measurement, path and mediation analyses. Findings This study highlights the role of employee hope in developing employees’ positive deviance intentions, and improving perceptions of organisational performance. Results demonstrate that the direct positive impact of hope on positive deviance intention was significant. Furthermore, positive deviance intention was found to positively impact employee goal attainment and perceived organisational performance. The authors’ employee hope model offers a better understanding of positive outcomes of employee deviance, suggesting that retail managers should invest resources to build strong employee–organisation relationships. Originality/value This is the first study to empirically demonstrate that employee hope can explain how customer-oriented positive deviance intentions help employee goal attainment and improve their perceptions of organisational performance.

This study attempts to solve problems encountered in traditional supply chain design, including: products not being designed or manufactured according to customer needs; low profit or over-crowded competitors in the chosen target market, and conflicts between the objectives for each member of the supply chain. Moreover, this study recommends a model for calculating the objectives for the overall demand chain and for each member. This model maximizes the overall demand chain performance by satisfying customer needs. It not only gives demand chain members for value adding direction, but also monitors the members during execution. The proposed model provides immediate corrective action if any members of the demand chain deviate from the objectives.

Purpose This paper aims to examine the impact of cultural specificity on hotel’s online reviews and ratings. Design/methodology/approach Using Hofstede’s scale of cultural differences, it analyzes 1,821 comments about the Catalonia Sagrada Familia Hotel across 77 countries. Logistic regression is used for data analysis. Findings It is found that detailed reviews tend to be provided by the guests who belong to a low-power distance culture, are collectivistic, are masculine, have a low uncertainty avoidance, are long-term orientated or are indulgent. On the other hand, the customers who tend to deviate from the prior average ratings come from high-power distance societies, are individualists, are feminists, belong to a high uncertainty avoidance culture, are long-term oriented or are indulgent. Originality/value These findings extend the hospitality management literature and potentially help the hotel managers to better understand their customers’ behavior in a web-based environment.

Frontline employee behaviours are recognised as vital for achieving a competitive advantage for service organisations. The services marketing literature has comprehensively examined ways to improve frontline employee behaviours in service delivery and recovery. However, limited attention has been paid to frontline employee behaviours that favour customers in ways that go against organisational norms or rules. This study examines these behaviours by introducing a behavioural concept of Customer-Oriented Deviance (COD). COD is defined as, “frontline employees exhibiting extra-role behaviours that they perceive to defy existing expectations or prescribed rules of higher authority through service adaptation, communication and use of resources to benefit customers during interpersonal service encounters.” This thesis develops a COD measure and examines the key determinants of these behaviours from a frontline employee perspective. Existing research on similar behaviours that has originated in the positive deviance and pro-social behaviour domains has limitations and is considered inadequate to examine COD in the services context. The absence of a well-developed body of knowledge on non-conforming service behaviours has implications for both theory and practice. The provision of ‘special favours’ increases customer satisfaction but the over-servicing of customers is also counterproductive for the service delivery and costly for the organisation. Despite these implications of non-conforming service behaviours, there is little understanding about the nature of these behaviours and its key drivers. This research builds on inadequacies in prior research on positive deviance, pro-social and pro-customer literature to develop the theoretical foundation of COD. The concept of positive deviance which has predominantly been used to study organisational behaviours is applied within a services marketing setting. Further, it addresses previous limitations in pro-social and pro-customer behavioural literature that has examined limited forms of behaviours with no clear understanding on the nature of these behaviours. Building upon these literature streams, this research adopts a holistic approach towards the conceptualisation of COD. It addresses previous shortcomings in the literature by providing a well bounded definition, developing a psychometrically sound measure of COD and a conceptually well-founded model of COD. The concept of COD was examined across three separate studies and based on the theoretical foundations of role theory and social identity theory. Study 1 was exploratory and based on in-depth interviews using the Critical Incident Technique (CIT). The aim of Study 1 was to understand the nature of COD and qualitatively identify its key drivers. Thematic analysis was conducted to analyse the data and the two potential dimensions of COD behaviours of Deviant Service Adaptation (DSA) and Deviant Service Communication (DSC) were revealed in the analysis. In addition, themes representing the potential influences of COD were broadly classified as individual factors, situational factors, and organisational factors. Study 2 was a scale development procedure that involved the generation and purification of items for the measure based on two student samples working in customer service roles (Pilot sample, N=278; Initial validation sample, N=231). The results for the reliability and Exploratory Factor Analyses (EFA) on the pilot sample suggested the scale had poor psychometric properties. As a result, major revisions were made in terms of item wordings and new items were developed based on the literature to reflect a new dimension, Deviant Use of Resources (DUR). The revised items were tested on the initial validation sample with the EFA analysis suggesting a four-factor structure of COD. The aim of Study 3 was to further purify the COD measure and test for nomological validity based on its theoretical relationships with key antecedents and similar constructs (key correlates). The theoretical model of COD consisting of nine hypotheses was tested on a retail and hospitality sample of frontline employees (Retail N=311; Hospitality N=305) of a market research panel using an online survey. The data was analysed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The results provided support for a re-specified second-order three-factor model of COD which consists of 11 items. Overall, the COD measure was found to be reliable and valid, demonstrating convergent validity, discriminant validity and marginal partial invariance for the factor loadings. The results showed support for nomological validity, although the antecedents had differing impact on COD across samples. Specifically, empathy and perspective-taking, role conflict, and job autonomy significantly influenced COD in the retail sample, whereas empathy and perspective-taking, risk-taking propensity and role conflict were significant predictors in the hospitality sample. In addition, customer orientation-selling orientation, the altruistic dimension of organisational citizenship behaviours, workplace deviance, and social desirability responding were found to correlate with COD. This research makes several contributions to theory. First, the findings of this thesis extend the literature on positive deviance, pro-social and pro-customer behaviours. Second, the research provides an empirically tested model which describes the antecedents of COD. Third, this research contributes by providing a reliable and valid measure of COD. Finally, the research investigates the differential effects of the key antecedents in different service sectors on COD. The research findings also contribute to services marketing practice. Based on the research findings, service practitioners can better understand the phenomenon of COD and utilise the measurement tool to calibrate COD levels within their organisations. Knowledge on the key determinants of COD will help improve recruitment and training programs and drive internal initiatives within the firm.

Given the challenges to ethical practices in a business to business marketing context, this study examines the influence of supervisors’ ethical leadership on key account managers. A mixed-method approach was used to answer research questions about the role of ethical leadership to shape account managers’ ethicality, ethical conduct and customer relationship quality. The study included a qualitative phase to confirm the constructs followed by a quantitative study to test theory-driven hypotheses. The initial exploratory phase interviewed a sample 18 participants, which comprised supervisors, account manager, and customers of an Indonesian information and communication technology firm. Analyses surfaced common themes which informed the concept of ethical key account management. An online survey with two stages of data collection followed, which used both quantitative measures and open-ended qualitative responses. In stage 1, partial least-squares structural equation modelling of responses from 258 account managers revealed that supervisors’ ethical leadership was positively related to account managers’ ethical awareness, intention, and judgment contingent on the ethical dilemma involved. Further analyses of the 73 completed responses of the survey in stage 2 indicated that ethical leadership was positively related to ethical equity judgment and customer-oriented organisational citizenship behaviour, and had an indirect positive effect on customer relationship quality. Theoretically, the study contributes new understanding by extending the model of ethical leadership outcomes to customers as the main organisational stakeholders. In practice, the study has the potential to inform strategies for improving the moral engagement of key account managers. This engagement is essential for guiding standards of customer relationship management. In sum, supervisors who engage in moral behaviour and provoke their subordinates to do so by role-modelling, communication and providing rewards and consequences, are likely to influence followers’ citizenship behaviour and discourage the deviant behaviour.

With the case study MetroEngineers, Sarah Langer, Ronny Gey, Diana Karadzhova-Beyer, and Andrea Fried highlight organizational deviance from standards in the software development of a service engineering company for rail vehicles called MetroEngineers. Despite the initial intention to develop software according to European standards, the case study explains the reasons why the software developers deviate from standards nonetheless. First, software development at MetroEngineers is provided for a Chinese market which is hardly regulated through standards. Deviations from standards are therefore hardly sanctioned, but even MetroEngineers itself has not established an adequate internal sanctioning system for standard deviations. Second, MetroEngineers’ software developers lack allocative and authoritative resources for standard enactment and a lively internal discourse on the importance of standard-compliant development involving middle management and the customer. This means that software developers are ambitiously trying to develop in accordance with European standards, but ultimately fail to overcome the various contradictions that arise in standard enactment. This chapter represents one of the two manipulation-oriented types of organizational deviance introduced in the book.