ALBERT

Description: In an environment characterized by growing awareness of environmental sustainability among various stakeholders in organizations, innovating for sustainability can be expected to grow in importance from the standpoints of organizational legitimacy, reputation, and performance. Relatedly, a firm’s sustainable innovations capabilities as a source of competitive advantage and the sustainability related attributes of a firm’s product offerings as bases for market segmentation, target marketing, positioning, and differentiation can also be expected to grow in importance. The emergence of sustainability as a major driver of innovation highlights a number of important issues that merit investigation, such as potential avenues for sustainable innovation and sustainable product innovation and factors underlying differences between firms in their commitment to a sustainable innovations orientation. In an attempt to gain insights into these issues, this paper presents (1) a conceptual framework delineating potential avenues for sustainable innovations and (2) a conceptual model delineating a number of firm-related and industry-related antecedents of sustainable innovations orientation, along with performance outcomes of sustainable innovations orientation. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.

Description: Conventional wisdom and prior research on processing fluency suggest that consumers prefer fluent information, such that it has positive effects on their purchase decisions. Challenging this conventional wisdom, and on the basis of recent research on processing disfluency, this study proposes that the increased effort required to process disfluent price information can lead to deeper information processing. If the advertised price offer represents a good value, it can enhance purchase decisions, even if customers prefer the disfluent display less. A series of studies in the field and lab demonstrate support for this positive impact of disfluent price information on purchase decisions.

Description: This paper seeks to understand how marketers might capitalize on consumers’ increasing time spent online and convert online procrastination tendencies into purchase behavior. More specifically, the authors explore whether the propensity to use the Internet to avoid work tasks (online procrastination) leads to purchase behavior, and if so, what the mechanism underlying such an effect might be. Through two studies, the authors find that online procrastination positively impacts purchase, which in turn is indirectly affected by the consumers’ propensity to delay their decisions. The authors further find different likelihoods of purchase based on degrees of tendency to delay decisions, online users’ age, and type of online activities. Implications of these findings for informing managers about the ways to increase purchases for decisive and indecisive consumers who waste time online and raising online procrastinators’ awareness about their vulnerability to marketers are discussed.

Description: Studies show that service employees are among the most disengaged in the workforce. To better understand service employees’ job engagement, this study broadens the scope of the job demands-resources (JD-R) model to include power distance orientation (PDO). The inclusion of PDO enriches the JD-R model by providing a key piece of information that has been missing in prior JD-R models: employees’ perceptions of the source of job demands (i.e., supervisors) or employees’ views of power and hierarchy within the organization. Study 1 uses a survey-based field study to show that employees with a high (compared to low) PDO feel more burnout due to supervisors when they are closely monitored by their supervisors. Study 1 further supports the finding that employees with high (compared to low) PDO feel less disengagement despite burnout due to supervisors. Study 2, using a lab experiment, and Study 3, relying on a survey-based field study, unveil why these effects were observed. Stress and job satisfaction emerge as mediators that explain the findings from Study 1. Implications of the role of PDO are discussed to improve the current understanding of how job engagement can improve customer service performance.

Description: Serving as mental models, psychological contracts guide consumers’ service interactions with their service providers. This study incorporates a psychological contract perspective into the relationship marketing literature, exploring service customers’ beliefs about the terms and conditions of the resource exchange process and the types of relationships they form with service providers. It provides new insights that explain why and how some customers respond favorably to a company’s relationship overtures and investments while others do not. A latent class analysis on a sample of 700 consumers across three different service industries reveals that consumers form four distinct types of psychological contracts: relational, standard, transitional, and captive. To further validate the differences between the contract types, open-ended responses from the respondents were sorted by each class. The distinctive themes that emerged provide a richer understanding of the characteristics of each class beyond those inferred from the quantitative results. Each contract type is also profiled against its underlying level of trust, satisfaction, and commitment to understand the relationship between the contract types and these traditional relationship marketing variables. Marketers can differentiate their relationship marketing strategies and allocate their resource investments more effectively by segmenting consumers according to their psychological contract type.

Description: Extant research confirms the importance of cocreating value with customers in service marketing, yet little is known about the impact of service agents’ work experiences on customers’ service perceptions. This research examines how service agents’ workplace ostracism from different sources (supervisors versus coworkers) influences customers’ perceived coproduction value, perceived service performance, and actual purchases. Three laboratory experiments and one survey reveal a double-edged sword effect of workplace ostracism and its contingency such that (1) supervisor ostracism reduces customers’ perceived control value in customer–agent coproduction through threatening service agents’ efficacy needs when the agents experience low servicing empowerment; (2) coworker ostracism enhances customers’ perceived relational value in coproduction through threatening service agents’ relational needs when they expect a long-term relationship with customers; and (3) customers’ perceived control and relational values increase their perceived service performance, and customer relational value also increases the amount of purchases. Our findings reveal that service agents’ workplace ostracism may actually help or harm customers’ service perceptions, depending on the source of ostracism. The results provide significant implications for how organizations can better manage employees’ perceived ostracism in the workplace and strategically improve customers’ experience in service coproduction with excluded agents.

Description: This research builds foundational theory in a new domain of marketing: animated visual brand elements. It focuses on agent animation, which conveys a sense that the brand element, such as a logo, moves of its own volition, as distinguished from object animation, which does not. Given limited marketplace utilization (pilot study), animated logos represent new opportunities for branding and promotion. However, the influence of agent animation on attitude toward the firm or brand is contingent on the fluent processing of the animation in the context it is used. As compared with object-animated or static logos, agent animation encourages more favorable attitudes toward dynamic firms but less favorable attitudes toward stable firms (Studies 1 and 2). Further, more favorable attitudes arise when the brand personality suggested by the animation is consistent with other brand cues, such as brand slogans (Study 3) or the logo graphic (Study 4). Finally, the effects are replicated with choice behavior using established brands (Study 5).

Description: Many businesses increasingly use strategic partnerships to manage corporate environmental agendas. However, how value is created in green partnerships remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, the authors examine the effects of announcements of green partnerships (marketing versus technology) on shareholder value. It is argued that in green partnerships firms leverage marketing and technology-related capabilities for value-enhancing purposes. The results show that announcements of green marketing partnerships have an immediate positive and significant effect on shareholder value, whereas announcements of green technology partnerships produce an immediate negative and significant effect. Nevertheless, green technology partnerships can accrue positive returns, but over a longer-term (1 year) period. In “dirtier” industries, it is more difficult to generate positive returns to green partnerships. Counterintuitively, though, in high-polluting industries, firms having a history of positive environmental performance experience lower financial gains from announcements of green partnerships than firms that were less environmentally responsible in the past.

Description: Work–family interface conflicts have typically been cast in a negative light due to their detrimental consequences. This study offers new insights by uncovering conditions under which such conflicts may produce both positive and negative effects on salesperson job-related behaviors in the context of B2B sales. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory as an overarching theoretical framework, the authors suggest that informal controls (i.e., professional control and self-control) have differential moderating effects in salespeople’s primary and secondary appraisal processes when faced with work–family conflict and family–work conflict. Dyadic data from a matched salesperson–customer sample reveals that professional control amplifies, whereas self-control mitigates, the positive effect of work–family conflict on perceived stress. Professional control amplifies the positive effect of stress on in-role behavior, and self-control strengthens positive effects of stress on in-role behavior and customer-directed extra-role behavior while suppressing unethical behavior under high stress. Moreover, the two types of informal controls moderate the direct effects of family–work conflict on salesperson behaviors in an opposite fashion, such that under a strong professional control, family–work conflict reduces in-role and extra-role behaviors and induces unethical behavior, whereas a strong self-control alleviates such detrimental effects. These findings suggest that work–family interface conflicts should be viewed as a double-edged sword capable of producing both positive and negative consequences under certain conditions, offering new theoretical insights and important managerial implications for this prevalent phenomenon in sales management.