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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a methodology by which qualitative analyses serve as rich source materials for discovery of theoretically cogent interrelations between latent variables. Design/methodology/approach: In an illustrative case, qualitative data are collected from US franchisee managers from a single branded franchise of automotive repair outlets. Qualitative analysis of franchisee experiences and attitudes is critical for construction of a causal model used to predict conflict intensity between franchisee managers and franchisors. Findings: The model is based on franchisees' normative expectations for resource allocation within the franchise; and their perceptions of franchisor normative violations, which are determinative of grievances, distrust, and hostility. This theoretical orientation serves to generate a system of interrelated empirically testable propositions. Research limitations/implications: In principle, the primary limitation of using qualitative analysis for the construction of causal models is the fruitfulness of the theoretical orientation shared by the qualitative analyst and the causal modeler. Practical implications: The methodological approach advanced in this paper advances qualitative research and causal modeling beyond the individual contributions. Qualitative analysis infuses variables and process imagery into causal modeling. In turn, causal modeling elaborates the qualitative analysis and makes explicit logical connections between variables. Originality/value: This paper advances a methodology by which qualitative analysis and causal model construction may be usefully integrated. Theory-based qualitative analysis may be formalized to map latent concepts and their interrelations. Further, operational measures of these concepts may be adduced from the analysis of textual data. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Purpose: This paper aims to develop a model that explains the moral bases of consumer ethnocentrism and consumer cosmopolitanism as purchase dispositions. The authors build their work on moral foundations theory and the social theories of Emile Durkheim. Design/methodology/approach: Theory-building from general theories of motivation is grounded in cultural norms, and empirical research is conducted to test theoretical propositions. Findings: The focus is on the theoretical implications of binding or individualism morals of consumers within social groups. Consequently, variables in the model relate to ethical themes of community, autonomy and divinity. This theory posits that, for a variety of considerations, loyalty has a direct and positive effect on consumer ethnocentrism and on consumer cosmopolitanism. Serendipitously, other moral foundations have negative effects. The authors theorize that negative relationships exist between authority and consumer cosmopolitanism, and between sanctity and consumer ethnocentrism. This model also illustrates that consumer ethnocentrism positively predisposes favorable domestic product judgments. Research limitations/implications: New ethical factors in consumer dispositions affecting product purchase decisions are explored. Hypotheses can be empirically replicated and moderated in future research. Practical implications: Marketers can use the variables of personal values, moral foundations and gender role identity to fashion marketing communications and to target selective consumer segments. Social implications: The persuasion process of social marketing will be enhanced by understanding relevant motives. Originality/value: The use of the fine-grained moral foundation antecedents to predict consumer predispositions of ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism is without precedent. © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The search for an ethical vendor who is honest and trustworthy in the exchange process is conceptualized as the Diogenes Effect, an innovative concept. In the light of this effect, the theoretical framework of the current study's model involved retail buyer responses to vendor persuasive communications. The model was tested by having a sample of retailer buyers complete a survey of information processing in the search for a product and vendor. This study innovatively links vendor communication effects to retailer buyer decision-making and evaluations by incorporating and integrating elements of Elaboration Likelihood Theory. Contributing to theory-building, it was found that when retailer buyers searched for a vendor with an ethical orientation, the result was intensified central processing of information and decreased peripheral information processing. This was especially salient when retailer buyers had greater longevity of professional experience. The next stage, information processing, led to feedback that enabled assessment of vendor trustworthiness. Finally, the research measured the level of fulfillment in the post-purchase phase. In the end, typical outcomes included the generation of favorable expectations of vendor performance, as well as the positive impact of those heightened favorable expectations on greater satisfaction with the value ultimately received from the vendor.

The authors explore how the relationship between part-time master of business administration (MBA) students and their employers changes as students proceed through their MBA program by examining the degree to which students are integrated into their employer organizations. Significant positive relationships observed between students’ progress through their MBA program and the integration factors of coworker support and future prospects with their employers suggest that an MBA education can have a positive effect on employee–employer integration levels. Consequently, in addition to increasing business knowledge and skills, an MBA degree appears to assist with integrating employees and employers. © 2014, Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This book explores new and leading edge marketing research approaches as successfully practiced by visionaries of academia and the research industry. Ideal as either a supplementary text for students or as a guidebook for practitioners, this book showcases the excitement of a field where discoveries abound and researchers are valued for solving weighty problems and minimizing risks. The authors offer rich new tools to measure and analyze consumer attitudes, combined with existing databases, online bulletin boards, social media, neuroscience, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, behavioral economics, and more. The reader will profit from the numerous contemporary case studies that demonstrate the key role of marketing research in corporate decision-making.

This study investigates the influence of role conflict, role ambiguity, and role strain on job performance, job satisfaction, and life satisfaction among field sales and company sales support employees in a single pharmaceutical company. Because this study is based on data from a single company, these results may not necessarily be generalized to all companies in the industry. In the present research, a path model of the process reveals important variations in response to role conflict, role ambiguity, and role strain between the two classes of employees. For both classes, the influence of decreased role ambiguity is generally positive for measured outcomes. However, reductions in role conflict, while lessening role strain, are likely to result in lower job performance for field sales employees. Decreases in role strain, while improving life satisfaction, may lead to lower job satisfaction for sales support employees. © 2003, Informa UK Ltd All rights reserved: reproduction in whole or part not permitted. All rights reserved.

Academic dishonesty of students is a problem that threatens the integrity of educational institutions. Understanding the sources of academic dishonesty has become an urgent need, which compels higher educational institutions to evaluate and redesign approaches to address this problem. To develop new and important insights about this this form of student misconduct, this paper takes an integrative social cognitive perspective. It explores students’ attitudes toward various forms of academic dishonesty. The central research question concerns the impact of individual differences in moral disengagement and Machiavellianism on academic dishonesty tendencies. The study is based on a sample of 195 students at a public university in northeastern United States. Analysis was conducted by partial least squares equation modeling (SmartPLS-SEM). The analysis disclosed that, in sum, moral disengagement was strongly associated with academic dishonesty attitudes of fabricating information and both moral disengagement and Machiavellianism were associated with obtaining unfair academic dishonesty advantages. Data supported nearly all aspects of a structural model of academic dishonesty tendencies, with the exception of an association between Machiavellianism and receiving or abetting academic dishonesty, as well as an association between moral disengagement and ignoring prevalent practices that were in the predicted direction but were not significant. These findings provide a general understanding of the process by which academic dishonesty is determined. Study implications for ameliorating the impact of academic dishonesty are as follows: students should be engaged in an atmosphere full of communal morality, dissuasive of justificatory rationalizations and social arrangements that negate students’ use of moral disengagement.

In the current study the relationships between CEO archetypes and organizational climate were examined. Archetypes are historical, mythical, and cultural representations that are shared in our collective unconscious. Data were collected from a CEO and his employees, using a mixed methods research approach which involved the Zaltman Metaphorical Elicitation Technique (ZMET), as well as personality measures and quantitative assessments of organizational climate. The CEO archetype as perceived by employees is that of a benevolent patriarch which mirrors the CEO's self-concept as caring for the well-being of employees. Employees ascribed the stress-free and nurturing organizational climate to the CEO's archetypical leadership style. However, their organizational climate, in principle, leads to excessive employee familistic dependence on the CEO for making important organizational decisions and supplying creative ideation. The present study of a CEO archetype and its bearing on organizational climate is unique, filling an important gap in management knowledge. Implications of the study involve the channeling of its insights about the archetype-embedded organizational climate, so as to better select administrative managers, improve organizational communication trust and openness, stimulate creative innovation, handle organizational crises, and generally promote employee well-being. © 2019 University of Phoenix

Purpose - A first objective is to add insight into how constructs of ethnocentrism, xenocentrism and cosmopolitanism relate to each other. Knowledge of how these constructs overlap or work together in affecting consumer preferences will offer global marketers insights for designing appropriate marketing strategies. The second objective is to extend this knowledge by examining the correspondence of these three constructs to a nomological network of dispositional concepts pertinent for product positioning and market segmentation. The third objective is to empirically examine the extent to which the measures, construct structure and associative relationships are robust in different national research settings. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - Surveying British and American consumers, this study examines and analyzes the correspondence of these identity-relevant constructs within a nomological net of pertinent concepts: consciousness-of-kind, global consumption orientation, materialism and natural environment concern. Findings - The hypothesized negative links between CET-XEN and CET-COS, and the predicted positive connection between XEN-COS were all confirmed on the latent factor results for the combined data set. The negative correlation between CET-XEN was of a considerably lower magnitude than that for CET-COS. Originality/value - To date, no research has used an identity theory framework and simultaneously examined in a cross-cultural context the interrelationships of consumer ethnocentrism consumer xenocentrism and cosmopolitanism - and their differentiating linkages to a multiplicity of consumer dispositions.

Purpose-This paper aims to use goal-setting theory to explain the transfer of knowledge and skills between master of business administration (MBA) and the workplace. Design/methodology/approach-Data were obtained by an online survey of MBA students enrolled in at four US graduate business schools. These were a public and private institution in the Northeast region, a private sectarian institution in the Midwest region and a private institution in the Pacific region. All students worked while attending the university. The sampling frame consisted of each school’s MBA enrollees. Questionnaires were distributed to a random cross-section of part-time students at each graduate school of business representative of returned by 144 students. The profiles of responders were consistent with parameters for the entire MBA student population. Findings-The research shows that multiple goals of reciprocal knowledge and skills transfer may be in harmony and mutually reinforcing. In principle, each goal is more likely to be attained with greater economy of effort than might be surmised. Additionally, the same forces may act similarly to facilitate attainment of two well-integrated goals, in this case transfer betweenMBAstudies and work, as well as between work and MBA studies. Research limitations/implications-The present study involved participants from part-time public and private MBA granting institutions in the USA. The study tested and extended goal-setting theory and introduced the innovative concept of reciprocal transfer. Future studies should seek to generalize the findings to a broader population of part-time MBA students, especially from other nations. Despite its strengths, the findings of this study need to be interpreted in the perspective of some limitations. The current study did not measure transfer climates in either the organization or university settings. Transfer climates undoubtedly have an important bearing on transfer outcomes. Practical implications-Review of the present study suggests that a positive MBA environment is needed to influence motivation to learn and perceptions of the MBA program’s utility, thereby promoting transfer of knowledge and skills to MBA studies from the workplace. A supportive work-to-MBA-studies transfer climate will lead to more active learning of course content that has greater relevance for achieving career goals. Potentially generalizable from the organizational transfer climate literature (Rouiller and Goldstein 1990; Rouiller and Goldstein 1993), positive transfer from work to MBA studies will occur when appropriate situational cues and consequences are present in the program. Social implications-A constructive implication suggested by the findings of this study would be the intervention and transfer management by educators to structure and strengthen the university transfer climate of their part-time MBA programs. Traditionally, the concept of transfer climate has been primarily applied to employee workplace training activity and job performance. The university culture of the MBA student might emphasize and reward continuous learning from workplace experiences. Opportunities at the university should be provided for the exercise of newly acquired workplace skills that reinforce MBA learning experiences. Originality/value-This is the first study that shows how learning goals and performance goals are integrated in the context of a new concept, i.e. reciprocal transfer of knowledge and skills betweenMBA and workplace settings. It also demonstrates, for the first time, the impact of learning and motivation for MBAstudies and perceived utility ofMBAprogram on the extent of transfer of learning and skills from the workplace to the university setting. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Identity is recognized as a powerful antecedent of behavior. Social identity denotes the incorporation of culture into a person’s self-concept. A strong correspondence exists between identity with a given social unit and commitment to group values/norms, and thus, how much influence the social unit exerts on the person’s attitudes and behaviors. As a psychological construct, social identity research requires probing how individuals subjectively interpret their own affiliation with one or several collectivities. Cultures are increasingly emancipated from geography in the global era. Because contemporary consumers are continuously exposed to a variety of cultural influences, they may develop polycentric identities. As companies and markets integrate, a key international market segmentation topic relates to consumers’ mindsets about home and extraneous countries/cultures, and subsequently, the products connected with these entities. To date, no research has simultaneously examined the interrelationships of consumer ethnocentrism (bias towards products from one’s national culture), consumer xenocentrism (i.e., preference or orientation towards products from a culture other than one’s own), and cosmopolitanism (i.e., a yearning for and adeptness at mastering cultural diversity) in a single study. Employing an online survey, and drawing from a representative sample (n = 269) of American consumers drawn from all 50 states (plus D.C.), this research also examines the correspondence of these identity-relevant constructs within a nomological net of pertinent concepts (all of which are established in the marketing literature): materialism, consciousness-of-kind, external orientation (cultural open-mindedness and consumption of foreign media), global consumption orientation, and natural environment concern. The survey contained a total of 60 scales corresponding to the 8 constructs, along with a series of key demographic measures. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were applied to the construct measures. Various analytical techniques were employed (tests for convergent/discriminant validity, bivariate correlations, t-tests, MANOVA, two-step clustering, as well as path analyses using structural equation modelling) to test the 19 proposed theoretical hypotheses. Most hypotheses were supported, in terms of statistical significance and magnitude, as well as directional valence. Associative network memory theory and signaling theory implicate how consumers decide from a constellation of local, foreign, and global product options. Upon activation of a brand node by way of retrieval cues (product categories, brand names, and so forth), linkages such product attributes and semantic associations (e.g., ingroups/outgroups and corresponding levels of felt identification) become salient. Firms can manipulate signals, including associations towards or away from countries/cultures, to position products and persuade consumers. Vertical segmentation, the conventional approach to adapting marketing strategies, entails developing marketing mixes for each country, from the near limitless combination of demographic, economic and psychographic variables. Due to the globalization of media and the widespread movement of products and peoples across borders a growing number of researchers instead advocate horizontal segmentation, whereby similar groups of consumers are targeted with an essentially uniform marketing strategy, irrespective of where they might live. Individuals’ inward and outward dispositions—towards their own and different countries, cultures, and products—are sound candidate constructs for designing horizontal strategies.

Quantitative consumer research has long been the backbone of consumer psychology producing insights with peerless validity and reliability. This new book addresses a broad range of approaches to consumer psychology research along with developments in quantitative consumer research. Experts in their respective fields offer a perspective into this rapidly changing discipline of quantitative consumer research. The book focuses on new techniques as well as adaptations of traditional approaches and addresses ethics that relate to contemporary research approaches. The text is appropriate for use with university students at all academic levels. Each chapter provides both a theoretical grounding in its topic area and offers applied examples of the use of the approach in consumer settings. Exercises are provided at the end of each chapter to test student learning. Topics covered are quantitative research techniques, measurement theory and psychological scaling, mapping sentences for planning and managing research, using qualitative research to elucidate quantitative research findings, big data and its visualization, extracting insights from online data, modeling the consumer, social media and digital market analysis, connectionist modeling of consumer choice, market sensing and marketing research, preparing data for analysis;, and ethics. The book may be used on its own as a textbook and may also be used as a supplementary text in quantitative research courses.

Purpose: Problems of relationship quality and interfirm conflict in business-to-business settings are serious concerns that need to be addressed. Thus, the authors have engaged in an extensive review to promote an understanding of these complex issues. This article develops an integrated framework for analyzing wide-ranging relations between individual representatives and patterns of interfirm incompatibility for managerial control.Methodology/approach: The review involves numerous sources that include articles and monographs. A theoretical framework is constructed to integrate fragmented empirical data. In particular, social identity and commitment-trust theories are mobilized for this framework.Findings: The review of studies has a substantial consistency with the theoretical framework. The article outlines a causal chain from interpersonal agent dissimilarities to dysfunctional buyer-supplier relations, culminating in interfirm pathological conflict. Moderating factors in the causal chain are: agent identity differentiation (for interpersonal dissimilarity), supplier relations mismanagement (for buyer-supplier relationship quality), and interfirm opportunism (for interfirm pathological conflict). Buyer-supplier interfirm incompatibility mediates the causal link between interpersonal dissimilarity and buyer-supplier relationship quality. Identity differentiation, the validation of one's self-image, is introduced as a process that determines buyer-supplier agent interpersonal dissimilarity judgments. This framework uses a contextual perspective. It describes interactions between observations of micro-level phenomena of interpersonal dissimilarities and macro-level models of interfirm fit. From a managerial perspective, interpersonal relations between individual buyer and supplier agents may be further strengthened by such strategies as expanding the scope of the interpersonal relationship, relaxation of role responsibilities, and volunteering business-related contact referrals.Originality/value: A new theoretical framework has been devised to predict and explain relationship quality and interfirm pathological conflict in the business-to-business context. The framework contributes to the value of the knowledge base by serving as a means for building new diagnostic tools for assessment of interfirm behavioral issues affecting exchanges. New concepts are introduced to enhance current literature on business-to-business marketing. The framework provides concreteindicators that operationally define ideas and enable or improve measurement for empirical modeling.

Despite the danger of franchisee non-compliance as a severe impediment to overall franchise operation and performance, there is currently minimal understanding of the key factors that lead to these behaviors. Using a foundation of relational exchange theory, we construct and test a model that demonstrates how two distinct forms of trust, based upon perceptions of franchisor integrity and franchisor competence, are critical to explaining the roles that relational conflict and satisfaction play in influencing franchisee compliance. Implications of these findings are then demonstrated to have compelling relevance to the effective management of franchise systems. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which personal values, moral foundations and gender-role identities affect, in sequence, consumers' constructions of their ethnocentric and cosmopolitan orientations. Achieving a better understanding of the psychological makeup of consumer ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism should help managers better design international market segmentation and brand positioning strategies. Design/methodology/approach: The study's conceptual framework is anchored in attitude and values theories, and focuses on the social categorizations that consumers make and how these contribute to the formation of their ethnocentric and cosmopolitan orientations. Drawing data from consumers living in five European countries, we test our theoretical conjectures through structural equation modeling approaches, including multigroup analysis at the country level, as well as the identification and scrutiny of potential pan-European consumer segments. Findings: Findings show that personal values, moral foundations and gender-role identities do exert direct and indirect (partially mediated) effects on the formation of consumers' ethnocentric and cosmopolitan orientations. These provide numerous insights for managers in terms of how they can segment domestic and international markets, as well as how to position products and communicate brand strategies. Research limitations/implications: The study focused on consumers' personal and role identities and offers implications based on data gathered from a sample of five European countries. Future work should broaden this perspective by including other identity facets, such as religious and ethnic identities, as well as product-category and brand-specific outcomes, in order to help develop a more comprehensive picture of the psychology underpinning consumers' identity-related orientations, and their effects on consumer behavior. Future research should also study these issues in a broader geographical context, by including national markets that have culturally diverse populations as well as places with dissimilar cultural and economic profiles. Originality/value: The study shows that individuals' personal values, moral foundations and gender roles have a strong effect on the formation of consumer ethnocentrism and consumer cosmopolitanism orientations. Consideration of how these antecedent constructs operate in concert to shape consumers' in- versus out-group orientations has been overlooked in the international marketing literature. Beyond the ramifications for theory, the study offers numerous substantive managerial implications in terms of how consumers are likely to respond to local and global/foreign products/brands based on these orientations. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.