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While the service literature repeatedly emphasizes the role of empathy in service interactions, studies on empathy in customeremployee interactions are nearly absent. This study defines and conceptualizes employee and customer empathy as multidimensional constructs and empirically investigates their impact on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. A quantitative study based on dyadic data and a multilevel modeling approach finds support for two effects of empathy in service interactions. The study reveals that customer empathy strengthens the positive effect of employee empathy on customer satisfaction, leading to more ''symbiotic interactions.'' The findings also indicate that empathic customers are more likely to respond to a dissatisfying encounter with ''forgiveness,'' in the sense that customer empathy is able to mitigate negative effects of customer dissatisfaction on customer loyalty. From these empirical results, the authors derive several implications for service research and the management of service encounters. In particular, the present study provides a valuable basis for strategies of ''interaction routing,'' that is, matching customers and employees on the basis of their psychological profiles to create smooth and satisfying service interactions. The authors elaborate on approaches to implement this strategy in service organizations.

This article reconciles mixed findings about the performance impact of middle managers' strategy involvement. We propose that the relationship between middle managers' adaptive strategy implementation—through upward and downward influence—and objective business performance can be curvilinear and contingent on formal and informal structures. Applying a multilevel perspective to social networks, we empirically show that reputational social capital enhances the performance impact of middle managers' upward influence while informational social capital elevates the performance impact of their downward influence. The size of a business unit or region has differential moderating effects. The curvilinear effects of middle managers' upward influence and reputational and informational social capital on business unit performance reflect paradoxes. We discuss the implications of these findings for strategy implementation research and practice. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study examines the diffusion of market orientation (MO) as a social learning process to acquire and transfer individual-level MO. Central to the diffusion are important work-group members, or envoys. Through their marketoriented action, top managers serve as market-oriented role models to two important types of observers in work groups-formal middle managers and work-group expert peers. In turn, these observers become top managers' envoys and role models of market-oriented behavior to frontline employees. Empirical results from a three-level data set from a Fortune 500 company support this perspective. While envoys who are neither market oriented nor identified with the firm are the least effective, envoys who are not market oriented but are strongly identified with the firm are also detrimental. Network size hinders the informal route of learning through expert peers but not the formal route through middle managers. By identifying who the important work-group envoys are and under what conditions certain envoys are likely to be most effective, this study helps managers select the best envoys to implement MO.

Salespeople represent a primary source of competitive intelligence (CI), but the contextual factors that influence the performance impact of salesperson CI quality remain underresearched. The authors develop a framework to examine the performance impact of CI quality at the individual salesperson and sales district levels, with sales district CI quality diversity and sales managers' network centrality as contingencies thereof. The empirical results from multilevel data sets of two U.S.-based corporations reveal that district CI quality diversity weakens the positive performance effect of CI quality at both levels. Sales managers' centrality in within-district and peer advice networks buffers the performance losses created by district CI quality diversity, but salespeople's centrality does not have this buffering effect. The study uncovers conditions under which the positive performance impact of salesperson and district CI quality can disappear and even become negative, thus highlighting the role of managers as CI hubs.

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Using a large-scale, multilevel data set, this study introduces to the sales management literature the concept of sales representatives' headquarters stereotypes as a negative outcome of social identification. The results suggest that work team identification fosters headquarters stereotyping more strongly when organizational identification is low than when it is high. Salespeople's physical distance from their corporate headquarters increases work team identification and decreases organizational identification. Competitive intensity, as an external threat to salespeople's social identity, strengthens stereotyping and social identification. In addition to important theoretical implications, this research also provides crucial insights for managers. Headquarters stereotypes are critically important because they can have harmful consequences for sales performance and customer satisfaction. Key managerial implications are that managers should foster organizational identification and that using different compensation systems does not remedy the negative effects of stereotypes.