Although the goal of a product recall program is to enhance safety, little is known about whether firms learn from product recalls. This study tests the direct effect of product recalls on future accidents and future recall frequency and their indirect effect through future product reliability in the automobile industry. The authors test the hypotheses on 459 make/year observations involving 27 automobile makers between 1995 and 2011. The findings suggest that increases in recall magnitude lead to decreases in future number of injuries and recalls. This effect, in turn, is partially mediated by future changes in product reliability. The results also suggest that the positive relationship between recall magnitude and future product reliability is (1) stronger for firms with higher shared product assets and (2) weaker for brands of higher prior quality. The findings are robust across alternate measures and alternate model specifications and offer valuable insights for managerial practice and public policy.
Defective products are often recalled to limit harm to consumers and damage to the firm. However, little is known about why the timing of product recalls varies after an investigation is opened. Likewise, there is little evidence on whether recall timing affects stock markets. This study tests the effect of problem severity on time to recall, the role of brand characteristics in moderating this relationship, and the stock market impact of time to recall. The authors test the hypotheses on a sample of 381 recall investigations in the automobile industry between 1999 and 2012. The results show that although problem severity increases time to recall, this relationship is weaker when the brand under investigation (1) has a strong reputation for reliability and (2) has experienced severe recalls in the recent past. However, the relationship between problem severity and time to recall is stronger when the brand is diverse. Importantly, the results reveal that stock markets punish recall delays. The study suggests that time to recall has significant implications for managers and policy makers.
Companies are more frequently taking public stands on often controversial social, political, economic, and environmental issues. Despite the importance of the topic, research on understanding the role of companies in societal change through activism is scarce. Using institutional theory, this article defines corporate activism as a company’s willingness to take a stand on social, political, economic, and environmental issues to create societal change by influencing the attitudes and behaviors of actors in its institutional environment. This framework conceptualizes corporate activism as a response to barriers that hinder the solution of an issue. These barriers stem from institutional actors’ attitudes and behaviors toward the issue, and corporate activism can address these barriers through influence and change strategies that can target the institutional environment “top-down” or “bottom-up.” This framework further investigates how the identity orientation of the company facilitates corporate activism. This research has important implications for managers, policy makers, and any other agents that aim to facilitate social change.
This research focuses on youth social entrepreneurs who are leading ventures that address pressing societal problems including climate change, gun reform, and social justice. It answers Journal of Public Policy & Marketing’s call for more research in marketing on social entrepreneurship. Consistent with the mission of Transformative Consumer Research to enhance individual and societal well-being, this research explores how the dynamic ecosystem of youth social entrepreneurs empowers them to rise up to transform people, communities, and the future for the better. The authors partnered with 20 established youth social entrepreneurs who have founded social impact initiatives as well as two organizations that support youth social entrepreneurs, Ashoka and Future Coalition, to develop a framework for understanding the ecosystem that encourages youth social entrepreneurs to enhance people’s well-being and make the world a better place. This framework integrates the experiences of these youth social entrepreneur partners and extant literature in marketing and related disciplines to provide guidance that can help researchers, policy makers, educators, and parents design an environment to support the success of youth social entrepreneurs.
Purpose
Frontline service employees (FSEs) face high demands of emotional labor when dealing with difficult, and sometimes even uncivil, customer behavior while attempting to deliver service with a smile. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether employees reciprocate uncivil customer behavior. The authors investigate two potential processes – ego threat and perceived interactional justice – and further address boundary conditions of this effect.
Design/methodology/approach
The data for this paper were collected in three studies: one field experiment and two online experiments using adult samples. Hypotheses were tested and data was analyzed using ANOVA and regression-based modeling approaches.
Findings
Findings from a field-experimental study and online experiments show that FSEs offer lower service levels to uncivil customers. The authors further find that this effect is mediated by a perceived ego threat and that employees’ regulation of emotion (ROE), as part of their emotional intelligence, attenuates the effect of perceived ego threats on service levels.
Research limitations/implications
This study finds that perceived ego threat (but not perceived interactional justice) explains why employees respond negatively to uncivil customer behavior. Therefore, it offers an emotion-driven explanation of retaliatory behavior in frontline service contexts. Implications for theories focusing on service value co-destruction and customer incivility are discussed.
Practical implications
The findings from this research show that ROE attenuates the impact of perceived ego threat on employee retaliatory behavior. Managerial implications include developing and training employees on emotion regulation. Furthermore, managers should identify alternative ways for restoring an employee’s ego after the employee experiences uncivil customer behavior.
Originality/value
The authors propose and test two processes that can explain why employees reciprocate uncivil customer behavior to gain a deeper understanding of which processes, or a combination of the two, drive employee responses. Furthermore, the authors shed insights into boundary conditions and explore when employees are less likely to react to uncivil customer behavior while experiencing ego threat.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.