Katrien Verleye

Managing Engagement Behaviors in a Network of Customers and Stakeholders Evidence From the Nursing Home Sector

Firms striving for long-term profitability need to build stronger customer-firm relationships by getting their customers more engaged with the firm. One path to this end is introducing practices to manage different forms of customer engagement behaviors (CEBs). To develop more effective and efficient CEB management practices, this research proposes and empirically tests a theoretical model on managerial and psychological processes to encourage CEBs that are embedded in a broader network of customers and stakeholders. Based on qualitative and quantitative studies in nursing homes, we demonstrate that organizational support and overall service quality toward significant others influence some forms of CEBs—more particularly feedback and positive word of mouth (WOM) behaviors—through customer affect toward the organization. It is interesting to note that customer affect toward the organization encourages WOM behaviors, while it discourages feedback behaviors. Conversely, managerial processes that increase customer role readiness—such as organizational socialization and support from other customers—were found to have a positive impact on all forms of CEBs. This research helps managers of nursing homes and other services with a broad network of customers and stakeholders to improve existing CEB management practices and develop new CEB management practices that are beneficial for the firm and its stakeholders.

The co-creation experience from the customer perspective: its measurement and determinants

– Companies increasingly opt for co-creation by engaging customers in new product and service development processes. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the customer experience in co-creation situations and its determinants. , – The conceptual framework addresses the customer experience in co-creation situations, and its individual and environmental determinants. To examine the degree to which these determinants affect the customer experience in co-creation situations, the author starts by proposing and testing a multidimensional co-creation experience scale (n=66). Next, the author employs an experiment to test the hypotheses (n=180). , – Higher levels of customer role readiness, technologization, and connectivity positively affect different co-creation experience dimensions. The impact of these dimensions on the overall co-creation experience, however, differs according to customers’ expectations in terms of co-creation benefits. Therefore, the author concludes that the expected co-creation benefits determine the importance of the level of customer role readiness, technologization, and connectivity for the co-creation experience. , – This research generates a better understanding of the co-creation experience by providing insight into the co-creation experience dimensions and their relative importance for customers with different expectations in terms of co-creation benefits. Additionally, this research addresses the implications of customer heterogeneity in terms of expected co-creation benefits for designing co-creation environments, thereby helping managers to generate more rewarding co-creation experiences for their customers.

Engaged customers as job resources or demands for frontline employees

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to empirically test a theoretical model on how different customer engagement behaviors (CEBs), such as giving feedback and helping other customers, affect the role stress-job strain relationship among frontline employees. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing from the job demands-resources model, this paper hypothesizes that some CEBs weaken the role stress-job strain relationship among frontline employees, whereas the opposite holds for other CEBs. To test these hypotheses, the study involved a survey among 279 frontline employees in 20 nursing home teams in Belgium. Findings – The results reveal that the impact of role stress on job strain is stronger when frontline employees notice more helping behaviors among customers and weaker when frontline employees receive more customer feedback or notice that customers spread positive word-of-mouth about the nursing home. Originality/value – This research contributes to the customer engagement and frontline employee litera...

Innovation in the elderly care sector – at the edge of chaos

Abstract As the elderly care sector is characterized by several challenges, rethought and restructured organizations and institutions and thus innovation are necessary. This study investigated (1) what innovation in the elderly care sector means and (2) which factors determine the innovativeness of elderly care organizations. Our goal was to develop a framework to catch innovation and explain the capacity for innovation in the elderly care sector. Via case studies within five Flemish elderly care organizations, the applicability of the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory was examined. The results showed that organizations partially acted as CASs, but totally acting as CASs was restrained by top-down forces, procedures, and regulations.

The impact of professional and organizational identification on the relationship between hospital–physician exchange and customer-oriented behaviour of physicians

BackgroundHospitals face increasingly competitive market conditions. In this challenging environment, hospitals have been struggling to build high-quality hospital–physician relationships. In the literature, two types of managerial strategies for optimizing relationships have been identified. The first focuses on optimizing the economic relationship; the second focuses on the noneconomic dimension and emphasizes the cooperative structure and collaborative nature of the hospital–physician relationship. We investigate potential spillover effects between the perceptions of physicians of organizational exchange and their customer-oriented behaviors.MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted on 130 self-employed physicians practicing at six Belgian hospitals. Economic exchange was measured using the concept of distributive justice (DJ); noneconomic exchange was measured by the concept of perceived organizational support (POS). Our outcomes consist of three types of customer-oriented behaviours: internal influence (II), external representation (ER), and service delivery (SD).ResultsOur results show a positive relationship between DJ and II (adjusted R2 = 0.038, t = 2.35; p = 0.028) and ER (adjusted R2 = 0.15, t = 4.59; p < 0.001) and a positive relationship between POS and II (adjusted R2 = 0.032, t = 2.26; p = 0.026) and ER (adjusted R2 = 0.22, t = 5.81; p < 0.001). No relationship was present between DJ (p = 0.54) or POS (p = 0.57) and SD. Organizational identification positively moderates the relationship between POS and ER (p = 0.045) and between DJ and ER (p = 0.056). The relationships between POS and II (p = 0.54) and between DJ and II (p = 0.99) were not moderated by OI. Professional identification did not moderate the studied relationships.ConclusionOur results demonstrate that both perceptions of economic and noneconomic exchange are important to self-employed physicians’ customer-oriented behaviours. Fostering organizational identification could enhance this reciprocity dynamic.