Neeli Bendapudi

Psychological Implications of Customer Participation in Co-Production

Customer participation in the production of goods and services appears to be growing. The marketing literature has largely focused on the economic implications of this trend and has not addressed customers’ potential psychological responses to participation. The authors draw on the social psychological literature on the self-serving bias and conduct two studies to examine the effects of participation on customer satisfaction. Study 1 shows that consistent with the self-serving bias, given an identical outcome, customer satisfaction with a firm differs depending on whether a customer participates in production. Study 2 shows that providing customers a choice in whether to participate mitigates the self-serving bias when the outcome is worse than expected. The authors present theoretical and practical implications and provide directions for further research.

Health Care A Fertile Field for Service Research

Health care is an enormously expensive, highly complex, universally used service that significantly affects economies and the quality of daily living. Service management, operations, and marketing scholars have much to offer to a critically important, intellectually challenging, but deeply troubled health care service sector. In this article, the authors use the opportunity they had to study at one of the worlds most admired medical institutions— Mayo Clinic—as the basis for discussing the similarities and dissimilarities between health care and other services. The article takes the reader “inside” health care. The authors challenge service scholars to consider health care for their research activities and propose areas for future research.

Patients' Perspectives on Ideal Physician Behaviors

We incorporated the views of patients to develop a comprehensive set of ideal physician behaviors. Telephone interviews were conducted in 2001 and 2002 with a random sample of 192 patients who were seen in 14 different medical specialties of Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz, and Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Interviews focused on the physician-patient relationship and lasted between 20 and 50 minutes. Patients were asked to describe their best and worst experiences with a physician in the Mayo Clinic system and to give specifics of the encounter. The interviewers independently generated and validated 7 ideal behavioral themes that emerged from the interview transcripts. The ideal physician is confident, empathetic, humane, personal, forthright, respectful, and thorough. Ways that physicians can incorporate clues to the 7 ideal physician behaviors to create positive relationships with patients are suggested.

Applying interactional psychology to salesforce management: a socialization illustration

Modern interactionism asserts that both the P (person) and the E (environment or situation) should be considered simultaneously in predicting attitudes and behaviors. In this paper, we apply the interactionist view to salesforce research. Specifically, we use salesforce socialization as an example to illustrate how interactionist concepts from psychology can be effectively applied in salesforce research. The role of qualitative research in this context is explored.