دانلود مقاله ISI انگلیسی شماره 2196
ترجمه فارسی عنوان مقاله

سرمایه اجتماعی ، گرایش و خلاقیت خدمات مشتری در فروشگاه های خرده فروشی

عنوان انگلیسی
Social capital, customer service orientation and creativity in retail stores
کد مقاله سال انتشار تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی
2196 2006 8 صفحه PDF
منبع

Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)

Journal : Journal of Business Research, Volume 59, Issue 12, November 2006, Pages 1214–1221

ترجمه کلمات کلیدی
نظریه سرمایه اجتماعی - گرایش خدمات مشتریان - خلاقیت - فروشگاه های خرده فروشی -
کلمات کلیدی انگلیسی
Social capital theory,Customer service orientation,Creativity,Retail stores,
پیش نمایش مقاله
پیش نمایش مقاله  سرمایه اجتماعی ، گرایش و خلاقیت خدمات مشتری در فروشگاه های خرده فروشی

چکیده انگلیسی

This paper argues that the structural, relational and cognitive dimensions of social capital within retail stores provide an insight into the antecedents of customer service orientation and store creativity. These three dimensions enhance a customer service orientation as a result of increased knowledge sharing, creation of information channels, and the facilitation of cooperative behavior. Secondly, because these factors foster the process of resource exchange and combination, they are also associated with an increased level of store creativity. Indeed, for a high level of creativity to take place at the store level, knowledge has to be shared and combined in an effective manner. Our proposed model is tested on a sample of 112 stores within a large national retail chain. We find partial support for our hypothesized model.

مقدمه انگلیسی

Retail organizations have recently made considerable leaps in their level of market orientation and customer responsiveness. This is particularly true of the global retail chains. It is well understood that responding to customer needs more efficiently and effectively than competitors is an important source of advantage for retailing organizations. While responding to customers' expressed needs and preferences is critical for competitive advantage in retail industries, a balance needs to be struck with the need to be innovative, which improves the retailer's ability to anticipate and cater to customers' emergent or latent needs (Narver et al., 2004). Accordingly, retailers must be both market driven and market driving (Jaworski et al., 2000 and Kumar, 1997). On the surface, these two objectives might appear in conflict. Being market driven largely implies incremental innovation as customers' expressed needs will be largely anchored within an existing business model or framework (Tuominen et al., 2004). Market driving innovation, on the other hand, implies larger steps forward and leads to more radical changes in the way people shop. Accordingly, market driving innovation involves greater risk (Kumar et al., 2000). Although they may require competing business logics (Tuominen et al., 2004), both objectives are pursued successfully by many retail organizations. Clothing retailer Zara, for example, consistently exceeds customers' expectations of contemporary, fashionable design (evidence of being market driven), while having also changed the way customers buy fashion (evidence of market driving). If retail stores are to attempt to be both market driven and market driving, they must, at a minimum, combine high levels of creativity with superior customer orientation. Creative ideas provide the seed for all innovation (Amabile et al., 1996), while customer orientation helps to channel innovative activity toward the provision of superior customer value. But this in turn raises questions about the sources of, and preconditions for, organizations achieving both high levels of creativity and customer orientation. Accordingly, one of the major questions we seek to answer in this paper is: what kind of organizational context encourages retail firms to be simultaneously creative and responsive to customers? We contend that having access to, and leveraging, valuable information is central to the achievement of this dual goal. Information must also be disseminated efficiently and accurately, so that members of an organization can respond to customer needs quickly and at the same combine multiple insights to generate new ideas. As a consequence, retail organizations must comprise relationships between members that facilitate both efficient response and a degree of organizational introspection capable of yielding more radical innovation. Social capital theory (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998)–with its emphasis on relationships, networks, and information flows–is a framework that is especially useful for understanding and analyzing the challenges facing retail stores in being simultaneously market driven and market driving. An organizational commitment to meeting customer needs (i.e., being market driven) will be partly dependent on the level and nature of information flows; something which social capital theory reminds us is driven by the nature of relationships and networks of store employees. Market driving, by contrast, is about ‘escaping the tyranny of served markets’ (Hamel and Prahalad, 1991); something which may be done by encouraging experimentation and trialing new ideas that change customers' perceptions of the nature and purpose of retail stores. Social capital theory is crucial here too because it highlights the importance of two building blocks in organizational creativity: social interaction and diverse resource inputs (Kogut and Zander, 1992 and Tsai and Ghoshal, 1998). Our aim, then, is to demonstrate how the creation of social capital allows retail stores to achieve superior performance in both customer service orientation (evidence of being market driven) and store creativity (evidence of market driving). The paper is organized as follows. First, we discuss the conceptual foundation of our study. Second, based on this theoretical background, we propose a model that specifies the dimensions of social capital-communication openness, trusting culture and shared vision—as antecedents to customer service orientation and store creativity which, in turn, affect the overall performance of the retail store. Third, we describe the research method and present our findings. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the results and implications for management and future research.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

We aggregated the employee level data to match the store level of analysis (Klein et al., 1994). We first established that eta-squared (η2) values exceeded the threshold of .20 (Georgopoulos, 1986). Next, we computed within-store agreement with the use of rwg (James, 1982). The rwg for each store exceeded the threshold of .70 which indicated a high level of within-store agreement among respondents. Consequently, we found that store level data aggregation was appropriate. Table 1 shows the intercorrelations, reliability, and descriptive statistics for the constructs at the store level. We computed Cronbach's alpha for each scale at the store level, with the exception of store performance, which was a formative scale. The intercorrelation for the store performance items was .67 (p < .001), which suggests that the measure is reliable (Cortina, 1993).