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This article advances our understanding of the influence of affect in consumers' responses to brief, nonpersonal service encounters. This study contributes to the services marketing literature by examining for mundane service transactions the impact of customer-displayed emotion and affect on assessments of the service encounter and the overall experience. Observational and perceptual data from customers were matched with frontline employees in 200 transaction-specific encounters. The results of this study suggest that consumers' evaluations of the service encounter correlate highly with their displayed emotions during the interaction and postencounter mood states. Finally, the findings indicate that frontline employees'perceptions of the encounter are not aligned with those of their customers. The managerial implications of these findings are briefly discussed.

Data from 292 service workers in 21 private clubs show that supportive peer and customer relationships are predictive of higher levels of employee experienced empowerment. Both organizational and employee-customer relationships accounted for significant variation in the dimensions of empowerment: meaningfulness, influence, and self-efficacy. Peer helping and supportive customer relationships were the two most influential predictors of all three empowerment dimensions. Implications for future research and for management practice are discussed.

This article describes two experiential exercises in which participants engage in Tinkertoy assembly tasks as a means of generating a discussion of complex management issues. "Tinkertoy Power" explores issues of resource interdependence and ethics, and "Blind Leadership" focuses on the importance of leaders' communicating a vision to subordinates. Instructions and procedures for conducting the exercises are included.

This study examines the influence of intellectual capital on performance in customer service firms pursuing different strategic orientations (e.g., low-cost leader, differentiation). Grounding these arguments in the resource-based view and using 538 hotels in the lodging industry, this article employs an economic-based production model to empirically explore the performance effects of investing in three different types of intellectual capital: systems capital (operational knowledge), customer capital (brand and marketing knowledge), and human capital (knowledge from both service and professional employees). In addition, the authors account for key controls, including the physical asset, cost of living, customer demand, market segment, and company affiliation. Results reveal that for firms pursuing a differentiation strategy only, investments in both service employees and professional employees enhance performance. However, investments in systems capital and customer capital enhance performance for all the firms studied. The authors discuss the implications of this study for research in the services arena.

Popular approaches to organizational leadership note that productivity and innovation in U.S. organizations could be greatly improved if top managers placed more emphasis on organizational values and culture. Recent findings in transformational leadership research prescribe top management to develop and share a vision for the organization, model that vision, encourage innovativeness, support employee efforts, and allow employees input into decisions concerning their jobs (Bass, 1985; Kouzes & Posner, 1988). These actions should act to improve productivity by increasing positive attitudes and clarifying the roles of the employees. This study examined the relationships between these five actions and employee commitment, job satisfaction, and role ambiguity. Results suggest that top-management actions are strongly related to all three of these outcomes. The results also suggest that the effects of certain actions vary for different organizational settings.