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Purpose – The purpose of this research was to explain the determiners that influence customer loyalty in rural grocery stores with a comparison of Sweden and Spain. Design/methodology/approach – This is a quantitative research using a multi-cross sectional design with an explanatory approach. The data was collected with a questionnaire survey that was distributed using a face-to-face and online method. Findings – The findings of the research revealed significant support for customer perceived value, satisfaction, trust and commitment to influence customer loyalty. The research also confirms that there are differences in customer loyalty regarding rural grocery stores between Sweden and Spain. Research limitations/implications – This thesis extend previous research by testing an adapted conceptual model of customer loyalty in a context of rural grocery stores and explain the determiners of customer loyalty in Sweden and Spain. The limitations of the research are discussed and directions for future research areas are suggested. Practical implications – The study provides rural retailers with suggestions for marketing strategies related to the determiners (i.e. customer perceived value, satisfaction, trust and commitment) that might influence customer loyalty and attract the rural customers. Originality/value – This research adds to the current stream of rural research by investigating how customer loyalty can enhance profitability. This research has originality since it makes a comparison of two countries, which can be of great interest and inspiration for how to maintain and develop rural grocery stores. Lastly, the research is significant as it provides implications to rural retailers as well as Provincial Governments.

Previous research has shown how venting one’s feelings can reduce the negative emotions of a consumption experience. This study proposes a general process of how consumers with feelings of unfairness due to a negative consumption experience can achieve emotional disclosure and reduced unfairness by posting online reviews. By using an experimental design with scenarios, this study tests how the perceived unfairness in this process is affected by the party encouraging the consumer to post an online review and the consumer’s public commitment. A student sample was divided into four groups and the perception of unfairness was compared between the groups depending on whether the party encouraging the feedback was a company perceived to be responsible for the sense of unfairness or an independent party and whether when the consumer was identifiable or anonymous to see if public commitment had an effect. Results showed that emotional disclosure was found to reduce the perceived unfairness in all groups. There was no significant difference between being encouraged by the company or independent party. Furthermore, no public commitment was in effect, even when participants’ answers were thought to become known to others. The results indicate that companies may prefer to encourage consumers to provide feedback themselves rather than using a third party and that posting online reviews will not make the consumer committed to their feeling of unfairness.

ABSTRACT ESCALATION OF COMMITMENT IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROJECTS: A GOAL SETTING THEORY PERSPECTIVE BY VIJAY KASI Aug 30, 2007 Committee Chair: Dr. Mark Keil Major Academic Unit: Center for Process Innovation Information technology (IT) projects are prone to failure. One explanation for the high failure rate among IT projects is that managers overly commit to a failing course of action, a phenomenon referred as escalation of commitment. While the notion of goals and commitment are central to the phenomenon of escalation, very few prior studies have investigated their impact on escalation. In this study, a research model rooted in goal setting theory is advanced to better understand escalation of commitment of IT project managers. A role-playing experiment with 350 IT managers was used to test the proposed research model. The results of the study suggest that IT managers are more willing to escalate their commitment under the influence of easy and vague goals compared to difficult and specific goals. Initial goal commitment of IT managers and the level of project completion were found to have a significant effect on IT manager’s willingness to continue. Initial goal commitment of IT managers was also found to moderate the relationship between goal difficulty and willingness to continue. In other words, when there is a higher level of goal commitment, an easy goal will have a greater effect in terms of promoting an individual’s willingness to continue.

För många är arbetet den mest centrala delen ilivet där de flesta av dygnets vakna timmar spenderas. Studiens syfte var attundersöka yrkesstolthet och identifikation med arbetet. Enligt KASAM- teorin, känslaav sammanhang, är meningsfullhet en viktig komponent för individens yrkesstolthet.Åtta individuella kvalitativa intervjuer genomfördes med åtta deltagare iåldrarna 40 till 65 år med varierande yrken. Ett heterogent urval användes föratt få en så stor variation som möjligt. Resultaten visade att den viktigastekomponenten för yrkesstolthet var upplevelsen av att få göra gott i mötet medandra människor samt att arbetet känns meningsfullt. Att deltagarna hade olikayrken tycktes ej vara av vikt för vilka faktorer som associerades med stolthet.Resultatet visade för samtliga deltagare att trots att den ekonomiskabelöningen upplevdes som låg i jämförelse med yrkets åtaganden inte vägde överde inre faktorer som påverkade deltagarens upplevelse av yrkesstolthet.

In Sweden today almost all people are connected to a bank in some way. It can range from loans, savings, shares, etc. They have a current account where salaries, student aid etc. is paid. Due to the large selection of banks, it has become more important for banks to be competitive in their services to their customers so they don’t change bank. This has led to that more and more banks are trying to get their customers to be more loyal to the bank by being more competitive. Loyalty is the result of several interrelated factors such as customer satisfaction and service. This leads to the purpose of this study to investigate if the demographic aspects have any influence on loyalty. Through a questionnaire survey, this study examined whether there is an influence of the demographic aspects on loyalty. The questionnaire consisted of questions based on previous research. It was distributed to people in Kristianstad on three different locations. Overall response rate to the questionnaires distributed gave us a participation of 110 respondents. The results were then statistically processed in order to test if there is a significant difference in loyalty within the various demographic aspects. According to this study, we could not find any differences in the demographic aspects. However, we were able to find small differences in the mean values ​​between the different groups in the demographic aspects / I dagens Sverige är i stort sett alla personer på något sätt kopplade till en bank. Det kan vara alltifrån lån, sparande, aktier m.m. Nästan alla personer i dagens Sverige har ett transaktionskonto dit lön, studiemedel m.m. utbetalas. På grund utav det stora utbudet av banker har det blivit viktigare för bankerna att vara konkurrenskraftiga i sina tjänster till sina kunder så att de inte byter bank. Detta har medfört att fler och fler banker satsar mycket resurser på att få sina kunder att bli lojala mot banken. Lojalitet är resultatet utav flera sammanhängande faktorer som exempelvis kundnöjdhet och service. Detta leder till uppsatsens syfte att undersöka ifall de demografiska aspekterna har påverkan på lojalitet. Genom en enkätundersökning har denna studie undersökt ifall det finns en påverkan av de demografiska aspekterna på lojalitet. Enkäten bestod av frågor som grundar sig på tidigare forskning. Den delades ut till personer i Kristianstad vid tre olika tillfällen. Totala svarsfrekvensen på de utdelade enkäterna gav oss ett deltagande på 110 respondenter. Resultaten har sedan bearbetats statistiskt för att testa ifall det råder signifikanta skillnader på lojalitet inom de olika demografiska aspekterna. Enligt denna studie kunde vi inte påvisa några skillnader inom dem demografiska aspekterna. Däremot kunde vi urskilja små skillnader i medelvärdena mellan de olika grupperna i de demografiska aspekterna.

Research gap: Reputation is seen as an important asset for companies and can create competitive advantages. Within business-to-business the reputation of the company is argued to affect the relationship between buyers and suppliers and although the area is stressed to be important, it is still under-researched. Previous literature is not aligning when it comes to the importance of reputation and the duration of the relationship and it also states trust to have impact on important parts of the relationship, such as affective commitment and the willingness to invest. Purpose: The purpose of the thesis was to measure to what extent the duration of a buyer-supplier relationship affects trust, and to what extent trust affects the affective commitment and willingness to invest, when the reputation of the supplier was negative as the outcome of adverse publicity. Hypothesis: H1a; H1b: The duration of buyer-supplier relationship has a positive impact on Trust (integrity or benevolence) if the reputation of the supplier is negative H2a; H2b: Trust (integrity or benevolence) has a positive impact on affective Commitment, if the reputation of the supplier is negative H3a; H3b: Trust (integrity or benevolence) has a positive impact on willingness to invest if the reputation of the supplier is negative Method: The study had a quantitative approach and collected the data by a questionnaire sent to manufacturing business-to-business companies by email. 462 companies were contacted which resulted in 72 usable answers. Conclusion:The buyer-supplier relationship was not to a significantly extent affected by negative reputation and the duration of the relationship was not differing to a substantially extent. The different trust increased the buyers’ affective commitment and willingness to invest which demonstrates the importance of trust in the relationship due to negative reputation.

This thesis study is about the effects of tight budgetary control on managerial behaviour in the Swedish public sector. Managerial behaviour represents the four variables; motivation, organizational commitment, stress, and satisfaction. As previous research mostly investigated the effects of tight budgetary control on organizational performance in the private sector, this study can be seen as one of the first that focus on managerial behaviour and is based on the public sector. For the data collection process, an online questionnaire was created that has been distributed via email to the different participants. Moreover, the study is based on a sample of 62 managers from different municipalities and universities throughout Sweden. The result of the thesis research study revealed that the majority of the local managers in the Swedish public sector actually experience tight budgetary control. Furthermore, the statistical test of the created hypotheses showed that the behavioural factors, both, organizational commitment and stress were respectively negatively and positively related with tight budgetary control. However, for the behavioural variables of motivation and satisfaction no significant results have been found.

Over the past few decades, hundreds of empirical investigations have examined the construct of “workplace commitment”. Much of this research is based on the assumption that commitment is tied to longevity within a given organization. In other words, those most committed are those who plan to remain with an organization. Work patterns, particularly within leisure delivery systems, are often inconsistent with the longevity model. Leisure settings often rely less on full-time lifetime employees and more on contingent workers, those working part-time, seasonally or on a temporary basis. Consequently, much of the commitment literature offers limited insight to leisure managers. Further, research efforts within the commitment literature have, perhaps unnecessarily, focused their efforts on commitment to the organization. An emerging literature suggests that commitment may be focused on a variety of entities. This literature would benefit from a more expansive view of commitment and the entities to which it is directed. Traditional views of, and research in, workplace commitment may be inappropriate for contingent employees. Finally, the commitment literature is dominated by quantitative and questionnaire-based methodology (Cohen, 2003). This study is intended to address many of these issues by using qualitative methods to explore the ways in which various commitment types emerge among contingent employees in a variety of leisure settings. Consequently, this study examines the meaning of commitment to contingent employees in selected leisure services. It focuses on what these contingent employees felt most connected to in their specific workplaces; in essence their stories of what commitment meant to them. The study sample was composed of students enrolled in an undergraduate Recreation and Leisure Studies Program. In order to take part in the study, students were to have engaged in a series of short-term professional-related experiences. Initial contact with potential participants was through a short introduction in 2nd, 3rd and 4th yr recreation class. Six classes were used in this study with a total of 168 responses collected. Class members were asked if they would be willing to participate in a 60-90 minute interview to further discuss their work experiences. 24 participants took part in a semi-structured interview in which questions were asked about the intensity and focus of their commitment. It has been suggested that contingent employees may express little emotional commitment because of the limitations of their work experience (Chang & Chelladurai, 2000). However, in this study, the topic of passion or desire came up repeatedly during the interviews. For these contingent employees, commitment seemed very affective in nature. Their commitment was based strongly on enthusiasm and passion for various components of the work setting. There were many such components or foci raised by the participants. Consistent with Stinglhamber et al.’s (2002) multi-foci perspective of commitment, these individuals’ passion was typically directed to more than one entity. All five major foci of commitment (to the organization, supervisor, occupation, workgroup and client) helped build passion and commitment for these participants. While this is not uncommon, it is noteworthy that commitment to the organization (which dominates much of the private sector commitment literature) was prevalent in only two of the interviews. In each of these cases, however, it is unclear whether the organization or people within the organization engendered that commitment. While the individuals expressed support for the organization, their remarks seemed more directed at people in their respective organizations. Overall, those who revealed the greatest commitment (toward any foci) echoed the importance of intrinsic motivation; they must love what they were doing. Among these participants, there was little evidence of passionate commitment to any organization. Instead, the emphasis was more often on some specific element within the workplace. The focus of their attention was most prominent toward clients and toward supervisors. For these contingent workers affective commitment (as opposed to normative or continuance) dominated their thinking about commitment. They worked at the locations because they wanted to be there, not as a result of external constraints. They not only wanted to work in these settings, but they were passionate about their work. It was evident that either they brought that passion when they first arrived or developed a passion while on the job. Although one cannot generalize this finding to all contingent workers in all settings, there was little evidence of outright indifference among these workers. Finally, 2 new foci of commitment were identified. Specifically, participants introduced commitment or attachment to place, and commitment or involvement in activity as they discussed job-related commitment levels. These variables, while new to the management/commitment literature, have each received considerable research effort from within the leisure community. Overall, this study suggests that the dominant business-based commitment literature has largely failed to consider job conditions specific to the contingent leisure service employee. Further, research in leisure settings suggests that attachment can expand beyond the traditional foci (the organization, people, unions, etc.) to include the setting in which the work occurs and the activities around which the work happens. This suggests that traditionally leisure-based issues (place and activity) can bring much to the work setting and the commitment of those who toil in those settings. For managers of contingent workers, understanding the importance of place and activity in addition to traditional indicators of commitment may prove significant in helping develop a more committed contingent employee in the leisure service settings.

Implementing Business Intelligence solutions has fundamentally changed how many large organizations conduct their business. This is well understood in the scholarly literature but the adoption of BI within small or medium sized enterprises has, on the other hand, received little attention. Given the importance of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the economy, the scarcity of research in this area can be viewed as a problem. Thus, the aim of this work is to explore the BI-commitment in smaller-sized organizations and investigate how far they have proceeded in putting business analytics in action. In order to shed light on BI-implementation in the context of smaller organizations, in-depth interviews were conducted with representatives of four organizations within the Skaraborg district of Sweden. The initial objective of the research project was to explore several focal areas in order to establish the current state-of-practice. This provided the groundwork for further investigation on how SMEs approach BI. Further work involved the use of two theoretical frameworks to analyze organizational commitment and analytical maturity within the focal areas. The main findings in this work are that the organizational commitment to implement BI infrastructure is high among participating companies, but the use of analytics is nevertheless limited to few specific areas. The high ambition of managers to implement BI infrastructure can be the key to further develop the use of business analytics.  This work adds valuable insights for various stakeholders within the community and to others that want to have an idea of the current status of BI within SMEs in Sweden.