The effects of emotional dissonance and employee's empowerment on service quality and customer satisfaction perception: customer level analysis

The performance of customer contact employees is essential in ensuring the success or failure of the service exchange. Employees’ personal conduct and attitude play an important role in affecting customer’s awareness of the quality of service delivered. This study contributes to the current body of work in the service marketing area by investigating four major constructs; Empowerment, Emotional Dissonance, Service quality and Customer satisfaction and their relationships. The sample comprises of hotel customers. The data was collected using a qualitative interview technique. Findings indicate that empowerment has a relationship with emotional dissonance and empowerment may also have significant influence in managing employees’ emotions at a workplace. Results also reveal that there is a positive relationship between empowerment, service quality and customer satisfaction

Designing a BDI agent reactant model of behavioural change intervention

Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model is well suited for describing agent’s mental state. The BDI of an agent represents its motivational stance and are the main determinant of agent’s actions.Therefore, explicit understanding of the representation and modelling of such motivational stance plays a central role in designing BDI agent with successful behavioral change interventions. Nevertheless, existing BDI agent models do not represent agent’s behavioral factors explicitly. This leads to a gap between design and implementation where psychological reactance has being identified as the cause of BDI agent behavioral change interventions failure. Hence, this paper presents a generic representation of BDI agent model based on behavioral change and psychological theories.Also, using mathematical analysis the model was evaluated. The objective of the proposed BDI agent model is to bridge the gap between agent design and implementation for successful agent-based interventions.The model will be realized in an agent based application that motivates children towards oral hygiene. The study explicitly depicts how agent’s behavioral factors interact to enhance behavior change which will assist agent-based intervention designers to be able to design intervention that will be void of reactance

Preliminary Study of International Students in Malaysia on Perceived University and Destination Image towards Intention to Recommend

The mobility of international students worldwide has grown exponentially over the years. The Malaysian government has similarly aimed to bring in higher number of international students due to the significant economical benefits towards the country development. In task of increasing the number of international students in Malaysia, the images of the country and university plays an important role due to the global competitiveness. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the determinants that lead the international students in choosing their place to further their tertiary education in terms of both country (destination) and university. Destination image was found to be associated with affective image which may affects the intention to recommend this destination to others. Additionally, the individual university image also affects the student’s perception in its enrolment. This study is not without limitation whereby the data collection is still limited and it is recommended to include other constructs for model testing and validation.

Breast Cancer Management Research Trends: A Bibliometric Analysis

Breast cancer is the most prevalent type of cancer in women and has a significant economic impact worldwide. Consequently, there is a need to analyze the disease's research trend academically to determine the breast cancer publishing trend based on a certain period of its collection properties. Bibliometric analysis is used to examine the research trend in breast cancer care through time using various data. Several tools, including the PRISMA flow diagram, Microsoft Excel for frequency analysis, Harzing's Publish or Perish for citation metrics and other pertinent analyses, and VOSviewer for image visualization and bibliometric networks, were used to study this article. Using the TITLE search strategy and the Scopus database, 3,532 articles were located. It was discovered that the trends in research publications rose steadily from one year to the next. Between 1932 and 2021, 3,532 publications will be produced with a total of 61,274 citations, which breaks down to 688.47 citations per year, 17.35 citations per cited paper, and 4.02 citations per author. The United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom have produced the most co-authored works in this discipline. Even though the annual incidence rate of breast cancer remains high, these findings appear promising for determining the most effective treatments, procedures, and management strategies. The guideline standard requires further attention at a higher level

Designing a BDI agent model for behavioural change process

Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model is well suited for describing agent’s mental state.The BDI of an agent represents its motivational stance and are the main determinant of agent’s actions. Therefore, explicit understanding of the representation and modelling of such motivational stance plays a central role in designing BDI agent with successful behavioural change interventions.Nevertheless, existing BDI agent models do not represent agent’s behavioural factors explicitly.This leads to a gap between design and implementation where psychological reactance has being identified as the cause of BDI agent behavioural change interventions failure. Hence, this paper presents a generic representation of BDI agent model based on behavioural change and psychological theories.The objective of this proposed BDI agent model is to bridge the gap between agent design and implementation for successful agent-based interventions.The model will be realized in an agent-based application that motivates children towards oral hygiene

The effect of customer satisfaction on the performance of the small an medium-sized hotels

Purpose – To investigate the effect of customer satisfaction dimensions on the SMSHs’ performance. Design – A quantitative, self-administered questionnaire was used to derive information from all respondents. Approach – The researchers used a different approach (which included the operational performance, financial (like the traditional approach) and non-financial indicators) compared to the conventional approach for measuring the hotel performance. Customer loyalty was used as a performance measure for assessing the operations of SMSHs from the hotel guests’ perspectives. Methodology – A double-respondent method and dual-rating system were used for investigating the influence of various customer satisfaction dimensions on the SMSHs’ performance. The two questionnaires were adapted and adopted from the review literature. The questionnaires were distributed to the hotel practitioners and hotel guests in 1-3 star/orchid rated hotels located in four states of Malaysia. The data set comprised of 212 SMSHs and 424 Malaysian hotel guests and the data was analysed using SmartPLS and SPSS. Findings – Customer satisfaction increased with an improvement in five service quality aspects like Core Product, Pricing, Technology, Islamic-Friendly Facilities, and Food and Beverage. Originality – This study has offered an insight into the manner in which the SMSHs allocate resources for improving customer satisfaction. The study also offered many insights into the significance of hotel attributes used by the SMSHs for improving customer satisfaction and SMSHs’ performance at the same time

Verification analysis of an agent based model in behaviour change process

This paper describes the verification analysis for agent formal model of behaviour change process. The verification analysis was based on two widely used approaches in agent formal evaluation namely mathematical and automated analysis. The mathematical analysis made use of stability equilibria point while the automated, made use of Temporal Trace Language (TTL). The results obtained verify the formal model validity

Comparison of marketing mix dimensions between local and international hotel customers in Malaysia

The main purpose of this paper is to compare the perception of local and international customer of marketing mix components in the hotel industry in Malaysia. The exploratory study involved 282 respondents, employed self-completed questionnaire survey to collect data from local and international hotel customers. T-test analysis and One-way ANOVA are used to identify the significant mean difference of marketing mix components between local and international hotel customer. The main finding indicated that the three components of marketing mix namely product and services, promotion and people have significant differences between the means for both local and international hotel customers. This study also revealed that the product/services and promotion also had significance mean difference between the means of male and female hotel customer. Implications and limitations of the study are also discussed