The impact of staff empowerment and communication style on customer evaluations: The special case of service failure

Empowering front-line staff to deal with service failures has been proposed as a method of recovering from service breakdown and ensuring greater customer satisfaction. However, no empirical study has investigated consumer responses to empowerment strategies. This research investigates the effect on customer satisfaction and service quality of two employee characteristics: the degree to which the employee is empowered (full, limited, and none), and the employee's communication style (accommodative - informal and personal, and underaccommodative-formal and impersonal). These employee characteristics are studied within the context of service failures. Subjects were shown videotaped service scenarios, and asked to complete satisfaction and service quality ratings. Results revealed that the fully empowered employee produced more customer satisfaction than the other conditions, but only when the service provider used an accommodating style of communication. Fully empowered and nonempowered employees were not judged differently when an underaccommodating style of communication was adopted. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Key issues in determining the ethics of research subject payment: the special case of drug abuse epidemiology

The authors identify key issues that researchers, funding bodies, ethics committees and ethicists might consider in contemplating research subject payment ethics. They argue that what is missing from the broader debate is due consideration of ethics committee decision processes; research subject reasons for participation; and current research practices. The authors explore these issues and how they relate to existing guidelines on voluntary consent, and arguments that have been proposed for and against research subject payments. (non- author abstract)