Baillod, C. and Furrer, O. (2025), Immigrant customers’ service encounters: a thematic analysis and fsQCA study, Journal of Services Marketing, (forthcoming).
This study aims to examine immigrant customers’ service experiences with local employees during daily service encounters. It identifies key factors affecting these experiences and explores how combinations of such factors shape particularly positive and negative encounters. The authors used a retrospective experience sampling approach to collect detailed descriptions of immigrant customers’ real-life encounters with local employees, along with complementary quantitative data. They applied thematic analysis and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to explore critical factors and configurations associated with distinct encounter outcomes. Language barriers, insufficient service knowledge, and the broader immigrant condition often cause difficulties, negative emotions and experiences of vulnerability during daily service interactions. Yet, immigrant customers’ experiences are not shaped by individual factors in isolation, but by how conditions combine and interplay. Employee-related factors, particularly dedication and benevolence, can mitigate challenges and play a decisive role in shaping the overall experience and outcome of the encounter. The findings offer practical insights to improve service provision for immigrant customers and provide a foundation for further research involving various immigrant subgroups or other types of customer groups that are likely to experience vulnerability in service contexts. This study advances understanding of immigrant customers’ daily service experiences through a holistic, interactional perspective, offering comprehensive and nuanced insights into how these experiences unfold. It also highlights the transformative potential of daily service encounters, which have so far been underexplored.
Ralston, D. A., Terpstra-Tong, J., Ramburuth, P., Karam, C., Furrer, O., Naoumova, I., … & Brock, D. M. (2025). Is there a global-business-subculture effect on gender differences? A multisociety analysis of subordinate influence on ethics behaviors. Business Horizons, 68(3), 277-300.
While business studies on gender have increased, they continue to adopt traditional approaches with limited samples drawn from general populations (e.g., students and teachers). In contrast, we investigate gender differences with our focus solely on business professionals. Specifically, we study 40 societies using the four dimensions of subordinate influence ethics (SIE) behaviors: pro-organizational behaviors, image-management behaviors, self-serving behaviors, and maliciously intended behaviors. We employed crossvergence theory as our theoretical foundation, with its two competing forces, sociocultural (gender differences) and business-ideological (no gender differences), which translates to a global-business-subculture effect. We found no gender differences for three of the four SIE behaviors and minimal differences for the fourth for our sample of business professionals. Thus, our findings differ significantly from those of previous general-population samples. We also tested for societal-level moderating effects of collectivism and individualism using the business values dimensions (BVD) measure. Our individualism findings, the primary values dimension associated with business success, in conjunction with findings from other studies, support our nonsignificant SIE differences findings. In sum, the truly minimal gender differences that we found provide strong support for the perspective that there is a global-business-subculture effect. Our findings also suggest that ethical differences between genders are minimal across the global workforce. We discuss the implications for international business.
Dheer, R. J., Terpstra-Tong, J., Treviño, L., Ralston, D. A., Tjemkes, B., Paparella, L. S., Furrer, O…. & Alas, R. (2026). Impact of organizational culture on employee psychological safety perception: The pivotal role of trust in top management across 18 societies. International Business Review, 35(1), 102523.
We assess the impact of organizational culture on employees’ psychological safety using data from 2451 employees across 18 societies. Our multi-level structural equation models reveal that organizations that emphasize a clan culture foster significantly higher psychological safety than those that emphasize a hierarchy culture, and trust in top management mediates the effect of organizational culture on psychological safety. Additionally, macro-environmental factors, specifically a society’s cultural context and governance quality, moderate the effect of trust in top management, explaining variance in psychological safety globally. Our findings make a novel contribution to the literature on psychological safety, international management, and organizational behavior. We outline vital implications for managers and provide directions for future research.
Le professeur Olivier Furrer a été interviewé en tant qu’expert en marketing :
La Liberté : Tandis que la consommation de chocolat stagne dans le pays, Cailler réaffirme sa suissitude pour se distinguer de la concurrence
Trend, magazine autrichien : Wer die Königin vom Thron stösst interview with S. Teichman for Trend Magazine
