Jaypatient-induced service sabotage behavior: the issue of self-esteem of hospital nurses.

Worrying incidents exist where disgruntled nurses destroy good service quality through sabotage behavior. Previous studies report the organizational and environmental factors that might lead to service sabotage behaviors; here individual differences in proclivity to service sabotage within any given environment of managerial context are reported. The study first uses interviews to establish typologies of difficult patients. Regression analysis and ANOVA applied to survey data shows that low self-esteem in nurses leads to service sabotage behavior, and that these nurses are less mature both chronologically and emotionally, less experienced, and less educated than their more typical counterparts.

Penetrating adolescents' mental models of mp3 with ZMET.

This article demonstrates the application of the Zaltman metaphor-elicitation technique (ZMET) to help adolescent consumers delve into their unconscious thoughts and provide them with insights into the use of mp3. An analysis of interview transcripts and images revealed that the ZMET process provides a description of how the knowledge structures of adolescent consumers are subdivided and grouped around important themes that frame and motivate their involvement with a product. The findings reveal that there are 33 themes of consumer knowledge structure toward mp3. Furthermore, among these themes, there are four major concepts: size/form, convenience, relaxation, comfort, and appearance. The respondents' minds include not only rational components but emotional ingredients. Notably, the results also show that music can be an effective metaphor in the application of the ZMET method.

Counterconformity: an attribution model of adolescents' uniqueness-seeking behaviors in dressing.

This article explores how an attribution model will illustrate uniqueness-seeking behavior in dressing in the Taiwanese adolescent subculture. The study employed 443 senior high school students. Results show that the tendency of uniqueness-seeking behavior in dressing is moderate. However, using cluster analysis to segment the counterconformity behavior of the subjects, the study demonstrates that there are two conspicuous types of segmentation "markets": rubber stamp and self-determined. The attribution models investigate the susceptibilities to informational and normative influence which have different direction impacts and weights on the adolescents' counterconformity behavior. More interestingly, path analyses indicate that consumer self-confidence mediates the relationship between informational influence and counterconformity behavior only on the rubber stamp type. This study then discusses how the adolescent consumers' need for uniqueness could be used in better understanding consumer behavior and the role consumption plays in their expression of identity.