Ayalla A. Ruvio

Michigan State University | MSU · Department of Marketing

Unlabelled: Do stronger relationships with customers (customer-company relationships [CCR]) help firms better weather economic crises? To answer this question, we examine firm performance during the stock market crashes associated with the two most severe economic crises of the last 15 years-the protracted Great Recession crisis (2008-2009) and th...

As companies face tightening budgets, many may be considering trimming their workforce. But of course, outright layoffs are expensive and risky. That’s why some have turned to a subtler strategy: quiet firing, or intentionally creating a hostile work environment that encourages people to leave “voluntarily.” The authors’ new research sheds light on...

We investigate the widespread yet under-researched social phenomenon of consumer arrogance—the propensity to broadcast one’s superiority over others in the consumption domain. Building on the theory of positive illusions, we examine how and under what conditions triggering people’s consumer arrogance prompts their positive and negative word-of-mout...

We develop a conceptualization of the material selfbased on self-identity and derive a four dimensional scale with 16-items to measure it. In Study 1, the concept of the material self and the new scale are compared and contrasted with existing measures where tests of reliability, construct validity, concurrent validity, and generalizability are exa...

In addressing the call for the application of learning from other domains to the sales context, our work integrates the optimal distinctiveness theory with the study of buyer–seller relationships. We conceptualize two main buyer–seller relationship-building strategies – a value-added differentiation strategy and a compatibility-based assimilation s...

Identity conflicts are an integral part of our lives, yet little is known about the implications of such conflicts for people's strategic presentation of their extended selves to others. To explore this topic and the role of possessions within it, we considered an extreme example that puts the issue into sharp relief. Using data from personal inter...

Marketers are justifiably interested in ethnic consumers; formulating effective ethnic marketing strategies requires insights into these consumers' attitudes and behaviors. However, prior research provides few insights into how different cultural environments might shape the consumption behavior of consumers with the same cultural heritage. To addr...

The ever-increasing immigration worldwide compels marketers to understand how a new mainstream culture that embeds immigrant consumers might shape their consumption behavior. Specifically, this study examines whether minority groups of the same cultural heritage, living in different countries, vary in their cultural orientations (i.e., mainstream v...

Innovativeness is an organizational trait that leads to innovations. Organizations with high levels of innovativeness develop and renew products and processes and abandon obsolete ones. While potentially contributing to long term growth and profitability, utilizing innovativeness can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. This paper examines...

This article provides a conceptualization of the new construct of consumer arrogance and develops and validates a measurement scale for it. It views consumer arrogance as a multi-dimensional trait reflecting the proclivity to use possessions in order to establish one's social superiority over others. The final version of the scale has four dimensio...

Consumer loyalty has long been at the focal point of researchers who explored the factors related to or affected loyalty (Chaudhuri and Holbrook 2001; Corstjens and Lal 2000; Miininen, Szivas and Riley 2004; Suh and Yi 2007). Nevertheless, consumer loyalty of immigrant groups remains a relatively under-researched area. When looking at immigrants, a...

Consumer Decision-Making Styles (CDMS) refers to consumers’ mental orientations when making purchase choices (Sproles & Kendall 1986). Viewed as consistent patterns of cognitive and affective responses, CDMS was explored across countries (e.g. Hafstrom et al. 1992; Leng and Botelho 2010; Lysonski et al 1996) as well as among sub-groups within a sin...

As immigration has become a growing worldwide phenomenon, the notion of migrant ethnicity is attracting growing interest in social sciences research. In marketing, scholars have studied if and how ethnicity influences consumer behavior. Ogdan’s (2004) comprehensive review supported the influence of culture and acculturation on consumers’ purchase d...

The individual’s pursuit of dissimilarity through consumption has fascinated scholars across disciplines and was recently been encapsulated by the concept of consumers’ need for uniqueness (CNFU, Tian et al. 2001). Despite the importance of CNFU in multiple domains, much of its literature has focused on the attainment of unique identity in private...

Materialism has a generally held connotation that is associated with character deficiencies, self-centeredness, and unhappiness, and most extant research views materialism as having a negative influence on well-being. In this article, we review and synthesise research that supports both positive and negative outcomes of behaviours associated with m...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of acculturation on immigrant consumers’ loyalty. The authors posit that the acculturation orientation of immigrants determines their consumer loyalty to both ethnic and mainstream brands and stores. Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of Hispanic consumers in the USA and consum...

This study investigated the way in which exposure to traumatic stress, posttraumatic reactions, and materialistic values impact coping and maladaptive consumption behaviors in a real-life traumatic situation. One hundred thirty-nine Israelis were sampled from a town under constant rocket fire (a high-stress environment), and 187 comparison responde...

Our research explores the amplifying effect of materialism on the experience of traumatic stress and maladaptive consumption via both an Israeli field study and a U.S. national survey. Our field study assesses the moderating impact of materialism upon both traumatic stress and maladaptive consumption among participants from an Israeli town under te...

Organizational innovativeness (OI) is a central concept in academic research and managerial practice. In many cases, OI has been operationalized as the number of innovations organizations adopt. In contrast, this paper conceptualizes OI as a five-dimensional construct (creativity, openness, future orientation, risk-taking, and proactiveness) repres...

Our research explores the amplifying effect of materialism on the experience of traumatic stress and maladaptive consumption via both an Israeli field study and a U.S. national survey. Our field study assesses the moderating impact of materialism upon both traumatic stress and maladaptive consumption among participants from an Israeli town under te...

Purpose – Previous research on impression management explored motives, the use of impression management tactics and the influence of personality characteristics on the tendency to engage in impression management. The purposes of this research are to examine gift‐giving behavior among adolescents based on the building blocks of impression management...

Relying on organizational innovativeness for long-term growth and profitability can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. In the context of service delivery of 395 strategic business units (SBU) in Israel's healthcare industry, this paper examines the role of a learning-orientation as a moderator in an integrative model of organizational inn...

Whereas prior research has focused on consumer socialisation and intergenerational influence theories to study mother–daughter interactions, this research draws on identity to emphasise the association between mothers’ social comparison and their related clothing consumption behaviors in the presence of adolescent daughters. A survey of 423 adolesc...

This paper focuses on the consumer's doppelganger effect, the inclination of consumers to intentionally mimic other individuals' consumption behaviors. Taking a role model perspective, we look at the inclination of Israeli teenage girls to resonate with role models with whom they have unidirectional (study 1; N = 152) and bidirectional (study 2; N...

Based on an ethnographic study of American garages, we develop a model of the roles that liminal spaces perform in the management of possessions and their meanings. We find that the garage serves as a transitional space that links the useful and useless, female and male, clean and dirty, sacred and profane, and past, present, and future. We also pr...

This study examines adolescents’ gift giving using a qualitative methodology, based on impression management theory. Gift‐giving motives and the characteristics of the chosen gifts indicated that adolescents use gift giving instrumentally to manage and protect their impressions among their peers. The study extends the literature on adolescents’ gif...

Most previous within-discipline research on innovativeness as an organizational trait does not account for cross-disciplinary perspectives, leading to incomplete findings. This paper develops an integrative model of organizational innovativeness, based on research in several disciplines to identify antecedents to, characteristics of, and outcomes o...

Southern white masculinity is often said to be distinctive. Scholarly treatments of the subject attribute the characteristics of conservatism, patriotism, independence, racism, a disdain for centralized authority and a tendency toward violence to southern white men (see e.g., Friend 2009; Watts 2008). The crucible for these traits is usually said t...

In this paper, the literature on aggressive driving tendencies as a con-sumption experience is reviewed. Two studies test a comprehensive model that includes personality, attitudinal, and value antecedents to such behavior. The research supports the role of most of the antecedents. However, personality and attitudinal constructs were found to be st...

Religion is receiving increased interest from marketing researchers due to the heightened relevance of religious affiliation to global marketing efforts. However, almost all studies in the marketing literature focus upon religion within dominant cultural settings, that is, in contexts where the religion being studied is the prevailing religious tra...

Although current conceptualizations of materialism have yielded very valuable insights, each seems to be narrowly restricted to its own research purposes. In this article, we offer an expanded view of materialism that stresses the functions of materialistic goal pursuit, the processes by which these functions are developed and implemented, and thei...

Consumer's need for uniqueness is defined as an enduring personality trait driving individuals to pursue dissimilarity by acquiring, using, and disposing of products and brands in an effort to develop a distinctive self- and social-image. It was conceptualized as a three-dimensional construct including creative choice, unpopular choice, and avoidan...

This paper explores the role that entrepreneurial leadership vision plays in the entrepreneurial process of nonprofit and for-profit ventures. The results indicate significant differences in the meaning of vision articulated for each type of venture. Differences between ventures were also found with regard to the relationship that vision has with t...

Purpose – The purposes of this research are to examine the extent to which daughters view their mothers as consumption role models, the extent to which daughters serve as consumption role models for their mothers, and the extent to which external role models are shared by mothers and their adolescent daughters. Design/methodology/approach – Two qu...

This article develops a multilevel model to explain social ventures' organizational outcome. The study examines the relationships between entrepreneurs' motivations and vision, ventures' strategy and environment, ventures' performance, and five-year survival of nascent Israeli firms. The findings suggest that an entrepreneur's motivation is reflect...

This paper examines the meaning of Christmas from the minority point of view of Tunisian Christians. Relying on in-depth interviews, its findings suggest considerable differences between the manner in which Christmas is constructed by Christians living in a Muslim setting vs. those who celebrate it in North America. Expatriates often import holiday...

Consumer piracy could include buying illegal copies of music CDs or movie videos or brand-name knock-offs and its cost is estimated at billions of dollars. Piracy by consumers is a severe problem to manufacturers. The annual global loss from counterfeiting, such as pirated software and purchases of counterfeited brands (e.g., fashion), is $80 billi...

Purpose – This paper seeks to assess the impact of consumer ethics and their piracy attitudes on piracy behaviors. The extent of such piracy is difficult to estimate because no worldwide statistics are available, but conservative estimates indicate that it costs manufacturers billions of dollars. Design/methodology/approach – The research was condu...

This study presents a three-year effort to study public sector innovation in Europe from the viewpoint of the citizen. It examines a model of public sector innovation across a multinational sample of eight countries and 626 participants. The paper develops a theory of antecedents to and consequences of innovation in public administration as perceiv...

Most research on standardization examines it in the context of the marketing mix. In contrast, research on standardization of management processes/characteristics is rare. The authors examine standardization of such processes/characteristics in international management of channels of distribution and its performance consequences. They include chara...

Uniqueness has a positive and attractive connotation, but being too unique can result in social sanctions. This paper focuses on the dual role of consumers' need for uniqueness. The findings of two studies in Israel support the notion that expressing uniqueness via consumption behavior is a safe way to achieve a different sense of being without dam...

This study assessed women's vulnerability to the threats of terrorism; 326 Israeli citizens (198 women and 128 men) from cities that were hit hard by terrorist violence were interviewed to identify their level of exposure to terrorist events, symptoms of posttraumatic distress, and cop-ing styles. Although the women were less exposed to terrorist e...

Opinion leadership has been a central construct in studies of new product diffusion models. Flynn, Goldsmith, and Eastman (1996) introduced the related concept of opinion seeking and documented its measurement properties. This replication and extension paper examines these two concepts, using their original scales and placing them in a nomological...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate cross‐culturally a short‐form, consumers' need for uniqueness (CNFU) scale. The length of the original scale (31 items) might have hindered its diffusion in research when questionnaire length and respondent fatigue are major considerations. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses surv...

The market maven construct, developed by Feick and Price (1987), has been used in empirical studies in the USA, South Africa, Germany, Poland, and Hungary. This study extends previous research by being the first to use the general mavenship concept in an Asian country (Israel). Furthermore, the study examines market mavenship and opinion leadership...

We hypothesized that exposure to Type IV trauma (involving alteration in a person's basic relation to the environment), associated with prolonged terrorist threats, would impact posttraumatic distress and that exposure to terrorism would impact the intensity of coping. The relationships revealed by the data proved to be in line with this model. Our...

This study examines manufacturer' perceptions of task and emotional conflict in domestic channels of distribution. Both are expected to depend on three antecedents (centralization, esprit de corps, and communication barriers) and to affect performance relative to competitors and manufacturer's satisfaction directly and indirectly through strategy q...

International animosity significantly affects the purchase of foreign products. However, domestic conflicts are also rampant in many countries, giving rise to similar issues. October 2000 marked the beginning of the second Arab Intifada (uprising) in Israel. In contrast to the first Intifada of the late 1980s and early 1990s, this time, Israeli Ara...

In their effort to improve performance, many voluntary and nonorofit organizations (VNPOs) have turned to market mechanisms, hoping to learn and implement innovative ideas and methods that proved useful in the private sector. This article adopts the businesslike concept of "marketing" into the arena of VNPOs by offering a meta-analysis to assess th...

The 2001 Á/2002 terror campaign against Israel's heartland was an unprecedented string of deadly bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. The violence touched the lives of countless Israelis and has negatively affected the general mood of many. The objective of this investigation was to assess the level of exposure to terrorism for individuals re...

This article1 deals with the fuzzy concept of organizational innovation in public sector domains. While it is not the first attempt to bring organizational innovation into the realm of public administration, the article provides a broader understanding of innovation in modern bureaucracies and points to some empirical efforts that may accel- erate...

Gender effects on job insecurity and other work attitudes (organizational commitment, tendency to quit, resistance to change, perceived performance, and perceived organizational support) were investigated, with Israeli schoolteachers as a case in point. On a multidimensional measure of job insecurity, males and females significantly differed in the...

In light of environmental and organizational trends toward privatization, and in response to changes in sectoral traditional differences, this paper investigated job insecurity (JI) of secondary schoolteachers in the public and private sectors in Israel. The study sample consisted of 326 Israeli schoolteachers. Using a multi-dimensional measure of...

The research reported here adopted a multidimensional approach to studying job insecurity, using Israeli teachers as a case in point. Based on two determinants of job insecurity—unionization and kibbutz affiliation—four distinct employment types were identified: unionized city teachers, unionized kibbutz members, unionized kibbutz hirees, and non-u...

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