The effectiveness of complaint handling and service recovery policies in customer retention has been the focus of both scholars and service organizations. In the past decade, Justice Theory has provided the basis of the dominant theoretical framework for complaint management and service recovery. However, it does not explicitly address unfair trade practices, which constitute an ethical issue. Favorable outcomes in complaint handling may not be able to restore the reputation of a company and the potential harm perceived by consumers. Using (...) face-to-face interviews, this study applies Fairness Theory to explore the psychological responses of consumers in the post-complaint phase, particularly in ethical judgment. The findings suggest that an unfavorable outcome in the post-complaint stage leads to counterfactual thinking by the consumer about the consumer's state of well-being. The complaint must be due to the discretionary actions of the service provider whose accountability is assessed. Those harmful actions are then judged against an ethical standard. Explanations can reduce blame, and their effectiveness is moderated by outcome favorability but not ethical judgment. Favorable outcome, captured by "Would Perception," has only limited influence on Perceived Potential Harm (PPH), which is an important determinant of ethical judgment. This study makes both theoretical and practical contributions. It is the first study to validate Fairness Theory empirically and apply it to complaint handling as a complement of Justice Theory in the information and communication technology (ICT) service context. The study indicates that customers may condemn a service provider because of PPH even though the outcome is favorable. Unfair trade practices are what make customers hate ICT service providers. (shrink)

Despite a long history in eastern and western culture of defining leadership in terms of virtues and character, their significance for guiding leader behavior has largely been confined to the ethics literature. As such, agreement concerning the defining elements of virtuous leadership and their measurement is lacking. Drawing on both Confucian and Aristotelian concepts, we define virtuous leadership and distinguish it conceptually from several related perspectives, including virtues-based leadership in the Positive organizational behavior literature, and from ethical and value-laden leadership. (...) Then, two empirical studies are presented that develop and validate the Virtuous Leadership Questionnaire, an 18-item behaviorally based assessment of the construct. Among other findings, we show that the VLQ accounts for variance in several outcome variables, even after self-assessed leader virtue and subordinate-rated social and personalized leader charisma are controlled. (shrink)

. The article attempts to show the way in which the notions of “natural law” and “cosmic harmony” have been applied by Western scholars in the interpretation of traditional Chinese thinking about the role of law in society, the extent to which the Western interpretations can be supported by the Chinese sources, and , more specifically, the degree to which official Chinese thought subscribed to a correlation between the occurrence of natural disasters and acts of maladministration or injustice on the (...) part of the emperor and state. Generally it is argued that the extent to which Chinese statesmen and administrators actually believed that errors in the infliction of legal punishment or the sentencing of offenders would produce aberrant natural phenomena has been exaggerated by Western scholars. (shrink)

It is widely accepted among Mencius scholars that for Mencius, the junzi 君子 is the kind of person who accepts Heaven’s will and never resents Heaven. There are, however, several passages where resentment seems to be presented as a quality that the junzi possesses. In particular, Mencius 2B13 has been the subject of much contention. In Section 1, I will discuss various interpretations of 2B13, building on and updating Philip Ivanhoe’s helpful 1988 survey. In Section 2, I will present an (...) argument for resentment against Heaven in the Mencius. I argue from passages in the Mencius and its relationship with the Shijing 詩經 that we have good reason to think that, under certain circumstances, the junzi ought to resent Heaven. In Section 3, I will develop a theory of resentment from the Mencius and demonstrate how 2B13 can be understood in the larger context of this theory. (shrink)