MOVED MY CHEESE TO WORDPRESS.com

I've moved to:

http://pmcounseling.wordpress.com/

Please click the link and check out my lastest !!!

The Einstein Monkey got you here, why not read on?

The bad news about good ethics- MORAL SELF-LICENSING

There is evidence that supports the notion that people are more likely to “misbehave” after they engages in what they perceives as ethical/moral conduct.  The theory, called “moral self-licensing”, predicts that people make note of their good behaviors and tend to act contrary to this soon thereafter.

An experiment in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology reported that people who expressed their support for presidential candidate Barack Obama were more likely to later declare that whites would be better suited than blacks for a hypothetical job vacancy in a police department.  It seems that their support for a back candidate won them “credit as non-racists”, and provided them with a “license to discriminate” in subsequent task.

A similar effect was found in a study measuring people’s propensity toward greed.  Students were asked to shop for items at one of two online stores. Half of the students shopped at a store stocked with mostly “green” products and the remainder shopped at a store that carried “conventional” products.  After spending an allotted $25 on products, the students were presented with various situations designed to measure their honesty and propensity toward greed. 

The students who shopped at the “green” store were more willing to 1) lie about the result of a coin game in order to profit, 2) act greedy by allocating more money to themselves than to a partner and 3) steal more money from an envelope when asked to retrieve their winnings. 

The clearest lesson for all of us is that we should be “on guard” with respect to our own actions.  We should recognize that our own moral acts may make us more likely to feel that we have earned the right (moral license) to act selfishly, discriminatory toward others or immorally.  Self-awareness is the key to avoiding this trap.

Here is the title, abstract citation, and the link to a good article if you’re interested in reading more about this phenomenon:

Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad

Abstract

Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral. We review research on this moral self-licensing effect in the domains of political correctness, prosocial behavior, and consumer choice. We also discuss remaining theoretical tensions in the literature: Do good deeds reframe bad deeds (moral credentials) or merely balance them out (moral credits)? When does past behavior liberate and when does it constrain? Is self-licensing primarily for others’ benefit (self-presentational) or is it also a way for people to reassure themselves that they are moral people? Finally, we propose avenues for future research that could begin to address these unanswered questions.

Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4/5 (2010): 344–357

Anna C. Merritt*, Daniel A. Effron, and Benoıˆt Monin Stanford University
Click for Article

Service Recovery Paradox

The Service Recovery Paradox- Leveraging your mistakes!

How many times have you failed to meet the expectations of your clients because of a service delivery failure?  If' your like most service providers, you never thought of this as an opportunity to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty!  The reality is, most of us either try to "justify" our mistakes or we simply avoid dealing with them altogether.  But justifying or avoiding a failure always result in a poor customer experience.  Moreover, by not addressing a failure, we completely miss a prime opportunity to build a stronger customer relationship. 

A picture is worth a thousand words... so check out this figure displaying how customer loyalty (and dissatisfaction with the service failure) can improve when a service recovery is successful.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Recovery

Note that loyalty is actually higher in the long run when a service failure and recovery occurred.  This "recovery" is the paradox. At first glance, it doesn't seem logical that customers would actually experience greater value when a service failure and recovery occurs than when a service is delivered as expected. 

But the reality is that clients know that mistakes happen.  Customers don't penalize you for your mistakes as much as they penalize you for your inability or unwillingness to make it up to them (recovery) in a timely and meaningful way.  In addition, customers often place a greater value on a service recovery than they penalize you for the service failure that necessitated it in the first place. 

The lesson here is clear, make sure that your company:

1) identifies all service failures
2) takes complete responsibility for these failures
3) responds fully and adequately to them 

But I think there is more to this story than this.  In order to CAPITALIZE on a service recovery, your response to a service failure should be:

1) OWNED: Not only should you identify service failures, you should take full responsibility for them, even when some outside factor is at fault.  Customers don't care if it is the fault of your shipping department or the US postal service, a failure is a failure.  OWN your service failures fully. 

2) TIMELY: If a customer knows that you did not respond immediately to a service failure, they are far more likely to perceive the service recovery as an act of "necessity" rather than a conscientious act of good will toward them.  In fact, more good will is generated when a mistake is corrected before the consumer is even aware of it or asks that it be corrected.

3) SINCERE: Customers know if you truly regret the inconvenience that the service failure has caused them.  Nothing is more insulting than to be patronized by the very person who has failed you in the first place.  Put yourself in their shoes!  Empathizes before you respond.

4) GENEROUS: Beyond making them whole, your recovery efforts should leave customers with the sense that they owe you (at least another chance) for your generosity.  This generates loyalty that will pay dividends in the long run.  Don't think of this as a "loss", think of it as an investment!  Customer loyalty is what drives word-of-mouth patronage.  Be generous in response to service failures.

5) CONSEQUENTIAL: Service failures are mistakes, and mistakes are often the result of service delivery systems that are broken.  Let customers know that you take your sercive failure seriously by investigating why it  happend and how you can avoid it in the future.  Customers are quite savvy and are often aware of the what you do in response to their complaints.  Where possible, follow up a serice failure with a note thanking them for their understanding and explaining what you are doing to ensure that such mistakes will not happen again. 

Service failures are inevitable and recovery is tenuous at best!  About all we know is that your response will shape theirs.

The man who aspires to make great art or compose great music is not inclined to stop once he has made a beautiful sculpture or orchestrated a great musical movement.  To the contrary, these accomplishments are what fuel the flame that burns within him.  These flames illuminate the precious truth, and affirm what we have felt all along, that we do ASPIRE.  Success is the Mitzvah of the human soul.  It is the ratification of our longing to be more.