Acknowledging the developments in the constructive employee deviance stream (Leo and Russell-Bennett, 2014), which denote that although employees may depart from workgroup hypernorms, their behaviour might still have pro-customer intentions (Vadera, Pratt and Mishra, 2013), this research illuminates deviant employee–customer encounters and grows the ongoing discussion on the impact of employee customer-oriented deviance on various customer outcomes. Customer-oriented deviance (COD) is a form of pro-social behaviour which occurs when the employee deviates from organizational norms, defying organizational protocol and higher authority for the sake of the customer who is the main beneficiary of this behaviour. Indeed, scarce evidence explores how customer-oriented deviance during the service encounter affects customers’ psychological state as well as whether the psychological consequences deriving from employee deviance which actually render the customer more prone to reciprocally respond the employee or the organization with some kind of citizenship behaviour (Hochstein, Bonne and Clark, 2015), this study addresses the impact of three types of customer-oriented deviance on post-deviant customer evaluations. To address these issues, an experimental design with a 3x2 between-subjects design is adopted. The independent variables manipulated are three types of COD and also whether the customer participates (or not) to the solution of the problem that (s)he is currently facing. In particular, the impact of three types of customer-oriented deviance (i.e. deviant service adaptation, service communication and use of resources) on customer’s distributive, interactional and procedural justice (cognitive outcomes) and customer’s emotional state (affective outcome) is considered. This study advances current knowledge in three ways. First, it proposes that post-deviant customer consequences are both cognition- and emotion-driven, deepening the empirical understanding of the role of customer’s perceived justice and emotional state as a result of COD. Results also uncover the importance of customer participation during COD and its corresponding impact on customer encounter outcomes. The social exchange and the equity theory are extended and set as the theoretical link between customer-oriented deviance and customer’s response to the organization and the employee.

The management of the New Service Development (NSD) process remains a key research priority for service organizations. As a diverse mix of team members with different skills, perspectives and backgrounds participate in development teams and close collaboration is required among them, conflicts are likely to arise among team members. Different team members perceive conflict episodes in a different way and often embrace different conflict management behaviours and orientations (e.g. competing, avoiding) to deal with them. This study recognises NSD team as a complex system, through which individual members’ conflict management style choices enable team developmental dynamics, which sequentially lead to intragroup conflict resolution. Although a lot of work exists around the role of individual members’ conflict management styles, little research scrutiny is attracted on how teams solve intragroup conflicts and even limited empirical evidence is available regarding the linkages between individual and team factors can contribute to resolve intragroup conflicts. The present study taking under consideration the causal complexity, asymmetry and idiosyncratic nature of NSD conflict resolution, utilizes Complexity theory and leverages the advantages of fs/QCA in order to shed light on the NSD intragroup conflict resolution. Data was collected from employees in several service industries such as advertising, financial, insurance, consulting, IT services and telecommunications providers. The results confirm the major tenets of Complexity theory highlighting that any attempt to examine complex phenomena, such as NSD conflict resolution, as simple ones, based on symmetrical methodological approaches, may lead to simplistic and distorted explanations. In fact, the results demonstrate that there is not a ‘one fits all’ solution in order to solve NSD conflicts. Different facets for both the conflict-management styles and team dynamics act in various combinations in order to predict high scores in NSD conflict resolution.