Standardization versus customization in service design is a topic of considerable discussion and debate. While it is recognized that service providers need to standardize or customize their services, it is unclear how such efforts may affect customer satisfaction. We hypothesize that standardization and customization may contribute to service satisfaction in a nonlinear fashion, and simultaneous efforts of standardizing and customizing service may not produce synergy in affecting customer perceptions of service. Empirical data collected from a sample of automobile after sale service customers offer considerable support for these hypotheses.

Graduate students’ academic misconduct has received increasing attention. Although past literature has emphasized university faculty as an important influencing factor on students’ moral behaviors, the mechanisms must be further disclosed. We investigated how supervisors’ ethical leadership influenced graduate students’ attitudes toward academic misconduct. We explained why and how supervisor gender affects post-graduate students’ social learning process by integrating social cognitive theory and role congruity theory. Study 1 used a sample of 301 graduate students in 60 academic teams in four Chinese business schools. Study 2 used experimental vignette methodology to enhance the findings’ internal and external validity and provided evidence of causality. Based on the two complementary studies, we found that supervisors’ ethical leadership significantly inhibited students’ acceptance of academic misconduct through students’ moral efficacy and the ethical climate of the academic team. The indirect effect via moral efficacy was more significant s for female supervisors. Implications for ethical leadership, academic misconduct, gender differences in leadership, and moral education were discussed.