Building on a social identity framework, our cross-level process model explains how a manager's servant leadership affects frontline employees' service performance, measured as service quality, ...customer-focused citizenship behavior, and customer-oriented prosocial behavior. Among a sample of 238 hairstylists in 30 salons and 470 of their customers, we found that hair stylists' self-identity embedded in the group, namely, self-efficacy and group identification, partially mediated the positive effect of salon managers' servant leadership on stylists' service performance as rated by the customers, after taking into account the positive influence of transformational leadership. Moreover, group competition climate strengthened the positive relationship between self-efficacy and service performance.
With the rapid development of 5G technology, numerous intelligent terminals can be successively connected to a network. This brings significant challenges to existing network access because it ...increases the collision probability. It is essential for Grant-free random access (GF-RA) to ensure low delay and reliable transmission. Due to multiuser interference and varying environments, user detection can be complicated, which leads to unreliable transmission. To address the limitations above, research on the GF-RA method based on compressed sensing is carried out and it includes the following: (1) The confidence-weighted orthogonal matching pursuit method is used for estimating the number of active users and overcomes the constraint of sparse condition. (2) The confidence-weighted simultaneous hard thresholding (SHT) method is used for active user detection (AUD), which can improve the performance of the SHT algorithm. (3) We conduct collision probability analysis to not only provide the performance upper bound using the multiple preambles method but also infer the collision probability relationship with different priorities. This is helpful to realize diverse quality of service requirements. The numerical results prove that the proposed method is valid for non sparse signals and can realize a high success access rate.
•The CW-OMP mehod is proposed for overcoming the defects of the SHT method.•The CW-SHT method is proposed to further improve the detection performance.•A theoretical collision probability model is built for decreasing the collision probability.•The CW-OMP method overcomes the constraint of sparse condition of compressed sensing.
Service climate captures employees' consensual perceptions of organizations' emphasis on service quality. Although many studies have examined the foundation issues and outcomes of service climate, ...there is a lack of a comprehensive model explicating the antecedents, outcomes, and moderators of service climate. The current study fills this void in the literature. By conducting a meta-analysis of 58 independent samples (
N
= 9,363), we found support for service climate as a critical linkage between internal and external service parameters. In addition, we found differential effects of service-oriented versus general human resource practices and leadership on service climate, as well as disparate impacts of service climate contingent on types of service, measures of service climate, and sources of rating. Research and practical implications are discussed.
We apply Quinn and Rohrbaugh's (1983) competing values framework (CVF) as an organizing taxonomy to meta-analytically test hypotheses about the relationship between 3 culture types and 3 major ...indices of organizational effectiveness (employee attitudes, operational performance i.e., innovation and product and service quality, and financial performance). The paper also tests theoretical suppositions undergirding the CVF by investigating the framework's nomological validity and proposed internal structure (i.e., interrelationships among culture types). Results based on data from 84 empirical studies with 94 independent samples indicate that clan, adhocracy, and market cultures are differentially and positively associated with the effectiveness criteria, though not always as hypothesized. The findings provide mixed support for the CVF's nomological validity and fail to support aspects of the CVF's proposed internal structure. We propose an alternative theoretical approach to the CVF and delineate directions for future research. (Contains 2 figures, 2 tables, and 2 footnotes.)
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and service orchestration simplify the deployment and management of network and telecommunication services. The deployment of these services requires, typically, ...the allocation of Virtual Network Function - Forwarding Graph (VNF-FG), which implies not only the fulfillment of the service's requirements in terms of Quality of Service (QoS), but also considering the constraints of the underlying infrastructure. This topic has been well-studied in existing literature, however, its complexity and uncertainty of available information unveil challenges for researchers and engineers. In this paper, we explore the potential of reinforcement learning techniques for the placement of VNF-FGs. However, it turns out that even the most well-known learning technique is ineffective in the context of a large-scale action space. In this respect, we propose approaches to find out feasible solutions while improving significantly the exploration of the action space. The simulation results clearly show the effectiveness of the proposed learning approach for this category of problems. Moreover, thanks to the deep learning process, the performance of the proposed approach is improved over time.
Customer service employees tend to react negatively to customer incivility by demonstrating incivility in return, thereby likely reducing customer service quality. Research, however, has yet to ...uncover precisely what customers do that results in employee incivility. Through transcript and computerized text analysis in a multilevel, multisource, mixed-method field study of customer service events (N = 434 events), we found that employee incivility can occur as a function of customer (a) aggressive words, (b) second-person pronoun use (e.g., you, your), (c) interruptions, and (d) positive emotion words. First, the positive association between customer aggressive words and employee incivility was more pronounced when the verbal aggression included second-person pronouns, which we label targeted aggression. Second, we observed a 2-way interaction between targeted aggression and customer interruptions such that employees demonstrated more incivility when targeted customer verbal aggression was accompanied by more (vs. fewer) interruptions. Third, this 2-way interaction predicting employee incivility was attenuated when customers used positive emotion words. Our results support a resource-based explanation, suggesting that customer verbal aggression consumes employee resources potentially leading to self-regulation failure, whereas positive emotion words from customers can help replenish employee resources that support self-regulation. The present study highlights the advantages of examining what occurs within customer-employee interactions to gain insight into employee reactions to customer incivility.
Objective: With its anonymity and accessibility, text-based online counseling has shown great potential in reaching people with mental health needs. One strategy adopted to meet the service gap is ...concurrent counseling, that is, each counselor attending to more than one client at a time. To date, there is no reported evidence supporting its rationality and effectiveness. This study investigated the potential opportunities, effectiveness, and caveats in concurrent service delivery and identified the optimal cutoff number of concurrent sessions while maintaining the quality of service at or above a set threshold. Method: We analyzed the transcript of 54,716 online counseling sessions from Open Up, a free, 24/7 text-based counseling service, to develop an attention score that measures the attention allocation of counselors and examined the impact of the counselor's attention allocation on client satisfaction and service outcomes. Results: On average, compared to nonconcurrent sessions, concurrent sessions were longer, more likely to end prematurely, and had lower client satisfaction. We also identified an optimal attention score of approximately 0.4 (out of 1.0, which denotes full attention), which translates to two to three concurrent sessions. Conclusions: This study provides empirical evidence for the feasibility of conducting multiple text-based sessions concurrently without compromising service quality and client experience. Our method of measuring the counselor attention allocation offers a way to systematically assess and evaluate concurrent sessions.
What is the public health significance of this article?
The rapid increase in the availability of online counseling services continues to be outpaced by the growth in their demand. This study is the first to provide evidence for the possibility and effectiveness of concurrent counseling, that is, treating more than one client at a time. It highlights the feasibility of reaching more people with psychological distress without substantially sacrificing the service quality. The resulting attention score calculation is potentially relevant to a wide range of contexts.
Extant research on high-performance work systems (HPWSs) has primarily examined the effects of HPWSs on establishment or firm-level performance from a management perspective in manufacturing ...settings. The current study extends this literature by differentiating management and employee perspectives of HPWSs and examining how the two perspectives relate to employee individual performance in the service context. Data collected in three phases from multiple sources involving 292 managers, 830 employees, and 1,772 customers of 91 bank branches revealed significant differences between management and employee perspectives of HPWSs. There were also significant differences in employee perspectives of HPWSs among employees of different employment statuses and among employees of the same status. Further, employee perspective of HPWSs was positively related to individual general service performance through the mediation of employee human capital and perceived organizational support and was positively related to individual knowledge-intensive service performance through the mediation of employee human capital and psychological empowerment. At the same time, management perspective of HPWSs was related to employee human capital and both types of service performance. Finally, a branch's overall knowledge-intensive service performance was positively associated with customer overall satisfaction with the branch's service.
Incivility between customers and employees is common in many service organizations. These encounters can have negative outcomes for employees, customers, and the organization. To date, researchers ...have tended to study incivility as an aggregated and accumulated phenomenon (entity perspective). In the present study, we examined incivility as it occurs during a specific service encounter (event perspective) alongside the entity perspective. Using a mixed-method multilevel field study of customer service interactions, we show that individual customer incivility encounters (i.e., events) trigger employee incivility as a function of the employee's overall accumulated impression of the (in)civility in his or her customer interactions, such that the effects are more pronounced among employees who generally perceive their customer interactions to be more versus less civil. We also find that these interactive effects occur only among employees who are lower (vs. higher) in negative affectivity. Our results show that, in order to expand the understanding of customer incivility, it is important to study the incivility encounter, the social context in which negative customer interactions occur, and individual differences.
We developed and tested a cross-level model of the antecedents and outcomes of proactive customer service performance. Results from a field study of 900 frontline service employees and their ...supervisors in 74 establishments of a multinational hotel chain located in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia demonstrated measurement equivalence and suggested that, after controlling for service climate, initiative climate at the establishment level and general self-efficacy at the individual level predicted employee proactive customer service performance and interacted in a synergistic way. Results also showed that at the establishment level, controlling for service climate and collective general service performance, initiative climate was positively and indirectly associated with customer service satisfaction through the mediation of aggregated proactive customer service performance. We discuss important theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
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