The changing role of employees in service theory and practice over the last few decades is overviewed from the perspectives of the management and marketing disciplines. The criticality of employees, ...particularly front-line employees, in driving customer service outcomes was emphasized in both fields in the 1980s and 1990s. The rise of services marketing highlighted the role of employees in dyadic service encounters with customers. In management, the implications of the customer interface for employee and organization were developed. In the 2000s, the status of the employee's role appeared to diminish as service marketing theory shifted from a provider to a consumer perspective on customer value creation, and as technology substituting for employees grew in practice. In management, new theory and research directions on service employees essentially plateaued. Going forward in evolving service contexts, employees will fill roles as “Innovators”; “Differentiators”; “Enablers” and “Coordinators”. Suggestions are offered for what management can learn from services marketing in the pursuit of interdisciplinary research.
Theory and research on service climate are synthesized, and an extensive agenda for future research is proposed. The service climate construct is first differentiated from conceptually related but ...distinct constructs, such as job satisfaction, service culture, and service orientation. Then a framework is presented based on prior research that displays service climate’s antecedents and consequences and the linkages among them. The synthesis draws heavily upon organizational behavior/human resource management (OB/HRM), but service climate has also received significant interdisciplinary attention. In particular, past work has integrated OB/HRM’s focus on the internal organization and marketing’s focus on the external world of the customer. The future research agenda includes further specification of the framework’s variables and linkages (e.g., the relative roles of individual and contextual attributes in creating service climate) as well as recommended research methods (e.g., profile analysis to assess interactions among multiple climates in a setting). Finally, the utility of the service climate framework for analyzing four key issues in service management is demonstrated: service infusion in manufacturing; the cocreation of value; sustainable competitive advantage; and the fostering of additional interdisciplinary research.
The context in which service is delivered and experienced has, in many respects, fundamentally changed. For instance, advances in technology, especially information technology, are leading to a ...proliferation of revolutionary services and changing how customers serve themselves before, during, and after purchase. To understand this changing landscape, the authors engaged in an international and interdisciplinary research effort to identify research priorities that have the potential to advance the service field and benefit customers, organizations, and society. The priority-setting process was informed by roundtable discussions with researchers affiliated with service research centers and networks located around the world and resulted in the following 12 service research priorities:
stimulating service innovation,
facilitating servitization, service infusion, and solutions,
understanding organization and employee issues relevant to successful service,
developing service networks and systems,
leveraging service design,
using big data to advance service,
understanding value creation,
enhancing the service experience,
improving well-being through transformative service,
measuring and optimizing service performance and impact,
understanding service in a global context, and
leveraging technology to advance service.
For each priority, the authors identified important specific service topics and related research questions. Then, through an online survey, service researchers assessed the subtopics’ perceived importance and the service field’s extant knowledge about them. Although all the priorities and related topics were deemed important, the results show that topics related to transformative service and measuring and optimizing service performance are particularly important for advancing the service field along with big data, which had the largest gap between importance and current knowledge of the field. The authors present key challenges that should be addressed to move the field forward and conclude with a discussion of the need for additional interdisciplinary research.
PurposeThis article overviews some key contributions to service research from the organizational behavior/human resource management (OB/HRM) discipline with its strong focus on the role of employees. ...This focus complements the Marketing discipline’s heavy emphasis on customers, largely true of service research, overall.Design/methodology/approachTen OB/HRM frameworks/perspectives are applied to analyzing the roles of people (with a focus on employees and modest consideration of customers as “partial” employees who co-create value) in a service organization context. Also, commentary is offered on how the frameworks relate to six key themes in contemporary service research and/or practice. The article concludes with five reflections on the role and status of employees in service research—past, present and future.FindingsEmployee roles in evolving service contexts; participation role readiness of both employees and customers; role stress in participating customers; an employee “empowered state of mind”; an emphasis on internal service quality; “strong” HRM systems link individual HRM practices to firm performance; service-profit chain with links to well-being of employees and customers; a sociotechnical system theory lens on organizational frontlines (OF); service climate as an exemplar of interdisciplinary research; emotional labor in both employees and customers; the Human Experience (HX); specification of employee experience (EX).Originality/valueService remains very much about people who still guide organizational design, develop service strategy, place new service technologies and even still serve customers. Also, a people and organization-based competitive advantage is tough to copy, thus possessing sustainability, unlike with imitable technology.
LEARNING TO BE A PARADOX-SAVVY LEADER WALDMAN, DAVID A.; BOWEN, DAVID E.
Academy of Management perspectives,
08/2016, Letnik:
30, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We outline the nature of paradox-savvy leader behavior by first considering an environmental context that increasingly demands attention to the paradoxes that are relevant to leaders. We then ...categorize such paradoxes as those that are inherent in leadership behavior per se, and those that are increasingly common in organizations. Based on this categorization, we outline four key paradoxes: (1) maintaining a strong sense of self while simultaneously maintaining humility, (2) maintaining control while simultaneously letting go of control, (3) stressing continuity while simultaneously stressing change, and (4) pursuing corporate social responsibility (CSR) for the strategic purpose of enhancing profits while simultaneously pursuing CSR for morally based purposes. In so doing, we consider the challenges in dealing with paradoxes and how such paradox-savvy leadership can be distinguished from, but still work in concert with, more classic approaches, such as situational/contingency leadership. We view our article as speaking to a broad range of management scholars, including those who are interested in leadership phenomena across organizational levels. In addition, beyond scholars, we view this article as being of concern to practitioners who have a continuing interest in new ideas for leaders and their development. Specifically, we suggest methods or strategies by which leaders can learn to effectively handle paradoxes.
PurposeThis tribute to Dr Pierre Eiglier, who passed in February 2020, was prepared for the “17th International Research Conference in Service Management 2022” in La Londe les Maures, France. Tribute ...is defined as, “an act, statement, or gift intended to show gratitude, respect, or admiration”.Design/methodology/approachSampled Pierre's publications; consulted the 1993 Journal of Retailing “Special Services Issue” on the evolution of the field; collected reflections from another founder and two of Pierre's former doctoral students who have helped co-chair the La Londe conference and drew from my own interactions with Pierre over the years at La Londe.FindingsIn the mid-1970s, Pierre was one of the first to specify the unique characteristics of services vs products, and the implications and introduced, with Eric Langeard, the “servuction” (service production) model, highlighting customer participation in the servuction process and determinants of the service experience. Pierre continually applied a synthesis of systems thinking, researcher–practitioner interaction, and interdisciplinary/cross-functional perspectives.Practical implicationsPierre's contributions came at a time when marketing practice was geared largely toward products/goods, yet the service sector was growing. Pierre's pioneering framing, along with other founders, of service attributes, service models, and the service experience had much-needed implications for services marketing practice.Originality/valueThis detailed tribute to a service field founder is, regrettably, quite original; too rare. There is value in revisiting these founding contributions which often were broader and more interdisciplinary in perspective than now.
Magnetic circuit components have long been the largest and most difficult components to miniaturize. Printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication methods cannot achieve small diameter, high aspect ratio ...vias for high winding turn numbers to achieve high inductance, and microelectronics methods cannot achieve the high-quality and thick ferrite core materials. In this article, we present an alternative breakthrough method of printed circuit fabrication to significantly reduce the effective via diameter for embedded magnetic devices, boosting the inductance per unit area. To reduce the effective via diameter, high-density via plugs are ex situ fabricated and shaped, and then embedded into PCB substrate in the same process as standard magnetic core embedding. The structure of the plug is such that precise placement within the substrate, or alignment to the plug with the winding pattern, is not necessary. Devices presented in this article use via plugs with an effective diameter of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">40 \mu \text{m} </tex-math></inline-formula> and a theoretically unlimited aspect ratio, though refinements in the plug fabrication process are expected to reduce the via diameter down to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">10 \mu \text{m} </tex-math></inline-formula>. The process is experimentally demonstrated with a 14-turn racetrack-shaped transformer; novel diagnostic methods using magnetooptic garnet films to image current paths are also demonstrated.
Theory building has lagged on the intermediate linkages responsible for the relationship between HRM and firm performance. We introduce the construct "strength of the HRM system" and describe the ...metafeatures of an HRM system that result in a strong organizational climate, analogous to Mischel's "strong situation," in which individuals share a common interpretation of what behaviors are expected and rewarded. The strength of the HRM system can help explain how individual employee attributes accumulate to affect organizational effectiveness.
Abstract
We report Hubble Space Telescope Cosmic Origins Spectrograph spectroscopy of 10 quasars with foreground star-forming galaxies at 0.02 <
z
< 0.14 within impact parameters of ∼1–7 kpc. We ...detect damped/sub-damped Ly
α
(DLA/sub-DLA) absorption in 100% of cases where no higher-redshift Lyman-limit systems extinguish the flux at the expected wavelength of Ly
α
absorption, obtaining the largest targeted sample of DLA/sub-DLAs in low-redshift galaxies. We present absorption measurements of neutral hydrogen and metals. Additionally, we present Green Bank Telescope 21 cm emission measurements for five of the galaxies (including two detections). Combining our sample with the literature, we construct a sample of 117 galaxies associated with DLA/sub-DLAs spanning 0 <
z
< 4.4, and examine trends between gas and stellar properties, and with redshift. The H
i
column density is anticorrelated with impact parameter and stellar mass. More massive galaxies appear to have gas-rich regions out to larger distances. The specific star formation rate (sSFR) of absorbing galaxies increases with redshift and decreases with
M
*, consistent with evolution of the star formation main sequence (SFMS). However, ∼20% of absorbing galaxies lie below the SFMS, indicating that some DLA/sub-DLAs trace galaxies with longer-than-typical gas-depletion timescales. Most DLA/sub-DLA galaxies with 21 cm emission have higher H
i
masses than typical galaxies with comparable
M
*. High
M
HI
/
M
* ratios and high sSFRs in DLA/sub-DLA galaxies with
M
* < 10
9
M
⊙
suggest these galaxies may be gas-rich because of recent gas accretion rather than inefficient star formation. Our study demonstrates the power of absorption and emission studies of DLA/sub-DLA galaxies for extending galactic evolution studies to previously under-explored regimes of low
M
* and low SFR.
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