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A small group of pioneering founders led the creation and early evolution of the service research field. Decades later, this article shares timeless service wisdom from ten of those pioneering founders.

Bowen and Fisk specified three criteria by which to identify a pioneering founder. In total, 11 founders met the criteria (Bateson, Berry, Bitner, Brown, Chase, Edvardsson, Grönroos, Gummesson, Parasuraman, Schneider and Zeithaml) and were invited to join Bowen and Fisk – founders that also met the criteria as coauthors. Ten founders then answered a set of questions regarding their careers as service scholars and the state of the field.

Insightful reflections were provided by each of the ten pioneering founders. In addition, based on their synthesis of the reflections, Bowen and Fisk developed nine wisdom themes for service researchers to consider and to possibly act upon.

The service research field is in its fifth decade. This article offers a unique way to learn directly from the pioneering founders about the still-relevant history of the field, the founders' lives and contributions as service scholars and the founders' hopes and concerns for the service research field.

Purpose: Work-related emotional exposure is a fundamental job characteristic in all kinds of service jobs from sales to law enforcement and corrections and from human services (nursing, counseling) to legal services. But formalized job descriptions are surprisingly silent about the emotional issues accompanying the jobs and roles service workers perform. This is surprising because formalized job descriptions are the foundation of job design, HR, and leadership practices that positively affect employee, customer, and organizational outcomes. Study Design/Methodology/Approach: This is a theory paper and review. To help clarify the emotional labor issues service employees confront, we explicate a model of emotional labor based on the attributes of jobs, roles, and professionalism. Findings: We define emotional labor as service work that exposes those who do such work to interactions with others that can arouse negative emotions. We propose that, while employing organizations define their jobs and employees craft their larger roles, professional norms and values also are a foundation for their emotional labor. Research Implications: We integrate this work-focused emotional labor model into the larger context in which such work occurs via theory and research on organizational climate. We suggest future research on this approach to understanding the antecedents and consequences of emotional labor work. We summarize the major research ideas of what should be the focus of such research and provide a hint about what an emotional labor climate scale might look like based on these ideas. Practical Implications: This chapter offers practical advice to HR managers about how to improve emotional labor. Social Implications: Better management of emotional labor can reduce employee stress and increase employee well-being. Originality/Value: This chapter develops an original model of emotional labor.

Over the past two and a half decades services marketing has emerged as a well established area of inquiry in the marketing discipline. In many ways, its growth and acceptance in the academic arena are indeed noteworthy. A question arises, however, concerning the direction that services marketing as a field of study should take in the future. This article reports and content‐analyzes the insights of ten leading services scholars regarding that question. That group comprises Leonard Berry, Mary Jo Bitner, David Bowen, Stephen W. Brown, Christian Gro¨nroos, Evert Gummesson, Christopher Lovelock, Parsu Parasuraman, Benjamin Schneider, and Valarie Zeithaml. Recurring themes and provocative observations among the services experts’ comments are related and discussed. Concluding remarks are offered.

First presents a brief overview of some research demonstrating a link between employee perceptions of the service firms for which they work and customer perceptions of the service quality they receive from those same firms. Followed by discussion of a framework that provides some insight into what customer‐focused HRM might look like. The framework focuses first on the kinds of strategic choices service firms must make (like whether to emphasize speed or tender loving care). Then some implications for HRM of these choices are outlined with research implications. Finally, it is argued that customer‐focused management in general (simultaneously of marketing, of HRM, of operations, etc.) might enhance competitiveness in the marketplace.

Customer‐contact employees are a critical asset of service organizations due to the interactive nature of service delivery. Customer‐contact employees are boundary spanners who attempt to serve both internal and external constituents. Attempting to serve two masters can result in role conflict and the present effort presents and tests a framework for understanding possible antecedents and consequences of such role conflict. Survey data collected from 200 telephone service employees in an insurance company revealed at least partial support for the following hypotheses: role conflict emerges when there is a discrepancy between what employees think customers expect of them and what they report management rewards them for doing; role conflict, in turn, is related to employee attitudinal (e.g. job satisfaction) and behavioral (e.g. absenteeism) outcomes; and role conflict mediates the relationship between service orientation discrepancy and employee outcomes. Implications of the results for the management of service employees and service quality are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to address the concept of linkage research and propose the addition of social identity theory as an important consideration in managing employee‐customer interactions and customer satisfaction.

Following the creation of a conceptual model, this study used an employee questionnaire based on the incorporation of service climate (SERV*OR) and employee identification factors. A total of 314 individual surveys were collected from four hotels in Australia. Hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to determine the effects that demographic factors, service climate and different levels of employee identification would have on predictions of customer satisfaction.

Service climate factors most closely linked to customer‐centric organizational practices were the significant predictors of customer satisfaction perceptions, as was employee identification at the superordinate (company) level.

The framework proposed and the findings of this study provided management with useful information about the important role of service climate and the way in which managers can capitalize on employee identification to enhance organizational practices, which can flow on to customer outcomes.

There is limited previous literature that attempts to incorporate social identity theory as a valuable dimension in the management of employee‐customer interaction.

We cluster the issues raised by Ostroff and Schmitt and respond to these clusters rather than to the more detailed ways in which each raised them. These issues concerned: (1) the collection of job analysis information at higher units of analysis (e.g. teams), (2) the analysis of such job analysis information, (3) the use of such job analysis information as a basis for the selection of people to be team members, especially when different selection procedures might be appropriate for different team tasks, (4) the nature of the linkage of criteria internal to organizations and those external to organizations, and (5) how decision makers might weight different criteria of effectiveness as guides to hiring decisions when the criteria exist at different levels of analysis. We note that these are all important issues but spend the most time on the first three having to do with team/group issues in personnel selection psychology. We conclude with a call for researchers to identify the “architecture of organizations” through the use of multi-level computational models. These models would require detailed specification of critical variables at different levels of analysis to permit preliminary exploration of hypothesized relationships. Through such careful explication and model testing, we envision considerable future progress in cross-levels personnel selection practice.

Personnel selection has a long and successful record for effectiveness in applied psychology. We propose that this record for effectiveness has been narrowly focused on the individual level of analysis, resulting in a lack of suitability for addressing conceptual and applied phenomena at unit (group, organizational) levels of analysis. The chapter integrates the traditional personnel selection focus on individuals with recent thinking on multiple levels of analysis and we show how this alternative has implications for selection system design, assessment procedures, and validation research. Specifically, we first review and critique the individual selection model from a multi-level orientation and then explicate how multi-level selection procedures may be enacted and evaluated. We then compare the development and validation of selection practices in two fictional organizations, one using the traditional focus on individuals and one using our revised multi-level methodology, to-illustrate the benefits of the new approach. We conclude with several recommendations for future research and practice.