Search results

Research suggests that employee engagement favorably influences the provision of customer service, that high levels of service employee engagement are rare, and that firms' strategic profit emphases affect engagement and service climate. This study responds to calls for research that identifies drivers of employee engagement and foundational issues that promote effective service climates within service organizations.

A survey method is utilized to assess data from 502 key informant service employees from multiple service industries.

The findings indicate that service organizations' revenue enhancement and cost containment strategic profit emphases differentially influence employee engagement, and that organizational and job engagement differentially influence service climate.

Data comprised of individual service employees' perceptions of their firms' strategic profit emphases and service climates are utilized. Although it is conceivable that some respondents' perceptions of these variables may be misguided, the study findings are based on a large sample of experienced service employees from multiple service industries.

The findings suggest that the most effective approach for promoting effective service climate is to hire service employees with a track record of job engagement and then focus on encouraging organizational engagement by creating working environments that support, value, and reward service quality.

Managers increasingly realize that how firms treat service employees critically affects customer service quality. However, relatively few studies examine service employees' perceptions of their own engagement and their organizations' working environments. This research incorporates social exchange theory and concepts from the fields of strategy and organizational behavior to assess service employees' perceptions of their organizations' strategic profit emphasis and its influence on engagement and service climate.

This paper aims to explore service learning with its insights in empowering corporate responsibility awareness. Attempts to build corporate responsibility widely in incorporating into the sustainability engagement could be demonstrated in fostering the transformative experiential learning with extensive evaluation and reconfiguration of existing programs. The focus on enhancing the learning experience in emphasizing the community engagement would be applied with strengthening the actual performance in encompassing the ability raising awareness about the environmental issues.

The approach used in this paper refers to develop the conceptual framework about the service learning with various strategies to give insight on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Incorporating the approach of conceptualizing the basis of service learning, key consideration was generated into particular enhancement of service learning in contributing to the CSR.

The finding reveals that getting benefit to serving into the community engagement may take beneficial outcomes with its valuable insight to assist in the progress of program designed with associating to enhance corporate responsibility and sustainability awareness. The advancement of the social control among the companies would be deployed within empowering service learning for CSR where sustainability awareness-based community service as embodiment of CSR should be enhanced through nurturing corporate responsibility-based transformative experiential learning. Moreover, this initiative refers to an attempt to strengthen the basis of corporate responsibility and sustainability awareness-based experiential learning, which could enlarge creative thinking with envisioning sustainability and corporate responsibility.

This study is expected to contribute to the experiential learning to enhance the sustainability within the learning setting engaged in achieving what to contribute to the environmental concern. In creating the situation where the balance between serving and learning can be achieved, attempts to encourage them in joining the service learning program should be collaborated with orienting both personal and social community oriented comprehensively in underlying the responsibility awareness, the sustainability-based moral values. These aim to enhance the understanding stage about the care for protecting the environmental concern within learning experience with the goal to produce responsible awareness especially by economic agents such as shareholders, managers, regulators and active participants to promote sustainable benefits.

As the cosmetic surgery industry grows and diversifies, societal beauty standards have shifted to include images of surgically enhanced bodies. With the increased use of influencer marketing, it is important for marketers to understand consumer perceptions of these modified appearances. This paper aims to use the lens of perceived morality (PM) to investigate consumer perceptions of cosmetic surgery services and the effect of enhanced body appearance on consumer interest in an endorsed brand. Interpersonal similarity (IS) is tested as a boundary condition.

A mixed-methods approach was taken with a qualitative study and two online experiments. Participants were recruited through snowball sampling (NStudy 1 = 133) and Amazon Mechanical Turk (NStudy 2 = 202; NStudy 3 = 270).

The themes uncovered in the qualitative study revealed that cosmetic surgery services were acceptable when internally motivated but may signal inauthenticity. The findings of Study 2 suggested consumer interest in an endorsed brand was negatively impacted by body enhancement (BE), with PM as the underlying mechanism. Study 3 results demonstrated IS moderated this effect. The indirect effect was significant only for those low in IS.

This research contributes to the underexplored area of cosmetic surgery services and its role in influencer marketing. The findings extend the literature on consumer attitudes and perceptions toward these services and provides insight into the intersection of BE and morality. The contribution is notable, as marketers increasing rely on social media influencers, many of whom have undergone cosmetic surgery services and enhanced their body appearance, to promote their brands.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an integrated approach using failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM), mathematical modeling and quality function deployment (QFD) techniques, for risk assessment and service quality enhancement in coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) as a treatment for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs).

First, the disruptions in the CABG process are identified and prioritized following FMEA instructions, using two MCDM techniques, called analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and TOPSIS. Consequently, several corrective activities are identified and weighted on the basis of QFD. Finally, a mathematical model is established to determine the most cost-effective activities for implementation. The approach is developed in a fuzzy environment to reflect the uncertainty and ambiguity of human reasoning.

Regarding the CABG process disruption, a total of 30 failure modes in four main categories were identified and prioritized. Moreover, eight corrective activities were devised and ranked according to their impact on the failure modes. Finally, considering a limited amount of budget, a sensitivity analysis on the mathematical model’s objective function indicated that using 30 percent of the total budget, required to implement all corrective activities, was enough to cover more than 70 percent of the effects of corrective activities on the failure modes.

This paper contributes to the quality risk assessment knowledge by introducing an integrated approach to evaluate and improve healthcare services quality. Also, the case study conducted on the CABG process has not been done by other related studies in the literature.

This paper aims to test four potential predictors of the behavior of empowered employees during the delivery of service to customers.

A questionnaire measuring employees' perceptions of training, performance‐related rewards, customer‐oriented culture, empowering management style, and empowered behavior was filled out by 356 frontline employees of 16 luxury hotels in seven European countries. These statistical analyses removed common‐method bias.

Results of regression analyses at the department level showed that two means of control – customer‐oriented culture and empowering management style – correlated significantly with empowered behavior.

The survey tool would benefit from further refinement. Creative replications of the survey in different service or hotel settings may benefit service managers, consultants as well as consumers, ultimately.

A direct implication of this study's findings is that in luxury hotel service settings, enhancement to employee empowerment may be achieved through careful management and organizational development. If done well, service enhancements may be within reach.

In prior research, employee empowerment has been identified as an important means to increase customer satisfaction. The present study contributes to a greater and more specific understanding of how employee empowerment can be attained in luxury European hotels.

Argues that all service encounters can be thought of as sharing common elements and common problems. Considers some common issues faced by a variety of personal service providers, maintaining that researchers and managers can understand consumer classification and evaluation of services by comparing functionally dissimilar services. Analyses data from a consumer survey on attitudes to 16different household and personal services. Uses cluster analysis of these services, showing two dimensions, Service Locus and Service Instigation. Examines the relative importance of service attributes across these clusters.

Exoskeletons are characterized as wearable, mechanical orthoses that augment the physical performance of the wearer, enhance productivity and employee well-being when used in value producing contexts. However, limited research involving exoskeleton usage by service employees in frontline contexts has been undertaken within service research. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of exoskeleton research undertaken within the context of value-producing roles, introduce exoskeletons conceptually to the service research domain, provide new conceptualizations of service exchange interactions involving physically augmented service actors and propose future avenues of exoskeleton research in alignment with key service theories.

A multi-disciplinary structured literature review based on the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses method was undertaken across a variety of literature fields. A final selection of n = 25 papers was selected for analysis from an initial sample of N = 3,537. Given the emergent nature of exoskeleton research and the variety of methodology types used between literature fields, a thematic analysis approach was used for analysing identified papers.

The literature review identified four main themes within role-focused exoskeleton research. These themes informed proposals for future exoskeleton research with respect to key service theories and typologies. The findings demonstrate that the presence of an exoskeleton changes the behaviours and interactions of service employees. The augmented social presence AugSP typology is conceptualized to explain the influences of human enhancement technologies (HETs) within service actor interactions.

This research introduces the AugSP typology to conceptualize the impacts that exoskeletons and HETs impose within technologically mediated service interactions and provides a service-specific definition of exoskeleton technology to guide future service research involving the technology.

This article looks to review recent practice undertaken within the UK hotel sector to improve customer service, and suggests ideals that could be implemented within National Health (NHS) Trust hospitals. At a time of increasing competition, hotel firms are using service enhancement as a means to gain competitive advantage, and therefore developing a range of techniques to measure levels of service quality improvement. With continued change in the health service, where greater focus now lies with patient satisfaction, so there is a requirement for managers to adapt techniques presently being offered in other service industries to improve levels of customer service and ensure patients are targeted to define their levels of satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how practices influence service systems.

Data across three service contexts (crafts, healthcare and fitness) were collected through depth interviews and netnographic analysis, and analyzed with a two-study multi-method approach focusing first on the micro- (individual) level and then on the macro- (network) level of service systems. Study 1 focused on a micro-level analysis using qualitative techniques (Spiggle, 1994). Study 2 focused on a macro-level analysis using partial least squares regression.

The results illustrate how practices can change service systems. This occurs when a nuanced practice (i.e. a practice style) orders and roots a service system in a specific form of value creation. The findings reveal four practice styles: individual-extant, social-extant, individual-modified and social-modified practice styles. These practice styles shift in response to event triggers and change service systems. These event triggers are: service beneficiary enhancement, service beneficiary failure, service provider failure and social change. Thus, the findings show that practices – when shifting in response to event triggers – change service systems. This transpires in the understudied meta-layer of a service system.

The study identifies four practice styles that can serve as the basis for segmentation and service design.

Service systems are dynamic and ever changing. This study explores how service systems change by proposing a practice approach to service systems.

When a firm implements certain HR practices, different employees attribute different motives and intentions to the firm with regard to those HR practices. Research on HR attributions has made progress toward understanding the relationship between HR practices and employee outcomes from a process perspective. However, this research is still fragmented and lacks a systematic typology of the different types of HR attributions and a compelling organizing research framework. Furthermore, a number of research gaps and opportunities have emerged regarding the nomological net of employee HR attributions. To address the gaps and capitalize on the opportunities, the authors propose an overarching theory-driven multi-level framework that guides the choice of the antecedents and outcomes of employee HR attributions and explains their relationships along with both mediating and moderating mechanisms. Drawing on signaling theory embedded in the proposed framework, the authors identify and categorize various antecedents of employee HR attributions to explain their relationships. The authors also use several additional theories such as social exchange and the job demands–resources model included in their review to identify and categorize various outcomes of employee HR attributions across levels of analysis (i.e., individual, collective [team/group/unit], organization) and explain their relationships. In addition, the proposed framework explains how individual-level employee HR attributions emerge at the collective level and influence collective processes and outcomes. The authors end their review by pinpointing future research needs and discussing related future research directions.