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The purpose of this study is to construct and validate a generalizable scale to measure service induced perceived stress for customers of personal services with a high level of intangibles having both online and offline components.

Five studies were conducted to this end. The first was qualitative and the rest were quantitative (survey) with a total sample size of 1,300. The last study was conducted in a different country than the first four.

The studies resulted in a five-dimensional SERVSTRESS scale to measure service induced stress for customers with the following dimensions, namely, psychological stress; information stress; complexity stress; personnel stress and outcome stress. The scale was tested in a nomological network.

The present study addresses a hitherto unaddressed gap in marketing literature with the construction and validation of a scale to measure service stress of a customer (named SERVSTRESS) using data from five studies spanning two countries.

The SERVSTRESS scale is relevant for the practitioners as it adds more value beyond the traditional service quality measures and allows the marketer to understand the nature of the stressors (with a specific focus on which is going right and which is going wrong) in the service delivery and allow him/her to take remedial actions.

The originality of the study is in the creation of a new scale to measure personal service stress and uncovering its underlying dimensions.

A vast body of literature has documented the negative consequences of stress on employee performance and well-being. These deleterious effects are particularly pronounced for service agents who need to constantly endure and manage customer emotions. The purpose of this paper is to introduce and describe a deep learning model to predict in real-time service agent stress from emotion patterns in voice-to-voice service interactions.

A deep learning model was developed to identify emotion patterns in call center interactions based on 363 recorded service interactions, subdivided in 27,889 manually expert-labeled three-second audio snippets. In a second step, the deep learning model was deployed in a call center for a period of one month to be further trained by the data collected from 40 service agents in another 4,672 service interactions.

The deep learning emotion classifier reached a balanced accuracy of 68% in predicting discrete emotions in service interactions. Integrating this model in a binary classification model, it was able to predict service agent stress with a balanced accuracy of 80%.

Service managers can benefit from employing the deep learning model to continuously and unobtrusively monitor the stress level of their service agents with numerous practical applications, including real-time early warning systems for service agents, customized training and automatically linking stress to customer-related outcomes.

The present study is the first to document an artificial intelligence (AI)-based model that is able to identify emotions in natural (i.e. nonstaged) interactions. It is further a pioneer in developing a smart emotion-based stress measure for service agents. Finally, the study contributes to the literature on the role of emotions in service interactions and employee stress.

A study of perceived sources of stress in the Devon Ambulance Service was carried out using interview and questionnaire surveys. Semi‐structured and non‐directive interview surveys were used to identify broad areas which were regarded as being stressful, while the questionnaire survey attempted to establish more precisely the levels of stress associated with different situations faced by Ambulance Service personnel. Factor analysis of the questionnaire results yielded four main elements: organisational and managerial aspects; new, unfamiliar and difficult duties/uncertainty; work overload; and interpersonal relations. The questionnaire results indicated that the most significant sources of stress were extrinsic, mainly involving the way Ambulance Service personnel were treated by other people. Based on the interview survey results, however, it is argued that the format of the questionnaire survey may have led to an underestimation of the role of intrinsic factors as a source of stress, particularly those involved with dealing with patients.

The purpose of this study is to empirically test and extend knowledge of the effects of emotional labor of frontline service employee.

The authors examined the effects of emotional labor (surface acting and deep acting) on frontline employee creativity, as well as the mediating effects of different kinds of job stress (hindrance stress and challenge stress) on the relationship between emotional labor and creativity. The research hypotheses were tested using data collected from 416 service employee–supervisor dyads in 82 Chinese local restaurants.

Results show that surface acting is negatively related to and deep acting is positively related to frontline employee creativity; surface acting is positively related to hindrance stress, while deep acting is positively related to challenge stress; and hindrance stress mediates the relationship between surface acting and creativity.

This study extends the consequences of emotional labor to frontline employee creativity from a cognitive perspective. It also advances knowledge about the effects of emotional labor on stress by classifying different kinds of job stress caused by different cognitive appraisals of surfacing acting and deep acting, and revealing the role of hindrance stress as psychological mechanism through which surface acting affects creativity.

It is now widely acknowledged that stress negatively impacts holistic and well-being and has been identified as a major global concern. The purpose of this paper is to report on a qualitative research study which sought to explore the experiences of stress and the use of coping strategies from the perspective of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) currently residing within the forensic in-patient services of one National Health Service Trust.

Data were gathered via focus group discussions involving 20 service-users with an ID. The data were subject to thematic analysis.

Data analysis produced three key themes: experiencing stress; sources of stress and coping with stress.

The findings of the research study have implications for practice. These include the need to utilise appropriate stress assessment measures and implement effective stress reduction and management programmes to address the holistic needs of people with ID, to ensure forensic services are truly high quality, person-centred and recovery focused.

Whilst stress experienced by people with ID residing in community settings has been explored, no studies have focused on how stress is experienced by people with ID residing in forensic services. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature.

This paper introduces some of the research that has been conducted into staff stress in learning disability services. It also examines how some individual characteristics of service users, particularly challenging behaviour and mental health problems, may influence the levels of staff stress reported. Service changes as a result of the development of supported living are also considered briefly. Some suggestions are made as to how these changes might influence staff. The importance of new research investigating these developments from a staff perspective is highlighted.

This chapter examines the role of stress and emotional well-being as critical antecedents of important outcomes in the military context. In it, we provide a framework for understanding the sources of stress among military personnel. Using this model, we review the risk factors associated with combat and deployment cycles in addition to protective factors, such as personality characteristics and social support, which mitigate the effects of stress on emotional well-being and performance. Finally, we evaluate efforts by military organizations to enhance the emotional well-being of service members through training programs designed to build resiliency.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between managerial control strategies, role-stress and employee adaptiveness among call centre employees.

Based on a conceptual model, a questionnaire-based survey methodology is adopted. Data were collected from call centre employees in India and the data were analysed through PLS methodology.

The study finds that outcome control and activity control increase role-stress while capability control does not have a significant impact. The interaction between outcome control and activity control also tends to impact role-stress of employees. Role-stress felt by employees has significant negative impact on employee adaptiveness.

The sampling approach was convenience based affecting the generalisability of the results.

The paper provides guidelines for utilising managerial control approaches in a service setting.

The paper looks at managerial control approaches in a service setting – a topic not quite researched before.

A study was conducted examining the relationship between perceived work stressors and job performance in a customer contact position. Workers served as technical liaison between clients and company engineers and were evaluated in terms of how efficiently communication networks were installed and maintained at the customer’s site. As predicted, a significantly greater proportion of individuals in the high performance group reported low levels of job stressors, suggesting that perceptions of job stress can relate to quality service. Implications of these findings for managing service positions are discussed.

The Occupational Stress Indicator (OSI) was used to investigate job stress in an ambulance service in the north‐west of England. Seven different aspects of the stress‐strain relationship were assessed and the findings compared with those from the fire service. Ambulance service employees were found to be experiencing major stress outcomes of low job satisfaction and poor mental and physical health. Fire service employees revealed significantly poorer physical health. Assesses the sources of job stress, type A behaviour, locus of control and coping styles and discusses them in the light of change in the public services.