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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.

Drawing from transactional stress and conservation of resource theories, this study untangles the relationship between power outage, patient incivility, job stress and proactive service performance. Further, this study also explores the mediating role of patient incivility and job stress.

A questionnaire-based survey was used, and data were collected from 275 healthcare professionals working in various public hospitals in Pakistan through convenience sampling. Structural equation modeling (SEM) via Smart PLS was used for data analysis.

Results revealed that power outage has significant positive impact on patient incivility and patient incivility has significant direct effect on job stress. Job stress has significant negative relationship with proactive service performance. Findings also confirmed that patient incivility mediates the relationship between power outage and job stress, and job stress mediates the relationship between patient incivility and proactive service performance.

This study helps the health administrators to think about the service standards of the public hospitals. Implications of this study are not limited to health sector. This study is useful for other service sectors where performance of employee affected by power outage. In addition to this, the current research helps to conduct research in other developing and underdeveloped countries which also face the problem of power outage.

This study marks the first step toward establishing power outage as an organizational behavior construct by demonstrating that power outage impacts significantly on proactive service performance. This study also explored the relationship between job stress and proactive service performance which was also not explored before.

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 paper aims to examine the mediating role of occupational stress in addressing the missing gap between organisational intelligence (OI) traits and digital government service quality.

By employing multistage cluster sampling, a total of 394 responses from the Malaysian service providers at federal government agencies were obtained. For data analysis, the partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach with a disjoint two-stage approach was employed to assess the proposed higher-order model. The analysis was carried out to examine how occupational stress mediates the relationship between OI traits at each component level and digital service quality.

Occupational stress mediates the relationship between OI traits at the third-order component level and digital service quality. At the second-order component level, only the employee-oriented OI traits exhibit a significant indirect effect on the digital government service quality. Narrowing down to the first order component level, two OI traits, namely “Alignment and Congruence”, and “Heart” demonstrate significant indirect effects in the mediation analysis.

By incorporating the organisational model of stress (OMS) with public service-dominant logic (PSDL), this paper takes an approach to revitalise the stressors and individual-level performance used in a traditional work setting. Precisely, it examines how digital service quality is influenced by today's high-performing public organisation stressors (OI traits) along with non-technical element (occupational stress). More importantly, digital government service quality was examined from a less emphasised perspective, namely the supply side or service providers’ standpoint in sustaining the digital government service performance.

This paper presents a conceptual model that links digital government service quality with organisational intelligence (OI) traits and occupational stress among the service providers in the public sector.

This is a conceptual paper that carries out a systematic review of the key literature from 1978 to 2021, concerning the evolution of models, scales and dimensions attributing to digital government service quality, OI traits and occupational stress. Following this, a new conceptual model is proposed to reflect the need of today's public service delivery from a broader perspective.

Based on the reviews of the existing models, there is no convincing evidence of the existence of a conceptual model that incorporates digital government service quality, OI traits and occupational stress from the public service providers' viewpoint. Therefore, a conceptual model, with occupational stress acting as a mediator between various OI traits and digital government service quality, is presented as a comprehensive framework to heighten the quality of the public service delivery.

This paper explores the gap in the current service quality studies and proposes a conceptual model that is more reflective of today's public service delivery. Firstly, it helps better understand digital government service quality from a much less focused area, the supply side (service providers) standpoint as opposed to the demand side (citizen) viewpoint (citizen). Secondly, it extends the understanding of performance and evaluation of public service delivery from perspectives such as knowledge utilisation, strategic alignment and participatory decision-making. Thirdly, it extends the literature on digital service quality from a non-technological perspective, as to how it is influenced by employees' psychological well-being factors.

Drawing on the theoretical lens of the job demands-resources model, this study builds upon and tests a conceptual model that links customer prioritization, product complexity, business ties, job stress and customer service performance. Conceptualizing customer prioritization and product complexity as job demands and business ties as personal job resources, this research explicates the mediating process by which customer prioritization and product complexity affect customer service performance through job stress and its boundary conditions. The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical framework in which business ties moderates the mediated relations of customer prioritization and product complexity to customer service performance.

Structural equation modeling and a moderated mediation analysis were used on a unique multi-level, multi-respondent data set of 248 participants from 124 small and medium-sized enterprises in Turkey.

This study finds that both customer prioritization and product complexity increase job stress. In addition, this paper finds that business ties have a bitter-sweet nature as a personal resource and reverse the relation of customer prioritization to job stress while strengthening the negative direct relation of product complexity to job stress. Finally, this study finds that the indirect relation of customer prioritization to customer service performance through job stress is contingent on business ties. Specifically, this paper finds that high levels of business ties negate the indirect relation of customer prioritization to customer service performance while low levels of business ties exacerbate the negative effects of customer prioritization to customer service performance, channeled through job stress.

The findings demonstrate the critical role that personal networks play in reducing job stress and enhancing customer service performance for small and medium-sized enterprises that adopt customer-centric strategies such as customer prioritization. Nevertheless, the results suggest that the managers need to cognizant of the undesirable consequences of business ties may have on job stress when boundary-spanners handle a wide range of products/services that are technically complex. Accordingly, this study recommends small and medium-size enterprise managers and owners should be cautious in resource allocation to establish informal, personal ties with suppliers, competitors, customers and other market collaborators.

This paper offers a deeper perspective of the relations of customer prioritization and product complexity to job stress and customer service performance. This study also specifies business ties as a personal coping resource, which decreases the undesirable consequences when used in small and medium enterprises that adopt customer-centric strategies.